Best TV of 2012

10/ Spartacus - Vengeance
Now in it’s third season, Spartacus is still a great period drama that is enormously enhanced by its boundry pushing language, sex and extreme bloody violence. Yey.

9/ Castle
Each season has surpassed the previous one in terms of the memorable, high concept episodes produced. Plus you’ve got ‘World’s Best Actor’ in Nathan Fillion and the divine Stana Katic. What else does a grown man need?

8/ Sherlock
Classy direction, sublime scripting and the perfect casting of Cumberbatch in the lead role. Fuck off Johnny Lee Miller, this is how to do a contemporary Sherlock Holmes series.

7/ Fringe
Great characters, great sci-fi concepts and an urgent, much welcome change of pace for the final season. Fringe; you will be missed.

6/ Family Guy
Still braver and funnier than the other Seth MacFarlane shows out there, Peter Griffin still has the best animated show on the air.

5/ Community
While The Big Bang Theory is prepared to portray geeks as social outcasts, Community thankfully portrays geeks as they truly are. Multi-layered, intelligent, post-modern and meta, with an endearingly loveable cast and a massive volume of in-jokes that makes consistent watching rewarding like no other show can offer. Classic Episode = Modern Warfare

4/ Doctor Who
  Only 6 episodes this year but we had three classic Steven Moffatt episodes, so who’s complaining. Celebrating the complexity of time travel, intricate, emotional stories, all served up like a science fiction fairytale. Classic Episode = Asylum Of The Daleks



3/ Game Of Thrones
  It still awes me that there is a big budget, fantasy series on TV and that it takes itself seriously. But Game Of Thrones proved that season one was no accident and climaxed in one of the most epic episodes of television ever in the amazing Blackwater. Plus it has dragons. And zombies. Oh, and evil vagina demons. Classic Episode = Blackwater



2/ The Newsroom
  Any new series from The West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin was bound to be good, but The Newsroom is stunning. Jeff Daniels makes for one great anti-hero while it being set 2 years ago allows for real life politics and media coverage to be mocked and critiqued. And the shows opening monologue sums up everything wrong with America making it worth the ranking of this series alone.
 Classic Episode = The 112th Congress



1/ The Walking Dead
  The Walking Dead producers seemed to take the criticism that the first half of the last season was a little slow, so for season three they promised a faster pace. That promise is more than fulfilled in one of the most intense half seasons of TV I’ve ever experienced. Unforgivingly brutal with shocks, unpredictable characters, imaginative situations and a willingness to play by no rules. Edge of your sphincter stuff. Classic Episode = Killer Within




Bubbling under = Red Dwarf X, Real Time with Bill Maher, The Daily Show, 30 Rock, Robot Chicken, Being Human, The Thick Of It