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It started well. It ended well. And in between, it was a topsy-turvy year in television.

The year began with True Detective, HBO’s stunning, brooding crime drama starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson. On Jan. 10, two days before the first episode aired, it was being called “the year’s best new show.” At year’s end, it is a top five contender, possibly the No. 1 pick for many – the star wattage of McConaughey and Harrelson mattering less than the fatalism and grave ambition of the writer, Nic Pizzolatto.

As the year closes, Homeland, one of this decade’s great dramas, is ending another season, unexpectedly revived as both brilliant and engrossing – a searing exploration of moral decay in U.S. foreign policy. Given that True Detective was essentially about moral decay in a postindustrial America, it was obviously a year of deep seriousness. The gravity of the best of contemporary TV drama is underlined by these two shows that bookend 2014.

In fact, there was a cornucopia of fine TV this year. A top 10 list doesn’t do it full justice. Across the spectrums, from network shows to cable series to Netflix inventions to online oddities, it was a year of stellar, disruptive innovation.

Yes, there were disappointments. But the great television outweighs them, easily.

Locally, the Canadian TV racket careered through one crisis after another.

The CBC dealt with less funding, the loss of NHL hockey and the Jian Ghomeshi scandal with ever-increasing ineptitude. The CRTC attempted to corral all TV-related issues into one file and found itself on the receiving end of blithe scorn from Netflix. And by the year’s end there were two Canadian competitors to Netflix – Shomi and Cravetv, both full of strong programming and launched with great hope that Canadians pay attention.

There were key shared experiences through television. The sometimes unnerving collision of fantasy and reality at the Winter Olympics in Sochi; the beauty and majesty of the World Cup in Brazil; the horror of an airliner blown from the sky in a disputed area of Ukraine; the tension, chaos and confusion of a gunman’s attack on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, the surreal media pandemonium of Ghomeshi’s court appearance.

The images that linger and define 2014 came from live TV coverage, asserting its importance again, even while social media lay claim to instant coverage, news and images.

But, in the end, the year in TV is characterized by the quality of the programming in drama and comedy.

Herewith, a list of the top 10 TV shows of 2014, in alphabetical order.

Argue, if you like, what the order of importance should be.

The Americans (FX/ FX Canada)

If it seemed a clever oddity in its first season, it was uniquely eloquent in its second. Set in the early 1980s at the height of the Cold War, it offered Elizabeth and Phillip Jennings (Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys), a couple with two kids, seemingly ordinary. But they are KGB spies. The episodes this year, especially those dealing with an FBI agent Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich, who is wonderful) and his involvement with Soviet embassy worker Nina (Annet Mahendru), reached an extraordinary level of pathos, distilling the Cold War to a very human story of lies, deceit and depravity run amok.

The Colbert Report (Comedy Central/Comedy Network)

His importance is measured by how he will be missed. Colbert, a TV comedian who can stay in character, day after day, is a first-rate wit who has a lot of stamina. His creation of Stephen Colbert, the demented, right-wing, self-aggrandizing fool, mining a rich vein of self-righteous blather, was one of American TV’s greatest achievements.

Fargo (FX/FX Canada)

It transcended any expectation that it would be a mere homage to the much-loved Coen brothers movie by emphatically creating its own warped world in wintry Minnesota. It emerged as a heightened, darker world, definitely more rife with evil. Such was the heightened sensibility that one suspected key character Lorne Malvo (Billy Bob Thornton doing his best work in years) was less real than a figment of the locality’s collective imagination. At once arch and bluntly violent, it was stunningly inventive.

How to Get Away with Murder (ABC/CTV)

It energized network drama with glorious aplomb. A murder case, but treated like no other in conventional TV. All sizzle and expertly concocted twists, it seethed with eroticism and at the same time, silliness, which made it exhilarating, top-notch entertainment. At its centre, Viola Davis was magnificent as the icy, commanding lawyer/ law professor Annalise Keating, manipulating her students like mad.

The Leftovers (HBO)

Not for the unserious. Set after a rapture-like calamity sweeps away part of the world’s population, it was relentlessly bleak. The morass of crazed reaction to the calamity would make you weep for Western civilization, in both sympathy and despair.

Mad Men (AMC)

The penultimate batch of episodes presented most of the characters on an ever-quickening path to self-destruction. It’s 1969, the culture is coming apart at the seams and a reckoning is on the horizon, a horizon that none of them sees, drenched as they are in narcissism and self-indulgence. What’s happening, too, is the demise of an old male order. Don Draper is back at work, but in a lowly position. As grim as anything, save for The Leftovers, but gripping as ever.

Olive Kitteridge (HBO)

A miniseries and a masterpiece of serious drama with dry humour. Perhaps the most urbane, poised and exquisitely delivered drama on television this year, and a testament to the power of TV storytelling at its best – intimate and trenchant. As Olive, Frances McDormand commanded the drama but her family and community came exquisitely alive.

Rectify (Sundance channel)

The most underrated drama of this year, Rectify is a glorious exercise in Southern Gothic, a wildly intense, small-scale story of great moral significance. A man is released from jail after a wrongful conviction – but is it wrongful? And the knowledge that he is released back into a world seething with corruption, horror and hatred, most of it male. Aden Young as Daniel Holden, the central character, has done one of the top acting jobs of the year.

Strange Empire (CBC)

At last a furiously energetic, creatively disruptive Canadian drama. Defying every expectation, it smashed the conventional western mythology to smithereens. Female-centric and often emotionally enraged, it became poignant, too, and all the while a western of the vivid imagination, hallucinatory and unforgettable.

True Detective (HBO)

Brilliant, nerve-jangling, it turned the mismatched-cops genre on its head. “Everything is a lie” was Rust Cohle’s philosophy – referring to religion, marriage, order, civility – and was the drama’s message. For all the optimism of its ending, the journey there was stunning TV to brood upon and admire.