Come with me if you want to live.

Remember, I come to everything 2 months late these days, but I've finally gotten around to Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and if you haven't tuned in, well, you're missing out. With BSG on hiatus/near retirement and The L Word locked away in premium cable, Sarah Connor may be jumping straight to the head of the class.

The biggest compliment I can pay it is that Josh Friedman (yes, that Josh Friedman) has made the show that David Eick's Bionic Woman should have been. Sarah Connor is smart, fast, and engrossing. Friedman has done a really masterful job of setting up a complicated scheme of well-designed characters who seem capable of driving the series in any number of interesting directions.

Also, Friedman has finessed the Terminator mythology enough that Sarah Connor is simultaneously (a) deeply grounded in the stuff and (b) pointed in a new, intriguing vector. Really, I don't think I can overstate how well written the first handful of episodes have been. To recreate a franchise like this is a remarkable accomplishment.

But Friedman also got lucky with Summer Glau. Brown Coats have been fawning over her weird, but beautiful work in Firefly and Serenity. She's equally brilliant with her physical business here, which is two-thirds of the role. But she brings with her some wonderfully off-kilter line reads and beautifully subtle reaction work. The show belongs to her character already. I suspect the only danger Friedman is going to face is the temptation to neglect John and Sarah Connor in favor of spending more time on Glau's forbidden-fruit machine.

Oh, of course there's the other danger--that the networks will destroy the show before settling with the writers. But I'd like to think that so many people have money tied up in the Terminator franchise that it will survive the strike.