The Best and Worst Television Shows for 2013

As 2013 comes to a close, today we take a look at the best and the worst in television over the last year….

By Damon Martin — Editor/Lead Writer

2013 saw a lot of great television shows hit the airwaves and a few of our favorites come to an end. Chances are when this year is over you’ll probably never look at a wedding or a grill fork the same again. Several cherished characters were lost and some shows just lost their footing.

Today we are going to look at the best and worst television shows for 2013 including our pick for the top choice on TV as well as the show that fell to the bottom of the pit when it was all said and done. Plus we’ll give a few honorable mentions along the way for those that didn’t quite grab that brass ring.

Best Show on Television for 2013: Breaking Bad

It may seem like an easy choice to hand this pick over to the monumental AMC show that ended this year, but Breaking Bad didn’t win just because it was great — it’s the best show of 2013 because it truly was a masterpiece.

From the opening episode in the second half of season five when the now infamous words ‘tread lightly’ were uttered from Walter White’s lips to the final chords of Badfinger’s ‘Baby Blue’ faded to black, Breaking Bad was everything you could hope for in a television show. Brutally crafted amidst a backdrop of desert sunsets and bloodshed, Breaking Bad managed to go out much bigger than it came in. This was one of those rare shows that just got better and better as each season played out.

Walter White’s tale was never meant to be one of triumph. His destiny was always numbered with an expiration date, but how we got to the final scenes this season with the former chemistry teacher turned meth kingpin battling cancer, envy, jealousy, a DEA agent brother-in-law, turncoat ex-partners and a dire need to provide for his family was all executed with surgical precision.

Breaking Bad even managed to put together one of the most satisfying endings of a show that’s ever happened — maybe even the best ever. It’s a show that will hold up for years to come alongside other stalwarts like The Sopranos and The Wire. Breaking Bad was brilliance and this was their year to shine. No one was brighter in 2013.

Honorable Mention: Sons of Anarchy

Now if you’re a regular visitor to this site, it’s no mystery that I love Sons of Anarchy and everything that crazy maniac Kurt Sutter manages to stuff into 13-episodes every season. It breaks my heart that the story will come to an end in less than a year, but the penultimate run this season was a tragic tale from start to finish as we rev our engines and go barreling towards the finish in the final year.

From the unexpected and unnerving moment we said goodbye to Clay Morrow to the sad, tear soaked end of the season when we lost Tara, Sons of Anarchy was a tour de force that came in like a tornado and left in a maelstrom. Sutter has a masterful hand at crafting this Shakespearean world for a modern age, and he’s left with a crimson canvas as he gets ready to build the machine to take us into the final year.

I’ll go ahead and predict now that unless something catastrophic happens like Jax leaping over a pit of sharks on his Harley street glide, Sons of Anarchy is a shoe in to win the best show in 2014 but this year was nothing short of excellent. If not for Breaking Bad, this would be the top pick. Emmys and Golden Globes be damned — Sons of Anarchy is still one of the best shows going today.

Honorable Mention: Game of Thrones

The toughest part about Game of Thrones isn’t making it through more murders than what you see playing a session of Grand Theft Auto — it’s realizing after the season debut that there are only nine more episodes to go until it’s over. Game of Thrones is an expensive show to make thus why there are only 10 episodes per season, but this series wastes little time going right for the jugular (both literally and figuratively).

The second to last episode ‘The Rains of Castamere’ which featured ‘The Red Wedding’ was at the top of any single 60-minutes of TV watching this entire year. Maybe because that episode was so unbelievable that it somehow dulled the other nine episodes and that’s the reason why Game of Thrones is only the honorable mention and not show of the year. Either way, the battle for the iron throne in Westeros continues to be one of the most compelling stories each year and March can’t get here soon enough for season four to unfold.

Worst Show on Television for 2013: True Blood

It’s hard to watch a once great show devolve into a cluttered mess with no real sense of story and characters that you’d rather stake than hear them speak for another episode, but that’s what True Blood has become over the past two seasons.

Former show runner Alan Ball created and crafted a fantastic fantasy world of vampires, fairies and werewolves all living in the Louisiana town of Bon Temps, but once he left the show his successors tried to go big and instead failed in their attempts to build a mountain out of a molehill.

New characters introduced this season were beyond ludicrous (Ben Flynn, yes that was his name) and actors like Rutger Hauer were squandered on pitiful stories and even worse dialogue. The end of the season brought about a somewhat hopeful ray of light in an otherwise damp, dark and failing show and mercifully HBO realized that True Blood was on its last legs and pulled the plug commanding only one more partial season to wrap up the series.

My hope is that True Blood can vamp up and super charge this final season to make it all worth while but this last year was not only hard to witness, it was simply unbearable to watch.

Honorable Mention: Under the Dome

Let me preface this review by saying that Under the Dome started out with great promise. The first couple of episodes had me intrigued and there were even a few characters that kept my interest in the early going. But as the season dragged on there were a number of things I started to realize that forced me to face the hard truth about Under the Dome

First off, CBS had a cash cow right away during the summer months, which are typically horrible for ratings and Under the Dome was pulling in great numbers. So instead of this being a one season miniseries based on Stephen King’s book, the executives decided to stretch out the story for at minimum a second season when there really should have only been a single stretch of episodes to tell this tale.

Second, what once started as an interesting character study that held similar inklings to a series called Jericho (which is far superior to this one by the way), as each episode passed I found myself caring less and less about each one of them. The cliché and stereotypical casting combined with predictable writing left zero mystery between who were the good guys, who were the bad guys and who was eventually going to be the damsel in distress.

Third and most important — if I had to look at Junior’s pouty face one more time I was going to put a pacemaker in my own heart and beg for a chance to run face first into the dome.

Maybe season two will turn things around but unless they start moving towards an end game I have a bad feeling things will just continue to stretch out until the ratings plummet and nobody gets to the conclusion.

Honorable Mention: Dexter

Did you see the finale? Did you watch the final season and see how far this show fell from what it once was? I don’t think I need to say much more. Dexter‘s final season was the exact opposite of the last days on Breaking Bad. We now live in a world where Walter White is dead and Dexter Morgan lives — oh the humanity.