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We Got This Covered’s Top 10 TV Shows Of 2013

2013 was a great year for television. The exact same thing was said about 2012 when we kicked off last year’s “Best of” list, so maybe we’re passed the point of having to openly state that TV’s been pretty freaking awesome for a while now. It’s been so good for so long now, critics now spend less time arguing for TV’s place at the artistic big kids table, and more time figuring out what exactly we’ll be calling the last decade-plus of boobtube brilliance years from now. Golden Age, Silver Age, Digital Age –however you put it, the most notable problem plaguing TV lovers these days isn’t finding something good to watch, it’s finding enough hours in the day to try and just keep up with all the shows worth watching.

[h2]5) Veep[/h2]

Veep

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Smart political comedies are a rarity these days. Not that they were ever in particular abundance. But with modern politics getting ever more rancorous and divided, Veep somehow manages to skewer the political establishment without tipping its hand as to a partisan agenda. Julia Louis-Dreyfus continued to absolutely kill it as Vice President Selina Meyer in the show’s second season, doing what was arguably the best acting of her career, and certainly some of the best comedic acting of the year. Unlike some of her other Seinfeld alumni, Louis-Dreyfus has managed to escape the shadow of that show and really prove herself a tremendous comedic talent no matter what project she lands on.

She didn’t do it by herself, though. Rather, she was surrounded by a tremendously talented ensemble cast and given and buoyed by creative direction of Armando Iannucci, who proved himself previously with the U.K. series The Thick of It and its tremendously funny spin-off movie In the Loop. Iannucci has become a master of a specific type of rapid-fire, bone-cuttingly sharp dialogue that goes by so fast it’s likely to leave viewers breathless. It often manifests as a series of back-and-forth putdowns between the show’s characters, but somehow in between all the insults there is some really on-point political satire as well.

Veep is a treasure for jaded cynics on both the left of the right of the political spectrum, and really, aren’t we all jaded cynics at this point? At a time when the Congressional approval rating is literally lower than that of hemorrhoids and toenail fungus, the mean-spirited opportunists of Veep seem all too believable. If the show weren’t so damned funny, it would be awfully depressing. As it continues on into its third season, it will be interesting to see what new ignominies Veep’s writers can heap upon Selina Meyer to keep things fresh.