Top Ten TV Episodes of 2013

You know my fifty favorite TV shows of 2013. Here are my favorite individual episodes. Now, for the record, there are many, many more episodes I wanted to include – the fact that Hannibal, Bunheads, Bob's Burgers, Justified, Scandal, Arrested Development and 30 Rock are all excluded from this list pains me. But if I cracked the doors a little more this would suddenly go from a ten-plus-episode list to a hundred-episode list, so I had to keep this club just a bit exclusive. Starting with a few runners-up I couldn't not mention, then rolling right into the top ten (with episode blurbs adapted from what I previously wrote in my monthly Best TV Episodes lists):

Runners-Up (alphabetical by show): Fringe, Season 5 Episode 13 - "An Enemy of Fate," Futurama, Season 7 Episode 26 - "Meanwhile," Game of Thrones, Season 3 Episode 4 - "And Now His Watch Is Ended," Orange Is the New Black, Season 1 Episode 11 - "Tall Men With Feelings," Spartacus, Season 3 Episode 6 - "Spoils of War," Spartacus, Season 3 Episode 8 - "Separate Paths"

10. Arrow, Season 1 Episode 23 - "Sacrifice"
Arrow had hands-down the best network season finale this spring. "Sacrifice" almost had a Buffy's "The Gift"-esque hugeness in scale and sheer climactic feel to it as Starling City began literally crumbling under the influence of the season's overarching supervillain plot. And Arrow didn't just tell, but showed buildings collapsing and streets imploding and anarchy abound, and it was huge and frightful and awesome. The episode had operatic, outsized action and emotion and a twist that floored me in its final minutes. "Sacrifice" is exactly what a pulpy action/adventure TV serial should look like.
9. Parenthood, Season 4 Episode 13 - "Small Victories"
"Small Victories" was a fantastic, achingly emotional hour of Parenthood that "took on" the abortion issue by refusing to "take it on" at all, instead depicting something overly politicized as the deeply personal choice it is. And the relative heaviness of that story was balanced by a comedic B-plot about body odor and pubic hair that had me laughing embarrassingly loud. This episode succinctly sums up everything that is good and vital about Parenthood.
8. Breaking Bad, Season 5 Episode 16 - "Felina"

(Spoilers follow!) Part of what makes Breaking Bad great (and stand out in contrast against most attempts at "quality television" that have followed) is that, for all its darkness and misery and its focus on consequences and its character arcs of supreme, literary power, it can be a really, really fun show with thick veins of pulp running through it. Always has been, from Walt destroying Tuco's office with magic bomb crystals to several instances of cool guys not looking at explosions to the half-Terminator/half-Anton Chigurh Salamanca twins to Two-Face Gus Fring fixing his tie before dying. And it's in that spirit that one of dramatic television's great narratives ends with its protagonist building and deploying a Nazi-killing robot. Awesome!

7. Game of Thrones, Season 3 Episode 9 - "The Rains of Castamere"

After patiently holding it in for three years, being able to finally shout "RED WEDDING RED WEDDING RED WEDDING RED WEDDING!!!!!" at the top of my lungs across every corner of the internet felt so very, very good. I have nothing to add to the discussion surrounding this episode's infinitely-dissected final ten minutes (beyond one last good old-fashioned "Holy fucking shit!"), but even outside of that iconic, unforgettable sequence it was a great hour for the Jon Snow, Arya and Daenerys storylines too. It's an episode worthy of being called the spiritual successor to season 1's "Baelor."

6. American Dad, Season 8 Episode 18 - "Lost In Space"

Detaching entirely from the titular American dad and core Smith family, "Lost In Space" follows alien prisoner Jeff Fischer to a space station above Roger's home planet, where he tries to figure out how to escape captivity in a big, stylish, intergalactic musical action-adventure comedy extravaganza that might just be the year's most purely ambitious sitcom episode. It almost felt like a whole space opera compressed into 22 minutes (with jokes), complete with impressive alien design and massive, complicated "sets" that showed a hell of a lot of visual imagination. It had emotional depth and a bittersweet, melancholy ending you'd never associate with the MacFarlane animation empire.

5. Switched at Birth, Season 2 Episode 9 - "Uprising"

I mostly just think of ABC Family's Switched at Birth as a teen drama – a far above-average one, but just a teen drama regardless – so it was a pleasant surprise to see them produce this formally and emotionally ambitious hour. The students of Carlton School for the Deaf rise up in an occupation protest when the city moves to shut their school down, which is, except for a few spoken lines at the episode's beginning and one more at its end, depicted entirely in silence with nothing but subtitled sign language to better reflect the viewpoint of the deaf characters. It was unique and ballsy, but more importantly than having a great gimmick, it had a great gimmick rooted entirely in character, thematically relevant and tied to a strong emotional throughline.

4. Spartacus, Season 3 Episode 9 - "The Dead and the Dying"

Years ago I read about how the real historical Spartacus held his own gladiatorial games to honor a fallen brother, using captured Roman soldiers as gladiators, and I spent all of Spartacus: War of the Damned nervously eyeing the ticking-down episode count, wondering whether or not showrunner Steven DeKnight had just decided to skip this particularly juicy historical nugget. But it turns out, nope, he was just delaying our pleasure, saving one of the show's finest outings for its penultimate installment.

DeKnight tweaked history to bring our heroes into the action (rather than having the Romans fight each other, in the show they fight the former slave/gladiator main characters), and, to be blunt, it was deliriously fucking awesome. In a show that is normally one of the most thoughtful and contemplative and consequence-heavy on television in its depiction of violence, it was enormous fun to see an episode just kick back and let it rip with an hour of pure pump-your-fists-and-cheer-out-loud bloody spectacle for perhaps the first time since Gods of the Arena. Just awesome.

3. Breaking Bad, Season 5 Episode 14 - "Ozymandias"

The crucial flip side of Breaking Bad's deliciously pulpy essence – what raises it from entertainment to televised literature – lies in the darkness, the misery and the consequences on full display in "Ozymandias," which Vince Gilligan himself has declared his masterpiece and the best episode of the series. I'm not 100% sure I'm ready to go that far – I need to rewatch the entire series and see "One Minute" and "Full Measure" and "Crawl Space" and "Face Off" and "Dead Freight" again first – but it is as intense, brutal and harrowing an hour of television as I've ever seen. If "Felina" is the climax to Breaking Bad, the entertaining crime/thriller saga, "Ozymandias" is the climax to Breaking Bad, the bleak tale of a man losing his soul and the horrors he rains upon everyone around him. Beginning to end, "Ozymandias" is an episode about consequences, and karma brought its full fury against Walter White and his family in service of just that.

2. The Legend of Korra, Season 2 Episodes 7 & 8 - "Beginnings" (two-parter)

Easily the best episode (well, technically episodes, but they aired together and go together, so whatever) of The Legend of Korra to date and what would have to be in contention to be called the best episode of the entire Avatar franchise, "Beginnings" took us back to the prehistory of the Avatar world and showed us the life and genesis and battles of Wan, the first Avatar. And, as far as genre prequels go, let's call it the exact opposite of The Phantom Menace: Something great and beautiful and damn near perfect in every way. It enchanted me, it intrigued me, it thrilled me, it moved me, it left me both grinning like a dope and damn near on the cusp of tears. It's basically Korra's stab at a Miyazaki "concept episode," and it does Princess Mononoke proud.

If you were to pluck "Beginnings" from its home on TV and call it a movie, I don't know that I've enjoyed an animated film so much since... god, WALL•E, maybe? Very, very few episodes of television have made me feel giddy and excited and moved and just freaking in awe of the sheer potential of onscreen storytelling like this in years. Maybe ever. The animation? Beautiful, breathtaking. The emotion? Goosebumps all over my body. The action? Immensely badass. The sheer scope of its storytelling? It rivals entire epic fantasy narratives like The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter in the space of about forty minutes of television. "Beginnings" is TV of mythic power. I love, love, love, love, love it.

1. Spartacus, Season 3 Episode 10 - "Victory"

I've already written and talked about 2013's finest television achievement at arguably excessive length and have little more to add on the subject. But I'll emphasize one last time that Spartacus' finale really had its cake and ate it too, providing a rich emotional feast and the conclusions to years of thoughtful character work and tying a totally satisfying thematic bow on everything while also remembering to give us a final battle sequence that made Game of Thrones' "Blackwater" look like the skirmish at the end of a Hercules: The Legendary Journeys episode. It's one of the best series finales and one of the best episodes of television I've ever seen.

Top Ten TV Shows of 2013

And we arrive at last at the best of the best. This top ten has me more melancholy than last year's, as three of these shows are now gone from the airwaves, resting forever in the annals of TV history, and a couple more are officially getting up there in years. But where there's clouds there's a silver lining, because a few of these shows are yet newborn babes just getting their runs started. On to it:

10. American Dad (Fox)
Best 2013 Episode: Season 8 Episode 18 - "Lost In Space" | Up 2 from 2012

My highest-ranked comedy this year, American Dad – despite being a downright ancient show that's been on since less than a year after I graduated high school – is still swinging for the fences. Oh, it had plenty of bad episodes this year. As many as anything else in my top twenty. But the four or five times a year that its producers really buckle down and decide they want to make something great, they're capable of churning out half-hours of such ambition, imagination and artistry that I bow before them. "Lost In Space," which follows Hayley Smith's kidnapped stoner husband Jeff to the mothership of the aliens who took him, is my favorite sitcom episode of 2013. It packs a whole great animated sci-fi action-comedy musical with its own mythology and epic settings into just 22 minutes, and, even if it weren't funny, would be something to behold on account of sheer scale alone.

For the record, American Dad and Bob's Burgers were neck and neck in these rankings – the latter even a touch ahead – until Dad's December 1st episode "Independent Movie," a sendup of indie coming-of-age flicks and the Fox Searchlight formula that calls to mind Galaxy Quest and "Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas" in how note-perfect a spoof it is. But the two shows really function as yin and yang; Bob's as the warm and realistic animated sitcom and Dad as the dark and surreal one. I watch both back-to-back every week and they complement each other perfectly. They're milk and cereal, baby.

9. Parenthood (NBC)
Best 2013 Episode: Season 4 Episode 13 - "Small Victories" | Down 4 from 2012

I'll admit first thing that Parenthood had its problems this year. This fall, I should really say, as the big albatross around season 5's neck has been Kristina Braverman's mayoral run, something which dragged the show in a very weird West Wing-lite direction that just isn't what I watch this bighearted family drama for at all. I'd almost compare it to the "Landry murders a rapist" subplot in Jason Katims' last show Friday Night Lights in how weirdly perpendicular to the premise of the show it seems (in fact, the parallel is almost spookily exact, with the offending subplots both being introduced in season premieres of each show and wrapped up in episode 9 of the same seasons).

But I'm willing to overlook mayoral shenanigans and top ten Parenthood (yes, "top ten" is a verb now!) the third year running for two reasons: One, that subplot is over. Two – and this is something I can't even say about several shows above Parenthood on this list – I care. You see, I'm a pretty emotionally guarded guy when it comes to fiction and forming true, genuine emotional investments in characters. I'm not generally a crier when watching TV, not a gasper or an applauder or any of that shit. You could count with fingers and toes to spare the number of TV shows ever made where I actually care about the characters on that level. Parenthood is one of those shows. I ache for the characters' pains, I cheer their victories; I'm invested in their lives top-to-bottom with all my heart. And that's why Parenthood, story problems aside, remains one of my favorite shows on television.

8. The Legend of Korra (Nickelodeon)
Best 2013 Episode: Season 2 Episode 7/8 - "Beginnings" | Same Rank as 2012

Oh hey second consecutive show in my top ten that was riddled with pretty significant problems this year! Yes, the first half of Korra's second season is animated by the same studio who does Naruto, whose work is clearly inferior to Studio Mir's. Many episodes are just messes of disconnected subplots. And the season's climactic final battle is won via a deus ex machina that makes the end of The Matrix Revolutions look smartly-foreshadowed and narratively logical.

But then... "Beginnings." The two-part Studio Mir-animated prequel episode that takes us back ten millennia in the Avatar universe to show us the genesis of the Avatar. I'mma be straight with y'all: I fucking love this episode. I love it as much as anything I've seen on TV all year. As much as anything I've seen in a movie theater all year. As much as any sex I've had all year. I love it for how visually inventive it is, and how emotional it is, and how epic in its timeframe and geographical span and impact on this fictional universe it is, and just how narratively and thematically and mythologically satisfying it is. One particular moment at the end (when Raava says "We are bonded forever." and the thirty seconds immediately after) literally gave me goosebumps. I watched this two-parter four times before the next episode hit.

It's time to cut the shit and call "Beginnings" what it is: The best animated medieval fantasy film since Princess Mononoke came out in 1997. A short, roughly 45-minute film, sure. But a masterpiece nonetheless. (Though I will say that Disney's great new princess flick Frozen is no slouch either.) And that's why The Legend of Korra is in my top ten.

7. Arrow (The CW)
Best 2013 Episode: Season 1 Episode 23 - "Sacrifice" | Up 17 from 2012

The CW and former Everwood producer Greg Berlanti's vigilante/superhero drama Arrow is my hands-down, far-and-away, nothing-else-even-in-contention pick for 2013's most improved TV show. Starting in the last few episodes of season 1 and continuing all through season 2, this Green Arrow adaptation stepped it up about twenty notches in almost literally everything from what it was last year: Character development and character dynamics, humor, cinematography, action scenes, excitement, pacing, thematic depth; all now firing on all cylinders. A year ago my overall stance on Arrow was "It's not bad." Today? I count the hours until new episodes and devour each one as a ravenous beast.

That Arrow is a better superhero show than Marvel's Agents of N.C.I.S. S.H.I.E.L.D. goes without saying. While that show futzes about with its disposable little cases of the week, Arrow is a layered, propulsive serial. While that show's wooden cast continues to feel like they're reciting lines at each other, Arrow's characters have become rounded and engaging, with real dynamics. And while that show is restricted to barely even using the Z-list Marvel characters no one's heard of, Arrow delivers the DC Comics goods: Barry Allen (aka The Flash), Black Canary, Deathstroke, China White, Count Vertigo, Deadshot and Solomon Grundy just this year. It's even namedropped Ra's al Ghul! (Though he hasn't appeared yet and when he does it's admittedly pretty damn unlikely he'll be Liam Neeson.)

What may go less without saying – but stands no less true – is that Arrow is the best onscreen superhero story of 2013, period. You can keep your Iron Man 3 and Man of Steel and The Wolverine and Thor: The Dark World. I'll be over here watching Arrow, which is engaging in storytelling more vital than any of them. With a Flash spinoff coming next fall from the same team I can officially say I'm a million times more interested and invested in Greg Berlanti's televised DC Comics universe than Zack Snyder's cinematic one. Fingers crossed we get to see Berlanti's take on Wonder Woman one day.

6. Orange Is the New Black (Netflix)
Best 2013 Episode: Season 1 Episode 11 - "Tall Men With Feelings" | Debuted 2013

I always found Weeds – even its reportedly best seasons – pretty tough to sit through, and after the Girls and The Americans incidents I've become super wary when it comes to TV critics jerking off to new shows all over the internet before they even air. So you'll understand why I was hesitant and held off a few weeks when it came to hitting play on the first episode of Weeds creator Jenji Kohan's new women-in-prison drama Orange Is the New Black, less despite and more because of all the critical adulation.

But hey, stopped clock, twice a day and all that. I eventually did fire up the pilot episode "I Wasn't Ready," and proceeded to inhale the rest of the first season in the space of about a week. Goddamnit if Orange Is the New Black isn't just as good as everyone said.

A lot of why I adore this show probably has to do with tone. In a year when damn near every new non-broadcast drama from The Americans to House of Cards to The Bridge to Low Winter Sun seemed to be trying to one-up all that came before it in how utterly bleak and despairing and joyless it could be, Orange Is the New Black is glorious sunlight bursting through the clouds. It has fleeting moments of darkness and violence, sure, but they're earned, and it is ultimately a show about community, about finding joy in the mundane, about the bonds between us rather than the antihero bullshit that drives us apart. Granted, said bonds are forced on the characters by the shackles of prison, but aren't so many great TV shows about people forced together by circumstance? High school-set teen dramas, workplace sitcoms, and so on – Orange Is the New Black is a new and wonderful spin on classic formula.

Best TV Episodes, September 2013

10. Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. / Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Season 1 Episode(s) 1 – "Pilot"

Respectively the strongest drama and comedy pilots of this new fall TV season, neither Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. or Brooklyn Nine-Nine (which are both, frankly, kind of annoying to type!) came exploding out of the gate on fire, but both show promise. A runner-up to the list could be Fox's Sleepy Hollow, which has a bit of a fun Fringe-y, Supernatural-y vibe to it, but unlike S.H.I.E.L.D. lacks a pilot written and directed by Joss Whedon. Stay tuned for more thoughts on fall's new lineup later in the year, once I've gotten more of a feel for everything.

9. Parks and Recreation, Season 6 Episodes 1 & 2 – "London" (two-parter)

I've been vocally down on Parks and Recreation over the last year or so – increasingly, I feel like the show hit a peak in the nine-episode stretch between "Media Blitz" and "The Fight" back in season 3 that it's never been able to remotely match again – so, unlike with most critics, it actually means something when I say that "London" was a great season premiere. Better than any episode of season 5, in fact. It's the first episode in a long time to put a legitimately delightful new spin on Ron's uber-manliness, and the way it temporarily wrote out Andy to accommodate Guardians of the Galaxy's shooting schedule was actually damn clever. And unlike Friends' trip to London the photography was beautiful too, both of the city and in the countryside with Ron.

8. Breaking Bad, Season 5 Episode 12 – "Rabid Dog"

Having now seen all of Breaking Bad season 5 1/2, I feel comfortable declaring "Rabid Dog" the weakest of its eight episodes. Which is to say it was merely very good instead of one of the best TV episodes of the last several years. It was clear even while watching the episode the first time that this was an hour dedicated to shuffling the pieces into place for the insanity soon to come – did anyone really think anything crazy was going to go down in that public square at the end? – but the bizarre, burgeoning relationship between Jesse and the Schrader family was just the right brand of strange and funny. I only wish we could see more of Jesse's confession tape!

7. Parenthood, Season 5 Episode 1 – "It Has to Be Now"

When it comes to Parenthood, the difference between an average, good or great episode often comes down to the absence or presence of one moment that reduces me from manly man to big dumb weepy baby. In the case of the show's fifth season premiere, said moment was found in the episode's final minute, where returning Afghanistan veteran Ryan York proposed to Amber, the preferred Braverman of all people with hearts, scored to Joshua Radin's "My My Love." No showrunner has ever used music as perfectly as Jason Katims, and that's as true in Parenthood season 5 as it was back in Friday Night Lights season 1.

6. It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, Season 9 Episode 3 – "The Gang Tries Desperately to Win an Award"

Surreally and against all the rules of television, Always Sunny is, nine years in, just getting more and more ambitious. Once, it commented on how terrible these specific people were; now it turns its sights on the entire medium of television, as the gang finds themselves trapped in a shitty ABC-style sitcom as they visit another award-winning (i.e. Emmy-winning) bar, where the people are "likable" and the colors are bright and the banter is phony and the will-they-or-won't-they romance is gag-inducing. Unlike Community's semi-takedown of Glee, there didn't appear to be much winking or loving about this parody: It was downright scornful of the shitty comedies Emmy voters throw gold at. And it was glorious. One of my favorite Sunny episodes in years.

5. Breaking Bad, Season 5 Episode 15 – "Granite State"

"Granite State" was something of a schizophrenic episode: On the one hand, up in New Hampshire with Walt's story, Breaking Bad became as moody, quiet, introspective and methodical in its pacing (and snowy!) as we've just about ever seen the show. Even compared to similarly stationary episodes like "Fly" and "4 Days Out," Walt's story here lacked a goal or a purpose; he was just trapped, deteriorating. Rotting. Until he saw a certain TV interview, that is.

Meanwhile, back in the ABQ, with Jesse and all the rest, things went fucking horrifyingly nuts, with dead-eyed Landry Todd Alquist stepping up to join King Joffrey on the short list of contemporary TV's sickest, most unpredictably violent and terrifying villains. The two contrasting halves of the episode created an enjoyably odd mix, propelling events into the finale and ending with the show's first-ever onscreen use of the Breaking Bad theme song outside of the title card, which was just thrilling.

4. Futurama, Season 7 Episode 26 – "Meanwhile"

Futurama's last couple years may not have been what the show was at its peak – and, let's be honest here, a really freaking small handful of shows in TV history are what Futurama was at its peak – but "Meanwhile" was nevertheless just about all you could have asked for from its series finale. It was funny, it was emotional, it had crazy sci-fi time-warping shenanigans baked into its plot, and it wrapped up the series-spanning Fry/Leela arc in a way that was wonderful, joyful and just a touch bittersweet. It's one of the goriest episodes in the show's history and it leaves you with a smile on your lips and a tear in your eye. Classic Futurama right there.

It's also the first one of these long-lived animated sitcoms to have a true series finale that really feels like a series finale, wrapping up characters and story arcs in a manner that gives the impression of a finished story. The Simpsons, South Park, Family Guy and American Dad live on and King of the Hill ended with a fairly non-eventful, non-climactic "life goes on" episode. But one day, those first four series will end, and "Meanwhile" gives them a good model for what kind of tone they might aim for in their final 22-minute slices.

3. Breaking Bad, Season 5 Episode 13 – "To'hajiilee"

(Spoilers follow!) The final ten minutes of "To'hajiilee" are, without question, among the most stomach-churningly suspenseful I've ever witnessed in television or film. I'm talking about everything after Uncle Jack's gang descends on Hank and Gomie, of course, but arguably even more importantly I'm talking about the minutes before they arrive. I mean, they're coming. You know they're coming. Hitchcock's bomb under the table is primed at ticking loudly when Hank is on the phone with Marie, delivering classic "I'm about to die" dialogue about how it's finally over and he loves her, and you just fucking know the Albuquerque desert is about to turn into Naziville, population Hank.

But all my years of 24 watching conditioned me to expect motherfucking SHOCK! moments (and Breaking Bad, too, has delivered a couple over the years), so I watched this on edge, every nerve ending alert, adrenaline pumping in a way no TV show should logically induce, ready for a gunshot to blow out Hank's brains out of nowhere. It turned out Vince Gilligan and company had something a bit different in mind, but still, holy fucking shit, what a sequence. What a set piece. I would be very interested to see what this episode's director Michelle MacLaren could bring to an action/thriller/suspense feature film once she's done with her work on Game of Thrones.

2. Breaking Bad, Season 5 Episode 16 – "Felina"

(Spoilers follow!) Part of what makes Breaking Bad great (and what makes it stand out in contrast to most attempts at "quality television" that have followed) is that, for all its darkness and misery and its focus on consequences and its character arcs of supreme, literary power, it's a really, really fun show with thick veins of pulp running through it. Always has been, from Walt destroying Tuco's office with magic bomb crystals to several instances of cool guys not looking at explosions to the half-Terminator/half-Anton Chigurh Salamanca twins to Two-Face Gus Fring fixing his tie before dying. And it's in that spirit that one of dramatic television's great narratives ends with its protagonist building and deploying a Nazi-killing robot. Awesome.

1. Breaking Bad, Season 5 Episode 14 – "Ozymandias"

However, the flip side of Breaking Bad's deliciously pulpy essence is all that other stuff I mentioned: The darkness, the misery, the consequences, and it's all on full display in "Ozymandias," which Vince Gilligan himself has declared his masterpiece and the best episode of the series. I'm not 100% sure I'm ready to go that far – I need to rewatch the entire series and see "One Minute" and "Full Measure" and "Crawl Space" and "Face Off" and "Dead Freight" again first – but it is as intense, brutal and harrowing an hour of television as I've ever seen. If "Felina" is the climax to Breaking Bad, the entertaining crime/thriller saga, "Ozymandias" is the climax to Breaking Bad, the intensely bleak tale of a man losing his soul and the horrors he rains upon everyone around him. Beginning to end, "Ozymandias" is an episode about consequences, and karma brought its full fury against Walter White and his family in service of just that.

Breaking Bad was brutal, fantastic, glorious brilliance. It is unequivocally one of the greatest TV series of all time. Now, internet, let's please try to maintain my love for it and frankly my sanity by shutting up about it for at least a year.

Best TV Episodes, August 2013

10. Longmire, Season 2 Episode 13 – "Bad Medicine"

Good news, everyone! As the summer TV hiatus ends in but a few shorts weeks, August should officially be the last month of "every halfway decent show gets a chance to play on the Best TV Episodes lists" season. One of the final recipients of this season's generosity, following in the footsteps of Defiance and Teen Wolf, is A&E's Wyoming sheriff procedural Longmire (which, despite my protestations in my best of 2012 list, I actually did pick back up and continue with, and it might even be a little higher on my 2013 list). The show's second season finale wasn't mind-blowing or anything, but it had a couple nice twists and some beautiful scenery, which is pretty much all you can ask for from Longmire.

9. Gravity Falls, Season 1 Episode 20 – "Gideon Rises"

Unlike Longmire, Disney's Simpsons-meets-X-Files-for-kids cartoon Gravity Falls is probably going to be lower on my best of 2013 list than where it stood last year. Not that it's been unenjoyable – it's just that my four or five favorite episodes of last year are still my four or five favorite episodes of the series. It's been entertaining this year, but not blowing my hair back. Nevertheless, its first season finale – which parodied mechs and giant monsters in a way that frankly might have been more entertaining than the overrated Pacific Rim – brought the show's first act to a reasonably funny and epic conclusion.

8. Longmire, Season 2 Episode 11 – "Natural Order"

Another Longmire? What gives, Tim?! Well, I'll tell you what gives: Jim Beaver guest spot! That's automatic bonus points right there.

7. Switched at Birth, Season 2 Episode 21 – "Departure of Summer"

I wasn't always in love with this summer-set and summer-airing half-season of Switched at Birth. This show, like pretty much all teen dramas, is stronger with the natural structure of the school year keeping the narrative cohesive. But still, Switched's second season finale (and yes, this makes three season finales in four entries) did a respectable and somewhat moving job of clearing the deck for next year, having characters split apart, confess to wrongdoings and start making amends.

6. The Newsroom, Season 2 Episode 7 – "Red Team III"

One of the more bizarre and pleasant surprises this month was seeing Aaron Sorkin's often preachy and formerly bordering on unwatchable behind-the-scenes-of-TV drama The Newsroom rise to the level of being, well, pretty watchable. A lot of that has to do with Sorkin finally letting his often unpleasantly perfect characters make more mistakes, and as the show's second season nears its end they made a truly massive one, doing a live special news bulletin on a war crime it turned out never occurred. The fallout has made for, if not quite The West Wing or Sports Night or The Social Network, pretty decent television.

5. The Fosters, Season 1 Episode 10 – "I Do"

In what is surely one of TV's better lesbian wedding episodes, the midseason finale of ABC Family's surprisingly moving new drama brought some of the titular Foster family closer than ever while other things fell apart. The show isn't quite Parenthood as far as family dramas go, but I've actually been pretty impressed at how deft it's been in its storytelling, character development and emotions. I can't quite forgive ABC Family for canceling Bunheads, but The Fosters is at least a band-aid on the wound.

4. The Newsroom, Season 2 Episode 5 – "News Night with Will McAvoy"

"News Night with Will McAvoy" is to The Newsroom as the pilot of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is to that show: Almost certainly the best hour it will ever put out, fleeting proof that buried somewhere inside is still the Sorkin who gave us Sports Night and The West Wing. In fact, this episode, which depicts one fast-paced, hectic, sometimes funny but ultimately tragic hour in Will McAvoy and MacKenzie McHale's newsroom, even calls to mind some similarly real-time episodes of those two classic shows, such as the "Draft Day" two-parter from the former and "17 People" from the latter. It's the one time I've finished a Newsroom episode and felt that it actually matched Sorkin's ambitions.

3. Breaking Bad, Season 5 Episode 10 – "Buried"

And now we reach the 500-pound blue meth elephant in the room. I'm not bothering with weekly Breaking Bad reviews on this blog, because quite frankly the entire rest of the internet will already have discussed, debated, broken down, analyzed, gif-ized, and then looped back around for reanalysis for every single episode before I could possibly get around to even typing my first sentence on the matter. There'd be no point; I'd be spitting into a tsunami. But still, one of TV's towering achievements will certainly have its day in the sun on these lists, as it should. The chaotic aftermath of Walt and Hank's confrontation and Jesse's slip into full-on depressive psychosis were both gripping as hell. Bloody meth empire coups are just the crimson icing on the crystal blue cake.

2. Breaking Bad, Season 5 Episode 11 – "Confessions"

Refusing authentic New Mexican tableside guacamole?! Walt's humanity is truly lost.

1. Breaking Bad, Season 5 Episode 9 – "Blood Money"

Confession: About two-thirds of the way through Breaking Bad's fifth-and-a-half-season premiere, I was thinking, "Well, this is good – Breaking Bad is always good – but it's not really blowing my mind like I'd hoped. They must be setting up the good stuff for next week." And then, blamo, like clear, climactic, revelatory thunder, the final garage scene between Hank and Walt. One of the most intense, gripping, powerful, brilliantly written and amazingly acted scenes I've seen on television all year long, and one of the best scenes of this entire stellar series.

Not gonna lie, I rewatched the scene on YouTube, like, ten to fifteen times the same night "Blood Money" aired, then probably another ten times over the course of the week. How brilliant it is to see five-plus years of television culminate in a moment like that. How rare. How awesome. I will not tread lightly when it comes to ranking this the best TV episode of August 2013.

Top Fifty TV Episodes of 2012

Unlike my top fifty shows, which I found a very fun list to compile, picking my fifty favorite episodes of the year was agony. There were countless great hours and half-hours of television to choose from, and while I eventually whittled things down to about fifty (give or take a few pairings of back-to-back Mad Men and Game of Thrones and Legend of Korra episodes I lumped into single slots because I'm weak and cowardly), there were no less than twenty episodes of 2012 TV I adored and deleting from my rough draft list felt like chipping away pieces of my soul.
Also, I myself was surprised by what shows did and didn't find their way onto my final list. While all of my top ten shows are represented by at least one installment, a full seven of my #30-11 shows failed to make the cut (and, for the record, exactly one show of my #50-31 has an episode listed). All the same, both my fifty shows list and fifty episodes list are totally genuine and from the heart, so I guess it just goes to show that we're all bundles of contradictions. Or at least I am, anyway.

Final quick disclaimer: The bottom thirty or so of this list is all pretty arbitrary and could be mixed up in more or less any order and I'd still be ok with it, so don't take it too serious. Also, just for fun, I've placed asterisks next to episodes that are season finales (there are no series finales on the list, though there are three series premieres). Here goes:

Top Ten TV Shows of 2012

We come to it at last. The great top ten of our time. You could probably switch my #10 pick with The L.A. Complex or American Dad! and I'd be ok with it, but I feel very comfortable with the placement and ranking of my top nine, the nine shows you could whittle all of television down to and it'd still be my favorite medium. Best of all, though three are ending (one in January) and one lost its original showrunner, all ten of these shows are continuing in 2013. Enough foreplay, let's get down:

10. Justified (FX)

There's been grousing on these here internets about Justified's third season not quite measuring up to its phenomenal second, and I can agree with that. (I didn't see Justified season 2 until it hit DVD, but when it did I wound up shotgunning the entire season in two sittings; five episodes the first night, eight the next.) Though actor Neal McDonough did the best he could, season 3 antagonist Robert Quarles just wasn't up to snuff with season 2's legendary Mags Bennett.

But when it comes to the day-to-day of pulpy crime fiction, no show does it better. Seriously – it can tell a fine serialized story, but when it goes straight cop procedural, Justified leaves the entire rest of that genre choking on the exhaust of its superiority (with the only two other examples on this list being Awake at #25 and Longmire at #46, and TV's million other cop procedurals being way down below my top fifty).

Part of this is due to Timothy Olyphant's charisma, even more due to the show's redneck noir Harlan County settings, but the biggest contributor has to be its lineup of lovable white-trash villainy: Ever-scheming Dickie Bennett, poor dumb Dewey Crowe, and especially Walton Goggins' sometimes-villain/sometimes-ultra-dark-antihero Boyd Crowder, one of the most unstoppably watchable characters on all television. I wouldn't say he overshadows Olyphant to the same extent Ian McShane did on Deadwood, but three seasons in there remains a giddy, tingling thrill to every scene he's a part of.

Top Ten TV Shows of 2011

No need for essay-length preamble, you know the drill. Also, standard "I haven't seen everything" disclaimer applies (perhaps most notably I haven't yet seen the acclaimed second season of Justified), so if your favorite show is missing there's no need to stress; it might just be on my to-see list and wasn't excluded deliberately.

Unless of course your favorite show is The Walking Dead, in which case I excluded it extremely deliberately. Sorry. Starting with our runners-up:

Noble Runners-Up (in alphabetical order)


30 Rock (NBC) – Between the freewheeling absurdity of "Operation Righteous Cowboy Lightning," the satirical edge of "TGS Hates Women," and the show's slightly masturbatory but still hugely entertaining love letter to itself in its hour-long hundredth episode, "100," the fifth season of 30 Rock ended strong last spring, keeping its reputation as one of TV's funniest and most irreverent sitcoms rightly intact.

Awkward (MTV) – Likely the year's biggest surprise for me and the tiny handful of others way outside MTV's target demo who caught it, Awkward emerged from nowhere to instantly become one of the best high school sitcoms ever. It's not necessarily doing anything that teen movies haven't been since the 80s, but it's an exercise in high school underdog formula executed with remarkably fresh, youthful, and sometimes cheerfully vulgar energy, and lead Ashley Rickards feels like a star on the rise.

The Chicago Code (Fox) – The most tragically canceled one-and-done season of television to air in 2011 came from the very same executive producer behind 2010's tragic one-and-done Terriers, Shawn Ryan, a man on a simultaneously hot and cold streak of artistic success and commercial failure. Nevertheless, these thirteen episodes did a fine job telling a thrilling, complex, and more or less complete story about the intersection between police and politics, with Delroy Lindo giving one of TV's meatiest, most entertaining performances of the year as corrupt Alderman Ronin Gibbons.

Fringe (Fox) – Network TV's best sci-fi show remains network TV's best sci-fi show, and not by a little. Despite the fourth season's controversial new direction (though few will deny the greatness of "And Those We've Left Behind," one of the best episodes of the series), Fringe's 2011 run continued to command cultish love even as it alienated mass audiences with its hard sci-fi, alternate timelines, parallel universes, and animated episode, all while Anna Torv kept delivering not one but several of television's quietly great performances as the many versions of FBI Special Agent Olivia Dunham.

Louie (FX) – Comedian Louis C.K.'s loosely-connected series of short films masquerading as a TV series continued to demand respect with its remarkable confidence, command of tone, and week-to-week unpredictability in its second season. Once a comedy, Louie now blurs genre lines unlike anything else on TV, having one episode build in its entirety to a massive fart while other episodes included straight-faced, relatively unsmiling depictions of Louie traveling to Afghanistan to entertain the troops and trying to talk a failed comedian friend out of suicide. 

The Vampire Diaries (The CW) – TV's best supernatural soap (fuck off, True Blood!) kept its foot on the gas and blew through 2011 without letting up on its alarming pace of jaw-dropping plot twists, agonizing cliffhangers, cool violence, nasty villains, and major character deaths for a second. Marrying the outer trappings of a teen drama to the internal combustion engine of a relentless thriller, The Vampire Diaries kicks ass.

Top Ten TV Shows of 2011

Best TV Episodes, October 2011

I've decided to kick off a new feature wherein, on the first day of each month, I go through and rank and give some brief (spoiler-free) thoughts on my ten favorite television episodes that aired over the last month, plus pick a few runners-up. I can't watch everything, so I make no claim of this being any kind of definitive guide, but I thought it would be a fun way to organize my thoughts and share them at the same time, and maybe even talk a little about some shows I otherwise don't much.

Keep in mind that there's no "only one episode per show" rule in effect, so it's entirely possible that a few shows may dominate the top ten any given month. I may be a liberal, but the Tea Party should approve of this feature: there is no sharing the wealth here.

Runners-Up:

17. The Vampire Diaries, Season 3 Episode 5 – "The Reckoning" 16. Parks and Recreation, Season 4 Episode 5 – "Meet 'N' Greet" 15. Revenge, Season 1 Episode 5 – "Guilt" 14. Boardwalk Empire, Season 2 Episode 2 – "Ourselves Alone" 13. Homeland, Season 1 Episode 4 – "Semper I" 12. Parenthood, Season 3 Episode 4 – "Clear Skies From Here on Out" 11. Community, Season 3 Episode 5 – "Horror Fiction in Seven Spooky Steps"

Top Ten:

10. Homeland, Season 1 Episode 5 – "Blind Spot"

Last Sunday's Homeland did a great job further cementing the show as, as I labeled it in my pilot review, the thinking man's 24. It excels at depicting espionage, intelligence gathering, interrogation, and other anti-terrorism activities in a way that adheres a million times more closely to reality, and continues to move the plot quickly yet patiently forward. I plan a full review of this episode in a day or two, so I'll leave it at that.

9. Breaking Bad, Season 4 Episode 12 – "End Times"

I mentioned in my Breaking Bad season four review that I found this episode arguably the weakest of the final act of the season, with a closing scene that seemed to take a certain character from smart to psychic. But, just as your favorite food slightly misprepared is still probably preferable to most anything else, problematic Breaking Bad is still Breaking Bad.

8. Parks and Recreation, Season 4 Episode 3 – "Born & Raised"

Joan Callamezzo is one of Parks and Recreation's great secret weapons, always hilarious but never overused and made stale (her talk show also anchored one of the funniest scenes of one of the funniest episodes of the series, "Media Blitz"), and she makes her season four debut to huge laughs and a really well-structured, interconnected plot. An all-around great episode for Leslie's character development and Ben being hilarious, because Adam Scott is always hilarious.

7. Parenthood, Season 3 Episode 5 – "Nora"

Parenthood is one of the most difficult shows on TV to define my enjoyment of, because the show is, at its heart, about decently well-off people having mostly small-scale, quickly resolved first world problems that have no impact whatsoever on the world at large. But showrunner Jason Katims (also behind Friday Night Lights) has a deft, borderline-magic touch for making these people so likable and their issues so compelling regardless that I end pretty much every episode with a goofy grin on my face. "Nora" was simply the goofy grinniest of October.

6. Boss, Season 1 Episode 1 – "Listen"

The second-best pilot of the fall and one of the best of the year, Boss, the story of a fictitious Chicago mayor and the machinations surrounding the office, is dense, brainy, literate television, hugely stylish and theatrical but with a thick undercurrent of realpolitik running through it. At showing the corrupting power of politics it excels far beyond the recent George Clooney film The Ides of March, and Kelsey Grammer is so ferocious as the titular boss that he damn near scrubbed the residual nightmares of his recent sitcom Hank from my mind.

5. Boardwalk Empire, Season 2 Episode 5 – "Gimcrack and Bunkum"

Long-simmering tensions between two characters come to a perfect boil, series dark horse Richard Harrow gets an awesome, actor-friendly showcase, and there's not one but two scenes of gruesome, beyond-the-pale violence. Hands down the best episode of the season, and one of the best of the series since the pilot; a sweaty, heart-pounding episode of a show that can occasionally feel cold and detached.

4. Homeland, Season 1 Episode 3 – "Clean Skin"

Effectively the third act and climax of the first act of Homeland's debut season, "Clean Skin" may be in certain ways the least cerebral Homeland yet, but it's also the most tense and thrilling, with one particularly shocking moment that will make almost anyone watching jump. It's the episode of Homeland where it's most evident the show is run by two of the same guys as 24, but without ever giving into that show's baser instincts.

3. Homeland, Season 1 Episode 1 – "Pilot"

Homeland's pilot, for my money, jumps ahead of the (both now deceased, the former more tragically than the latter) The Chicago Code and Lights Out and stands behind only Game of Thrones as having the best pilot of the year. While it does a great job laying the show's groundwork as a terrorism thriller, its true accomplishment is building its two key figures, Claire Danes' Carrie Mathison and Damian Lewis's Nicholas Brody, into startlingly rich, compelling, three-dimensional characters within the space of one hour. Watching Danes in this episode was the first time I was riveted watching an actor in a new series this fall.

2. Breaking Bad, Season 4 Episode 13 – "Face Off"

As perfect a fourth season finale as I think any of us could have hoped for a few months back, "Face Off" is explosively tense, violent, satisfying, and just plain climactic television, bringing tons of plot threads to their conclusions and showing an awesome, wicked delight at sending the show's premise spinning in a wildly new direction. (The episode is also surprisingly funny at points, particularly when Hector is spelling things out with his bell.) It doesn't necessarily contain Bryan Cranston's greatest performance of the season, but it does take the character into fascinating new territory, one where they now might as well go ahead and retitle the show Broke Bad. The stage is well set for a terrific fifth and final season next year.

1. Community, Season 3 Episode 4 – "Remedial Chaos Theory"

The first two seasons of Community each have a pair of episodes that loom tall and monstrously above the rest as little 22-minute comedy masterpieces among the best television has ever seen. Season one had "Modern Warfare" and "Contemporary American Poultry." Season two had "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons" and "Conspiracy Theories and Interior Design." And now season three is halfway to the same place with "Remedial Chaos Theory," a blast of dizzyingly clever comedic brilliance that singlehandedly makes almost all of the tens of thousands of sitcom episodes that have come before look lethargic and unambitious in comparison.

It has a hugely clever and perfectly-executed central gimmick, does terrific character work spanning the entire cast, is loaded with uproarious jokes, and has as heartwarming an ending as anyone could hope for, one that filled me with warm fuzzies that even Parks and Recreation at its best struggles to measure up to. If Community gives us just two or three more episodes on the level of this and the other four I mentioned before series' end, Dan Harmon can look back on a life's work and consider himself one of comedy's great architects.

Breaking Bad Season 4 Review

Full spoiler review of Breaking Bad season four behind the cut, bitch!