1. In a system for receiving a signal containing digital data representing high definition television (HDTV) format information in the form of multilevel symbols formatted into groups of successive fields, each field comprising a field segment, a plurality of data segments, and associated sync components, a signal processing method comprising the steps of: (a) demodulating the received signal to produce a demodulated signal; (b) filtering the demodulated signal to reject NTSC co-channel interference to produce a filtered signal; and (c) trellis decoding the filtered signal with a trellis decoder employing a recursive non-Euclidean metric.