NEW YORK — Even after all these years, TV in 2013 continued to surprise us.
What a fine surprise was “The Returned,” a French-language zombie series aired by Sundance Channel. And Tatiana Maslany was startling in BBC America’s eerie series “Orphan Black,” in which she played nearly a dozen varied clones of her main character.
It was a year that shocked “Glee” fans with the death of cast favorite Cory Monteith, whose passing was marked in a surprisingly sappy memorial episode of the Fox series that, in the words of one character, aimed to avoid making “a self-serving spectacle of our own sadness” — then went on to do just that.
It was a year that saw once hard-hitting “60 Minutes” go soft, and worse, get sloppy, with a story on last year’s attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, based on a professed witness whose account soon unraveled. The story’s collapse led to CBS ordering “60 Minutes” correspondent Lara Logan and her producer to take a leave of absence, and left the newsmagazine’s glorious reputation besmirched.
It’s difficult, perhaps even a fool’s mission, to isolate the Top 10 (well, actually 11) programs from the rest that aired during 2013. But, in the order of their air dates, here’s trying: