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The 25 Best TV Shows of 2013

The year’s best TV offerings were either enlivened by the medium’s possibilities or lovingly defied them.

The 25 Best TV Shows of 2013
Photo: NBC

On September 29th, 2013, at approximately 10 p.m. EST, Walter White died, and for a little while, it seemed silly to talk about anything else. The world didn’t nearly stop spinning on its axis the way it did when The Sopranos cut to black, but Mr. White’s world most definitely didn’t end with a whimper. Most news programs covered the finale. That was the show’s power, and its legacy: the television series as societal talking point above all else, including The Hunger Games, Yeezus, and that guy’s live-tweeting of his neighbors’ breakup.

But then, of course, the whole foundation of television started shaking some seven months before Breaking Bad hit the dirt, as Netflix showed formidable viewership numbers coming off of its first four major forays into original programming, three of which appear on this list. Netflix now stands toe-to-toe with AMC, FX, and HBO, and the renewals of House of Cards, Orange Is the New Black, and Hemlock Grove lends credence to the future of streaming. True, the new crop of original programming from Hulu and Amazon Prime doesn’t look particularly promising, but Netflix, which features no commercials, has one of those rare honest chances to reshape the landscape in terms of quality. That their upcoming projects are dominated by a partnership with Marvel on four hotly anticipated adaptations speaks to the boldness of the company’s vision.

Indeed, the one thing shared by the best television of 2013 was the audacity, in style and storytelling, that a new class of producers and writers has creatively harnessed in the medium. Steven Soderbergh’s Behind the Candelabra was summarily dismissed by all major film distributors, but at HBO, it was marketed enthusiastically and received almost unanimous praise. In 2007, would anybody pay to see a neo-western about the zombie apocalypse in IMAX 3D? Well, okay, yeah, but would anyone really give a shit about the old amputee with the ponytail? Try to imagine the sheer force of disinterest any filmmaker would face if, pre-2006, he or she pitched a period drama about a guy who pitches commercials for a living.

Television is where the interesting stories are going, but even some of the best shows are still lacking in visual acumen, an arena where film inarguably still has it over on television. The dependency of the box office on sequels is a pack-a-day habit compared to the heedlessly protracted storylines that power most television shows, which is more comparable to the Mantle brothers toward the end of Dead Ringers. Still, progress is being made even in this realm, and the year’s best TV offerings were either enlivened by these possibilities or lovingly defied them to indulge a kind of refined classicism. Walter White is dead; long live Walter White! Chris Cabin


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2013

25. Treme

David Simon and Eric Overmeyer’s abbreviated fade-out on post-Katrina New Orleans is tattered yet hopeful, perfect in its soulful imperfections. Decisions in the Big Easy are slowed down by good booze and better boogie, and by the time the Big Chief (Clark Peters) bows out, very little about this intoxicating menagerie of musicians and other truth-seekers has been convincingly settled on. Life’s not tidy in the Treme and the show’s creators let all the bad omens hang out, including the impending birth of Delmond’s (Rob Brown) first child and Janette’s (Kim Dickens) third restaurant opening. Of course, all the trouble made the music sound all the sweeter, as careers begin to congeal and legacies found (temporary) footing amid the city’s riotous buzz. The fat lady is singing for Treme, and she’s belting it out loud, if not for long. Cabin

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The 25 Best TV Shows of 2013

24. Downton Abbey

Downton Abbey jumped the shark in season two by tipping its bowler hat too often to the broad strokes of Charles Dickens’s pen. Maybe because its scope was limited to the period of a single year, or because the shrilly over-determined Bates prison subplot was finally resolved, but season three felt like a corrective of sorts, regarding the period-specific dramas that gripped the lives of the Crawleys and their servants with an attention to nuance that felt written with the heart’s blood. The tragedies weren’t so easily forgotten, and while the incessant scheming remained as delicious as ever, even the most furtive of glances was in service of illuminating a privileged society’s reckoning with class difference and identity. Ed Gonzalez


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2013

23. Arrested Development

The long-awaited fourth season of Arrested Development offered a rarity in television: genuine beguilement. After seven years of picking over the dense interplay of jokes in the first three seasons, viewers scrambled to understand what the fuck just happened in a deliriously abstracted storyline involving the University of Phoenix, an ostrich farm, and Fakeblock. The sui generis comedic invention of the cast felt revitalized, and by focusing on a single character per episode, the creators manifest feelings of alienation, hysteria, desperation, and profound confusion. In effect, this undervalued return mirrored Hurwitz and company’s own deep-seated feelings following one of the most seemingly empty-headed cancellations in the history of the medium. Cabin


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2013

22. Orange Is the New Black

Taylor Schilling’s Piper Chapman started out as a perceivable necessity: a Caucasian prism through which Jenji Kohan could portray the far more fascinating lives of black, Hispanic, and LGBT inmates at an upstate New York prison. Three episodes in, however, Piper became one with her fellow inmates and Kohan’s series matured into a scathing comedy, one that depicts the alarming reality of being a liberated woman in a world run by men. And unlike Weeds, Kohan’s latest never feels as if it’s straining to attain a sense of diverse community. The ensemble performances rank alongside Mad Men and Treme in their unforced fullness, able to find a touching unity among the disparate histories of the incarcerated. Cabin


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2013

21. Luther

Coming face to face with two vigilante killers, Detective John Luther (Idris Elba) also became the focus of a secret investigation into his professional behavior and pliable view of justice in the third season of Luther. In other words, it’s soul-searching time for Luther, but the series continues to smartly avoid the dull trappings of police procedurals through its effectively lugubrious atmosphere. Elba’s troubled variation on Columbo wanders through a rotting working class, rupturing with societal resentment and repressed madness, and what the series consistently expresses is full knowledge that Luther could be one with his enemies, if not for the necessary remove of his mordant humor and a sickly sense of good. Cabin

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The 25 Best TV Shows of 2013

20. Enlightened

It’s fitting how Enlightened’s trajectory serendipitously mirrored the journey of its protagonist, Amy Jellicoe (Laura Dern). The little series that could until it couldn’t told the story of how one broken woman’s quest for personal rehabilitation increasingly involved those around her, jostling them from their comfort zones. Unfortunately, her surrounding environment, akin to the bulk of HBO’s regular viewership, apparently wasn’t quite as prepared for change as she was. When the second season came to a close, every door was left open for a third, with the show’s characters finally feeling as if they were ready to embrace true reformation. Which is a shame, because the TV landscape needs more shows that push dramatic boundaries not with shock tactics, but with quiet, insightful fury. Mike LeChevallier


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2013

19. The Venture Bros.

It’s a testament to the boundless creativity of co-creators Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer how sizable of a cult following The Venture Bros. has generated. When it’s at the top of its game (which is quite often), the animated series is one of the best things on TV: a singular tale of a malfunctional family’s plight to erase the deep grip of failure from their past, and jam-packed with a mishmash of pop-culture references. Over the course of the show’s run (which has been more like a trot, with only five seasons and 63 episodes in 10 years), Publick and Hammer have built a brilliant mythology as complex and varied as the myriad of influences they draw inspiration from. If The Venture Bros. has taught us anything, it’s that you can’t rush greatness. LeChevallier


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2013

18. Bob’s Burgers

Bob’s Burgers thrives on its impeccably modulated melding of the absurd and the heartfelt. It mines uproarious humor out of seeing children at various states of emotional and sexual development (Gene’s relationship with an automatic toilet, the butt-loving Tina caught between two boys with dancing feet, Louise orchestrating a plan to profit from a nude beach), and in two of the greatest episode’s of its entire run, “Seaplane!” and “Turkey in a Can,” it arrives at profound truths about the nature of trust and the need for belonging by mirroring the paranoia of its characters in giddily digressive flights of storytelling fancy. Gonzalez


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2013

17. Rectify

Rectify shrewdly and subtly brought to light the one-of-a-kind experience of returning to the place you once called home to find that everything is different yet somehow, vapidly, the same. Daniel Holden (Aiden Young) is released from a Georgia state penitentiary into a world that isn’t quite willing to accept him back. Over the course of its first season’s six episodes, each recounting a day in Daniel’s post-incarceration existence, creator Ray McKinnon and his stellar ensemble cast paint a tragic picture of how one horrendous act can disrupt the harmony of a small town forever. With its languid visuals and breezy dialogue, Rectify is a modern Southern gothic fable that establishes an unshakable tone that simultaneously emanates dread and misplaced hope while staying grounded in the realm of naturalistic self-discovery. LeChevallier

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The 25 Best TV Shows of 2013

16. Behind the Candelabra

Ripe with flamboyant melodrama and tinged by the grotesque, Steven Soderbergh’s long-gestating Behind the Candelabra serves as a landmark transitional work from one of the great popular visual storytellers of the 21st century. The story of Liberace (Michael Douglas) and his most dutiful lover (Matt Damon) provides a thicketed allegory for Soderbergh’s own fears about becoming a copy of himself, of passion curdling into a corrupted need for aesthetic perfection in a malleable yet delicate form. It’s fearless self-analysis and, by extension, analysis of the filmmaking process, dressed up in the glittered wardrobe of popular history and biographical storytelling. Cabin


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2013

15. Homeland

Season after season, Homeland has asked us to accept one elaborate twist after another, some more dubious than others, and with a hysterical audaciousness that would be insulting if the cons weren’t so convincingly brokered by its incredible cast of actors, namely Claire Danes, Damian Lewis, and Mandy Patinkin. Which is to say nothing of the finesse behind the camera, as two of the season’s finest episodes were directed by veterans of the screen, Carl Franklin and Keith Gordon, with an uncanny gift for crafting set pieces wherein the needs of government and the needs of the heart are braided together with a corkscrew tension at once riveting and disarming. Gonzalez


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2013

14. The Walking Dead

“Too Far Gone,” the mid-season finale of The Walking Dead’s fourth season, was not just a reflection of the Governor’s (David Morrissey) power-hungry temperament. It served just as well as a reflection of the impatient attitude that plagued many fans (present company included) in relation to the show’s ambitious new direction. The Governor’s final blood-soaked campaign for absolute power changed that right quick. Playing fast and loose with its source material, the ingeniously splintered narrative is remarkable for its refreshing and unpredictable sense of long-form storytelling, genre, and dramatic structure. The show’s distinct pacing and attentiveness toward even marginalized characters, though often easy to dismiss, is part and parcel of what makes its vision of weathered hope in a world beyond the brink so damn compelling, finding the humanity in horror that the movies regularly misplace. Cabin


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2013

13. American Horror Story: Coven

Exhaustive in its artistic invention, American Horror Story: Coven exudes the force of an epic reckoning. The most Sapphic and chameleonic of television wonders, it delivers unto us week after week a litany of by and large elegantly interlocked plotlines, shot with a heightened sense of audio and visual stimulation that’s appropriately nauseating given the show’s context and its fixation on the nature of power, from how it’s discovered to how it’s used to exert control. The series may sometimes stumble in its employment of horror tropes to explore issues of race and gender, but most shows don’t have the cojones to risk half as much in their entire run as this dazzlingly humane study in female subjugation often does in a single episode. Gonzalez

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The 25 Best TV Shows of 2013

12. Top of the Lake

With this breathtaking, well-assured seven-episode miniseries, Jane Campion’s fascination with open natural habitats blooms fully. Like the beach in The Piano and the desert of Holy Smoke, the New Zealand lake town of the title, around which the search for a pregnant minor is undertaken, is the main character of Top of the Lake, if not necessarily the most wild and abused. The verdant sprawl of the town’s surrounding woods is a literal cradle of creation, shook by man’s control and perversities, but the women who come to the aid of the elusive Tui Micham are shedding the yolk of masculinity for good. Campion’s eloquent and mystic aesthetic obsession with objects revealed tremulous schisms in the women who inhabit the small town, which has all the hushed terrors of its history shaken out by the series’s end. Cabin


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2013

11. Futurama

Futurama was always in thrall of its obsolescence, and yet the series remained optimistic throughout its final run of expectedly punchline-laden episodes. It wasn’t a peerless home stretch (it’s tempting to think that the awful, flagrantly nostalgia-mongering “Saturday Morning Fun Pit” was only released because of contractual obligation), but those that soared did so with the show’s customary sense of pathos. The grace notes were plenty: Fry realizing that a familiar sound that haunts him is rooted in the memory of his mother; All My Circuit hambone Calculon trying to return to notoriety; and Fry getting caught in a heartbreaking time loop. To the very end, and while bringing us to tears, the series achingly expressed its perhaps futile desire to one day live again. Gonzalez


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2013

10. House of Cards

House of Cards allowed David Fincher’s seductive aesthetic sway to carry on well beyond the inaugural diptych he helmed, despite TV’s well-noted preference for story over artistic signature, but that’s almost besides the point. The scheming exploits of Kevin Spacey’s silver-tongued congressman-devil provide a galvanic shock of political satire and thrillingly modern melodrama, but the real hook is Robin Wright’s stirring performance as the politician’s better half. In the thick of it, this addictive series convincingly depicts a shifting political landscape, wherein an ascending class of strong and brilliant women retools man’s ruthless personal and professional strategies to better advance a contentious, testosterone-weary nation. Cabin


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2013

9. Mad Men

It could be seen as cop-out to say that an entire series can be defined by one jaw-droppingly beguiling episode (and one that birthed a treasure trove of GIFs), but Mad Men did just that with “The Crash.” The creative staff at the newly merged Sterling Cooper & Partners is injected with a stimulant to boost productivity, and its effects, much stronger than anticipated, galvanize an evening of intense debauchery and hallucinatory musings; for viewers, the sequence was as a welcome respite not only from a season that was somewhat bogged down by tired storylines (the draggy Don and Sylvia affair, the Heinz debacle), but from a series that, much like its characters, was in need of a rejuvenating booster shot. The payoff? A home stretch that was, simply put, divine, concluding with possibly the finest closing imagery of the year: Don Draper’s (Jon Hamm) past meeting his present, with the future uncertain. LeChevallier

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The 25 Best TV Shows of 2013

8. Boardwalk Empire

In Boardwalk Empire’s fourth season, the consistency of its storytelling finally matched that of its unparalleled aesthetic purity. A multi-layered minor masterwork of interwoven vignettes uniting to expose a slew of themes (the burden of family, the invisible barriers of race, the inescapable nature of a crime-filled crusade to realize one’s dreams), series creator Terence Winter and his team managed to produce 12 episodes, each capable of standing on their own, that told distinct stories of troubled people clawing their way out of debilitating situations and cutting close ties in the process. Each character’s individual arc could easily fill an entire film, so thematically rich in their breakdown of morality that there was hardly any time to come up for air. LeChevallier


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2013

7. Archer

More so than any other season, Archer’s fourth found its characters shooting the shit more often than being wrapped up in the usual high-stakes spy-movie parodies we’ve come to expect from the series, and it was all the better for it. Not that Adam Reed’s show has ever been anything besides an exquisite farce, but there was a certain confidence on display throughout every episode this season that allowed for an uncommonly relaxed narrative flow amid the rapid-fire jokes and jabs launched by the show’s ragtag crew of ISIS agents. LeChevallier


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2013

6. Girls

The second season of Girls revolved around its characters’ dramatic shifts in mood. When one was high, another was low, and when they attempted to meet in the middle everything collapsed on itself. Hannah’s (Lena Dunham) highest point of emotional clarity arrived, inarguably, in the divisive “One Man’s Trash,” which found her naked more often than not, exercising complete sexual and emotional control over a lonely, desperate man (Patrick Wilson) in an idyllic brownstone apartment. And her rock bottom came in “On All Fours” while compulsively shoving Q-tips in her ears to fight the distress brought on by her sketchy e-book deal and crumbling bond with ex-boyfriend Adam (Adam Driver). Girls has never been fond of happy endings, but, surprisingly, it gave us one here in the playful season finale, “Together,” uniting couples and rebuilding friendships, but, per usual, avoiding cheesiness with an unwavering sense of bittersweet foreboding. LeChevallier


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2013

5. The Americans

Throughout the 13 episodes of its first season, The Americans slowly peeled back the layers of a particularly dark onion in America’s past. Except what first appeared to be a mere espionage procedural set during the waning days of the Cold War, though one just as tensely executed but infinitely more playful than Homeland, was revealed to also be a captivating chronicle of a marriage at a difficult and strange crossroads. The Americans treats the union between Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys’s Russian spies as a metaphor for political discourse, one difficult compromise and accommodation after another, and it achieves profundity every time they must reckon with the possibility that they’re slowly becoming the very thing they’re pretending to be. Gonzalez

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The 25 Best TV Shows of 2013

4. Game of Thrones

If Game of Thrones still feels like it’s just a bit weighed down by the sheer heft of its narrative strands, to say nothing of the seemingly endless backstories and mythologies, the show’s third season seemed lighter on its feet than ever before. The dense interplay of storylines, hemmed down from the endless sprawl of George R. R. Martin’s venerable fantasy novels, played more decisively, each exterior and interior conflict having finally come out the other end of its gestation period and allowed to begin to bloom. The uniformly excellent cast continues to bolster the show’s talky, myth-ridden stretches, but the action hardly suffers. The drama felt smartly refocused on its chief thematic concern with roleplaying and how allegiances, lies, and familial betrayals can reshape accepted roles. Nearly every frame possessed the feeling of gathering, impending force, as if the whole of Westeros was about to erupt into violent, ceaseless madness and death. And, of course, it did. Cabin


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2013

3. Justified

Justified reached staggering creative heights in its fourth season, which opened with a bang, quite literally: In a flashback to 1983, a man wearing a detective parachute plummets from the sky and smashes onto the pavement in Corbin, Kentucky, dying instantaneously. In what could have been a drawn out season-long whodunnit, or, rather, whoisit, Justified uses three decades’ worth of bad blood and corruption to arouse a many-faceted face-off, both physically and spiritually, between the citizens of Harlan County, its law-enforcing authorities, prisoners, career criminals, religious folks, hillside dwellers, drug addicts, prostitutes, and the ghosts of all those who fell victim to Harlan’s unyielding grip. The season’s final, heartrending image speaks volumes: Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) staring ominously at three family headstones, two of them filled, and the other, his own, still in need of an inhabitant. Olyphant’s speculative expression says it all: It’ll be a while yet. LeChevallier


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2013

2. Hannibal

There was no more indelible a TV image this year than Hugh Dancy’s Will Graham, wracked by the effects the swelling in his brain was having on his consciousness, ostensibly waking up from sleep only to find himself trapped in some variation of Dali’s “The Persistence of Memory.” Every week on network TV’s best new series, Will floats through a cavalcade of horrors so dizzying in their graying of reality and fantasy as to suggest a perpetual slipstream. Through a hieratic fusion of image and sound, the show’s makers have made the focus of Hannibal not so much the cruelty of the debonair, ever-elusive monster played by Mads Mikkelsen, but the toll one man’s empathy, his anxious desire to save humanity by entering the minds of killers, has on more than just his own well being. Gonzalez


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2013

1. Breaking Bad

Breaking Bad went down with guns a blazin’, and while it may not have stuck the landing, too forcefully striving as it did to sentimentally redeem Bryan Cranston’s Walter White, its final stretch of eight breathlessly constructed episodes corroborated that Vince Gilligan’s great American tragedy would belong to the ages. In the desert standoff been money-hungry crooks, in Skyler (Anna Gunn) not so reluctantly allowing herself to play the Lady Macbeth to her drugpin husband and recommend Jesse’s (Aaron Paul) murder, and in a poolside hug between father and son (RJ Mitte) that caps a conversation impossibly and depressingly layered with deceit, this great series continued to articulate, and with unnerving clarity, empathy, and flashes of dark humor, how our brutally exclusionary American dream makes monsters out of the men and the women who chase after it. Gonzalez

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