16. The Walking Dead (AMC)
Were this a contest of “Most Improved,” AMC’s monstrous hit would be the winner by a country mile. After closing out the second season in a labored, squirm-inducing fashion that came to describe the show itself as much as the zombies in it, the first half of season three finally started to make good on The Walking Dead’s unrealized potential. With a pair of exciting new locations (an abandoned prison, and a town of suspiciously friendly survivors), the show got back to its frantic, bloody roots, where no one was safe, and the living were just as dangerous as the dead.
Now that the tenure of Glen Mazzara has finally cleared the mess leftover from the sudden firing of former showrunner Frank Darabont, The Walking Dead has become better plotted, better written, even better acted, than ever. If the rest of season three is up to snuff, then it’ll be able to backup the massive ratings with something more substantial than just heaps of gore.
- Best Episodes: “Seed,” “Killer Within”
15. Sherlock (BBC)
If any show could have used a mulligan on one episode, it was Sherlock. Following up a splendid first series with one that, when on its game, was just as good, the BBC’s modernizing mini-series, starring literature’s greatest detective, suffered from an acute case of the sophomore slump. Since only three episodes aired in 2012, it’s hard to ignore that the middle chapter, “The Hounds of Baskerville,” wasn’t up to the high standards the show had set for itself over the course of its four previous installments.
The dynamic interplay between Benedict Cumberbatch’s Holmes, and Martin Freeman’s Watson, was put on the backburner, in favor of a convoluted military conspiracy plot that played like it might have fallen out of a script showrunner Steven Moffatt had intended to use for Doctor Who. “Baskerville” only sticks out so badly because the pair of cases bookending it were so stellar, but even when a series of Sherlock comes up one win shy of the trifecta, it still makes for a highly-watchable, and clever spin on a classic icon.
- Best Episodes: “A Scandal in Belgravia,” “The Reichenbach Fall”
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