From the rise of original Netflix series to the return of cable favorites like Game of Thrones, there was plenty of good television to go around in 2013. If anything, there's been so much to see on network, cable and online channels that the real challenge has been figuring out not just which shows to make time for, but how and where to watch them. With that in mind, here's our list of the series that surprised, excited and amused us the most this year, with a handy guide on where to download, buy or stream them from the comfort of your own computer. The Returned Where you can watch it: Available for purchase on Amazon Instant Video and iTunes, DVD and Blu-Ray (Jan. 21). Forget The Walking Dead – and every vampire show on the air, while you’re at it. The best undead show of 2013 is The Returned, a French drama where a handful of the dead return in a small alpine town – not as grim specters but as the people they used to be. On its face, the show is a mystery: Why did this motley crew of adults and children come back? Why don’t they remember what happened? Why does the electricity keep going out? Why is the water level at the local reservoir dropping, and what lies beneath? Rather than focusing on supernatural conspiracy, however, The Returned is more interested in the impact of the resurrections than their origin. After all, would knowing why make it any less painful for the woman who was preparing to remarry until her dead former fiancé came knocking at her door? Or the girl who learned to live without her twin sister – only to find a mirror image of her younger adolescent self return in the flesh? If you’re looking for gore or monsters jumping out of closets, however, look elsewhere. This show isn’t the zombie that suddenly grabs you in a darkened room; it’s the unsettling dream where a lost loved one suddenly comes back to life, and it's the gutted space that opens up inside you when you wake to find them gone again. Zombie dramas typically ask us to imagine a world where the resurrection of loved ones is a horror rather than a miracle. The Returned asks the same question, not by changing people into monsters but by bringing them back in a world that has already buried them and moved on. For them -- and their families -- returning from the grave is at best a painful adjustment, and at worst a trauma as irreconcilable and terrible as any death. —Laura Hudson

Veep Where you can watch it: HBO Go, available for purchase on iTunes Going into Season 2 of Veep, it was hard not to feel a little nervous, like heading to a second date. The first season was so surprisingly hilarious – crammed with droll humor and excellent performances – that the cynical part of you was simply waiting for the other shoe to drop. How could this kind of magic last? By the end of Season 2, it was the kind of show you wanted to marry. When we returned to the offices of acid-tongued vice president Selina (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), she was facing down the midterm elections and ended with her embarking on her own presidential run, but Veep isn't really about the story; it's about political satire. Show creator Armando Iannucci created a political palette so agile and party-agnostic that it can take any Beltway blunder – tweet faux pas, televised interview lies – and turn it into a throw-away joke or an entire storyline. The bulk of the laughs still come from Louis-Dreyfus – who else could deliver "I hate impeachments, so '90s" with the same punch? -- whose character is poised to embark on the road to becoming POTUS in Season 3. The campaign trail for this dark-and-twisted Parks & Recreation is going to be one hell of a ride. —Angela Watercutter

Breaking Bad Where to watch it: Final season available for purchase on iTunes and Amazon; early seasons streaming on Netflix. Much like Jesse’s metaphorical wooden box from shop class, Breaking Bad has always felt like a work of careful, deliberate craftsmanship. But as the end of the series approached and fan anticipation built to a fever pitch, it was hard not to wonder whether Vince Gilligan’s unlikely tale of a chem teacher turned meth cook could really stick the landing. We need not have worried. The final six episodes were relentless -- opening on Hank’s world-shaking revelation about Walt, and hurtling at breakneck speed until the final moment when the camera drifted skyward. Darker and more painful than anything that came before, this was a show determined to deliver in its final stretch, not just on the epic confrontations we’d waited years to see but the unexpected twists that kept our jaws dropping episode after episode. Ultimately a story about the cost of greed and glory, the show's greatest trick was how gradually it transformed Walt down from mild-mannered suburban dad to cold-blooded killer – from beige to blue -- and how many of us he kept on his side along the way. It wasn’t a happy ending, really; but then, that’s not what we signed up for when we started watching a series about a terminally ill, increasingly megalomaniacal drug manufacturer. Much like Heisenberg himself, Breaking Bad wasn’t particularly nice, but it was addictive and often brilliant -- the sort of show that will stick to the insides of our minds for years to come. --Laura Hudson

Dads Just kidding.

Game of Thrones Where to watch: HBO On Demand, DVD (February 18). Spoilers follow. Transforming a beloved work of fiction into a new format is tricky business, especially when what's essential about the original work so often gets lost in the process. HBO’s Game of Thrones is the exception to the rule: that rare adaptation that not only retains the best qualities of the original, but improves it. While the first two years of the show hewed very close to the source material, this was the season where it started improvising -- and rather than going off the rails, came into its own. Where the novels are limited to the perspectives of only a handful of characters, the television show offers fans admittance into scenes where the lack of point-of-view characters would never have permitted them: the battle of wits between those two shadowy titans of intrigue, Littlefinger and Varys; the showdown between worthy opponents of Lady Olenna and Lord Tywin; and last but never least, the true political genius of Margaery Tyrell and the inner workings of her relationships with Joffrey and Cersei. Showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have a gift for knowing when to flatten the complex backstory into slightly neater accordion folds, and when to unpack the simpler characters and moments of the series into more well-rounded shapes. They also offer the best hope for correcting the two greatest flaws of Martin’s writing: lateness and sprawl. The show's relatively quick pace leaves little leeway for Martin’s recent one-book-every-five-years schedule. But if we’re lucky, Benioff and Weiss may find a way not only to transform the 1700+ pages of the last two books into a tighter, more focused story, but to make the dreams of every Song of Ice and Fire fan come true and finally show us how it all ends. (Dragons? Please say dragons.) —Laura Hudson

The Wrong Mans Where you can watch it: Hulu On first glance, The Wrong Mans could be dismissed as something unoriginal. Certainly, the central conceit of the six-part British comedy series is familiar: an ordinary man in the wrong place at the wrong times gets drawn into an increasingly labyrinthine, ridiculous web of intrigue, murder and mystery. What makes The Wrong Mans worth paying attention to, then, isn't the plot but the execution. In many ways -- in the best ways -- the closest comparison is to Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright's Cornetto Trilogy; like those three movies, The Wrong Mans balances knowing winks and meta-commentary on the genre it's working within with a genuineness and honesty that lifts it above simple parody. If you've ever wished that someone would make a Hot Fuzz or Shawn of the Dead for Alfred Hitchcock movies, then, congratulations: It exists, it's three hours long and available on Hulu in six half-hour chunks. The Cornetto comparison goes beyond sharing the intelligence and humor of the Pegg/Wright material. The on-screen double act of Matthew Baynton and James Corden (who co-created and co-wrote the series with Tom Basden) is akin to that of Pegg and Nick Frost at times, if perhaps more prone to sentimentality instead of snarky one-liners. Like all the best thrillers, when you watch the show, you quickly realize that the only people that can be trusted are the two core characters; everyone else's motives are suspect and everyone might be in on the conspiracy, or a conspiracy. What may have looked like a retread of an well-traveled path at the beginning quickly turns into a riotously funny, surprisingly nail-biting journey that should put anyone making thrillers for American television on notice: Watch The Wrong Mans and realize just how far the bar has been raised —Graeme McMillan

Orange Is the New Black Where you can watch it: Netflix Over the last year, Netflix moved hard and fast into the original-programming business, letting its customers binge-watch not just past seasons of network TV, but new, exclusive-to-Netflix series like House of Cards and the final season of Arrested Development. Although those two original series may have earned the lion's share of the buzz, no new series impressed quite like prison drama Orange Is the New Black, produced by Jenji Kohan of Weeds. Kohan has described Orange Is the New Black as a Trojan horse, a way to tell stories about characters who rarely end up featured on screen. OITNB's protagonist, Piper Chapman (modeled loosely on Piper Kerman), is a upper-middle-class white woman, sent to prison for a drug crime committed ten years ago at the behest of her then-girlfriend, played by Laura Prepon of That '70s Show. Chapman is our vehicle into the prison, where her narrative frames the lives and perspectives of a diverse cast of fellow inmates, addressing race, class, gender, and sexuality -- and their intersections with the criminal justice system -- with remarkable frankness. Kate Mulgrew (Star Trek: Voyager's Captain Janeway) as middle-aged Russian mobster Galina "Red" Reznikov, and Uzo Aduba as Suzanne "Crazy Eyes" Warren, a mentally ill woman briefly bent on winning Piper's affections, deserve particular praise, but there's not a single actor who's less than stellar. Even minor players leave indelible impressions, from Constance Shulman as the nervously Zen "Yoga" Jones, to Danielle Brooks as Tasha "Taystee" Jefferson, the prison's boisterous inmate librarian. An overwhelmingly female ensemble is a natural byproduct of a show set in a women's prison, but it's exceptionally rare to see one with such representative breadth. In any story whose protagonists are prisoners, the good guy/bad guy line can be blurry, and Orange Is the New Black occupies its significant gray areas with relish: even the antagonists, like corrupt prison guard George "Pornstache" Mendez and violent evangelist Tiffany "Pennsatucky" Doggett, are consistently portrayed with nuance and compassion. There's a singular challenge and satisfaction to media that forces viewers to identify with and relate to figures they'd normally overlook, revile, or dismiss. Orange Is the New Black is valuable not only for what it slips onto your screen—but for what it'll introduce to, and bring to the surface in you. —Rachel Edidin

Masters of Sex Where to watch it: Showtime The phrase "smart and sexy" gets thrown around a lot, but rarely has it been so accurate a description for a show. A period drama about pioneering sex researchers Dr. William Masters and Virginia Johnston, Masters of Sex is a chronicle not only of their historic scientific work, but our culture’s profoundly dysfunctional relationship with sexuality. Perhaps the most remarkable thing we learn about the experiments of Masters and Johnston is how afraid scientists were, even 50 years ago, to investigate the biology behind one of the most important human impulses. Over and over, the show demonstrates the harm and confusion this the veil of ignorance does to people of both genders – but especially to women, who end up trapped between the Catch-22 of male desire and slut shaming. Thank goodness for Virginia Johnston (Lizzie Caplan), the ambitious single mom who transforms herself from secretary to revolutionary research assistant and confounds the men who keep trying to turn her into a fantasy by insisting on being a person instead. One of those men happens to be her boss, the socially awkward Dr. Masters (Michael Sheen); despite his interest in unraveling the science of sex, Masters -- like much of the country heading into the '60s -- remains a product of his era’s repressed attitudes, even as he tries to break free of them. Although much like Mad Men, the show often seems designed to make us laugh or shudder at the outdated attitudes on display, considering that abstinence-only sexual education is still a real thing in 2013, Masters of Sex also serves as a useful reminder of how much further we have to go before we can truly claim that they are in our past. --Laura Hudson

Doctor Who's 50th Anniversary Where you can watch it: For purchase on Amazon Instant Video and iTunes After a seventh season that was, at best, uneven, fan expectations for the 50th anniversary of the BBC's science-fiction series Doctor Who were cautiously optimistic at best. In recent years, the show had become increasingly mired in its own mythology and sentimentality, the common wisdom went, so the notion of Who managing to offer up a special episode that wasn't continuity-heavy or overly filled with fan service seemed an unlikely one at best. They needn't have worried. "The Day of the Doctor," November's one-off special, managed to not only fulfill expectations in terms of scope and importance to the show's mythology -- finally revealing a piece of the Doctor's history that has been speculated upon, but never seen, since the show was revived in 2005 -- but surpass them, offering up something that acted as much as reaffirmation of who the Doctor is, and what makes him different from other pop culture heroes. Epic, smart and beautifully kind, "The Day of the Doctor" was, fittingly, the best Doctor Who has been in years. The episode was historic in more than just its celebratory intentions, however. It was aired simultaneously across almost 100 countries in multiple languages, the result of much planning by the BBC, with U.K. screenings also including a 3-D component visible outside of that country via cinema screenings in the U.S. and elsewhere. Even if the episode had ended up a letdown in terms of story, it still would have counted as a technical triumph for the practical considerations necessary to make everything work as well as it did. Since its revival almost a decade ago, Doctor Who has become an important part of the BBC's international outreach efforts. The various components of the 50th anniversary reminded us of why that is -- the universal appeal of the character and the storytelling, as well as the ambition of all those involved -- while also demonstrating the series' ability to continue to change and evolve like its lead character. All golden anniversaries should be this impressive. —Graeme McMillan

Gravity Falls Where you can watch it: For purchase on DVD; some episodes and clips are available on the Disney Channel website Welcome to Gravity Falls, Oregon, where secrets hide behind every door, a mechanical monster lurks under the surface of the lake -- and your sister's new boyfriend just might be a Voltron-style stack of gnomes. Gravity Falls is the story of a pair of 12-year-old fraternal twins sent to live with their grumpy great uncle, who runs a roadside attraction in a town where nothing is quite as it seems. Think of it as a sort of Twin Peaks for the tween crowd: besides the superficial similarities (and some points of clear homage, like a restaurant modeled after Twin Peaks' notorious red room), Gravity Falls shares Twin Peaks' predilection for low-key absurdity, subtle foreshadowing and slow builds -- and harbors plenty of Easter eggs and hints for the discerning viewer, from backwards recordings in the opening theme, to ciphers and symbols hidden within episodes. It's also one of the recent explosion in creator-driven cartoons, rising alongside shows like Cartoon Network's Adventure Time and Regular Show, and Nickelodeon's Sanjay and Craig. Gravity Falls is the brainchild of writer and animator Alex Hirsch, who also voices several characters on the show (Dipper and Mabel Pines, the main characters, are based on Hirsch and his twin sister Ariel). The first 20-episode season ended with a jaw-dropping cliffhanger on August 2, and it's been renewed for a second, to come in 2014. Most episodes of Gravity Falls function on two levels: single-episode stories nested within the longer plot of Dipper investigating the secrets of Gravity Falls as the Pines family tries to protect the Mystery Shack from sinister pint-sized televangelist 'Lil Gideon. The one-offs, which highlight the gleefully weird are great—funny, fun, age-appropriately scary, and heartwarming without getting sappy. But the long game is where Gravity Falls stands out. It's got enough slapstick and fast-moving gags to keep young kids entertained, but the long-view writing and intricately assembled world are irresistibly engaging, with a reach beyond the show itself. In a town -- and show -- where every character is more than he seems, everything becomes a mystery ripe for solving. —Rachel Edidin