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Everything is unsettling. The town is both concrete and imagined, a place where all roads lead nowhere. The only arrivals are the dead, though it's never entirely clear who is alive and who is dead. The Returned takes many of the familiar killer zombie tropes and gives them an unfamiliar twist. You think losing a child or a partner may be the worst thing that could happen? This drama series makes you wonder whether having them back might be worse. It's an existential pain evenly shared between the living and the dead. No one really understands the rules of engagement: not the living, not the dead. And certainly not this viewer. All I know for sure is you're best off avoiding the underpass. John Crace

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This year has been all about exciting gritty modern TV dramas. The Returned. The Fall. Everything starring Olivia Colman. Hurrah for modern TV! So, naturally, my favourite show is Endeavour, the programme that makes you feel as if the past 13 years never happened. Undoubtedly, a large part of the show's appeal is sentimentality. I adored Morse and just hearing Barrington Pheloung's tune on TV again prompted a Proustian thrill. But Endeavour did not coast on sentiment. Shaun Evans was brilliant as young Morse, with a face that looks more like John Thaw the more you look at it. Then there's Roger Allam – a man I would watch in anything – as his superior. The two gave Endeavour classiness rarely seen in Sunday night dramas. Not seen, in fact, since Morse. Modern and gritty are all very well, but comfort and class are irresistible. Hadley Freeman

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Chris Chibnall's scripts for Broadchurch contained one of the darkest and most original scenes in TV drama: when Olivia Colman's DS Ellie Miller confronted in an interview room a killer on whose family background she would need no briefing. The show confirmed Colman as a pretender to Julie Walters' throne as Britain's most versatile and admired small-screen performers, and satisfyingly proved wrong almost all current theories about how TV works. At a time when the fashion was for "stripping" a series across one week and Netflix was encouraging viewers to watch House of Cards at a time of their own choosing, Broadchurch kept and built an audience across eight weekly episodes, in the manner of the past. Mark Lawson

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The Good Wife is technically a legal procedural, I suppose. The protagonist, Alicia Florrick, is a fortysomething mother of two forced to go back to work when her politician husband Peter has the kibosh put on his career when his use of prostitutes is revealed. But what unfolds over the next four-seasons-and-counting is a drama that is given its emotional heft by the loving, nuanced, realistic portrait of a marriage shattering and then slowly being put back together. It also has complex, fully realised characters of a kind more usually associated with niche cable shows rather than network series such as The Good Wife. This would be good enough, but the fact that women outnumber the men makes it glorious. There's Diane, the co-founding partner at Alicia's law firm, who is neither bitch nor secretly unfulfilled nor shrew; Alicia herself, an almost uniquely stoic female character; Kalinda, who – well, she just kicks ass in every way, don't get me started; Peter's mother, who sits like a sweetly smiling spider in the middle of the domestic web; and even the Florricks' 14-year-old daughter is not a screaming teenage cipher but a thoughtful and considered player in this increasingly brilliant ensemble piece. Lucy Mangan

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Closer in emotional tone to The Returned than the shoot-'em-up mayhem of The Walking Dead, TV debutant and writing-scheme beneficiary Dominic Mitchell's rural Lancashire zombie drama wittily recast its undead as "partially deceased syndrome sufferers", and used social satire and brain-scooping horror to place ancient fears in a modern setting with hot-button themes of intolerance, integration and BBC3's signature war in Afghanistan. Newcomer Luke Newberry's government-assisted rehabilitation after his gay-shame suicide is reversed during the mysterious "rising". Scary, moving and funny, it pulled 600,000 viewers to BBC3, with the channel providing inventive online support, and won a recommission, proving that zombies do come back. Andrew Collins

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A belting US import doing the business for ITV on Saturday nights. Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell play Soviet agents Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, living as a suburban Washington couple in Reagan's America. Even their kids don't know who they really are and we meet them just as a nosy FBI agent moves in across the street. The constant peril of discovery propels every episode as they try to gather intel, and Phil begins to go native and starts line dancing. While Russell is kept busy snapping enemy necks and grooming her 80s side-sweep, Rhys's face dominates: the contrast turned up to 11 on his pale skin and black brows with cheekbones that could slice kielbasa. Truly thrilling. Julia Raeside

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When the entire series of House of Cards arrived on Netflix in one go this year, everyone was so caught up in discussing its impact on traditional television that they forgot to talk about what the show was actually like. This is a shame. At its best, House of Cards was magnificent. A gleaming, sumptuous political drama that made its BBC predecessor look like provincial am-dram, House of Cards was underpinned by Kevin Spacey's remarkable slow-motion Foghorn Leghorn turn as scheming majority whip, Frank Underwood. The whole thing bordered perilously on self-parody at times – especially during the clanging product placement of the infamous "Say, is that a PSP Vita?" scene – but that added to its charm. Stuart Heritage

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The small screen's growing appetite for serial killers is not necessarily to be celebrated, but BBC2 drama The Fall was a claustrophobic, unsettling and utterly gripping watch. A "whydunnit" rather than a whodunnit, The Fall turned The Killing on its head, with much of its focus on the family man by day/psychopath by night, Paul Spector (Jamie Dornan). If Dornan was good, then Gillian Anderson, as the glacial armour-plated DS Stella Gibson, was even better. "The most repulsive drama ever broadcast on British TV," said the Daily Mail. If at times it made the viewer feel complicit in Spector's crimes, then it also made them confront, in Gibson's words, the "age old [issue of] male violence against women". Grown-up drama, without a weak link, and with no resolution. Not until the second series, at least. John Plunkett

Scintillating moments from season three: Brienne of Tarth's terrifying fight with a CGI bear, the ice-wall ascent, the slaughter of House Stark, any scene featuring Peter Dinklage's randy, dissolute dwarf, Cersei's expression when brother-lover Jamie made it home minus a hand but with his gorgeousness otherwise sickeningly intact. How good is Game of Thrones? Almost good enough to make me sign a peace treaty with Rupert Murdoch's evil empire and subscribe to Sky Atlantic. I said almost. While The White Queen is supposed to be about the Wars of the Roses and Game of Thrones merely cherry picks it for material, the latter feels more authentic, its filth and fornication less 21st century than Philippa Gregory, author of The White Queen, dared. Can't wait for season four. Stuart Jeffries

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I didn't expect to fall for Dates. I came with low expectations, only there for a bit of fun, but after one evening with Oona Chaplin's smouldering Mia and Will Mellor's weary David, I was halfway in love. It's one of those bold pieces of programming that shouldn't work: slow, dialogue-heavy vignettes, peeling back the layers to reveal complex, damaged characters, like a sexy British answer to Louis Malle's My Dinner with André. The scripts were smart, naturalistic, funny and full of surprises, brought to life in thoughtful performances from a cracking cast, with bewitching turns from Montanna Thompson, Sian Breckin and Andrew Scott in non-recurring roles. Sometimes things just click. Tom Meltzer

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The trailer didn't look promising – Waspy blonde gets sent to the slammer where she learns how hard life is for poor black people – but this comedy-drama is finely balanced, funny, sharp and easy to love. It takes the usual prison TV tropes of bent screws, lesbian affairs, claustrophobic pettiness and racial divides, and makes them seem fresh, skewing our perspectives in unexpected ways. It's also a delight to have a show that not only passes the Bechdel test but goes straight to the top of the league table, telling the stories of a broad variety of women's lives without ever feeling tokenistic. I devoured all 13 episodes in a weekend; thankfully a second season is due next year. Rebecca Nicholson