And that's a wrap: Television we loved in 2013

They’re gone – all the best premium cable shows. Seasons have ended or are on mid-season break. But when will they be back?

By HANNAH BROWN
The cast of Homeland 370 (photo credit: Reuters)
The cast of Homeland 370
(photo credit: Reuters)
They’re gone – all the best premium cable shows. Seasons have ended or are on mid-season break. But when will they be back? And what is there to watch in the meantime? Some of the shows are gone for good, like Dexter and Breaking Bad.
Others, such as Homeland and Ray Donovan, have finished their seasons. A few are on a mid-season or holiday hiatus. The Good Wife, which just presented its 100th episode, will be back in early January (and is broadcast here on YES Drama and YES V.O.D.) with two episodes. Against the odds, The Good Wife has come back from some dramatic missteps in the fourth season (Kalinda’s husband, the British drug dealer, was an unusually lame plotline) to have one of its best seasons yet.
Alicia (Juliana Margulies) is the wife of the disgraced Illinois state’s attorney, now Illinois governor (Chris Noth). She found herself when she went back to practicing law. This season has mostly been about how comfortable Alicia has gotten as a power broker herself, leaving the law firm she worked at and starting her own with younger colleagues. That’s made for a lot of interesting warfare, and the show continues to include cases that focus on new, hi-tech legal issues that add spice (one of the firm’s top clients is the mogul of a company based on Google).
Scandal, the show that stars Kerry Washington as the most gorgeous fixer in the history of Washington, is in its third season, and HOT will be broadcasting new episodes on HOT 3 and HOT V.O.D. starting January 7.
The Walking Dead, everyone’s favorite zombie apocalypse series, will be back on February 9. This season – its fourth – has drawn mixed reviews. Much of the season focused on a plague at the prison and a mysterious traitor among the group’s ranks, but there was little here that ranked with the nailbiting suspense of previous seasons. A plotline involving the Governor (David Morrissey) bonding with a family he meets on the road was more intriguing. The mid-season finale involved a pitched battle for control of the prison, and the last few episodes will follow the survivors as they regroup. Something important must change because Season 5 will open as the survivors head for Washington, DC.
The second season of House of Cards, the story of a cynical US senator (Kevin Spacey) and his cynical colleagues, friends and family, will be released on Valentine’s Day on Netflix. As was the case with the first season, the entire season will go online at once, and YES Oh will start broadcasting it one episode at a time.
Another one of the new Netflix original series, Orange Is the New Black, which is broadcast here on HOT, ended on quite a cliffhanger, but there is no date set for the new season, which will be broadcast some time in 2014.
Although critics loved it, the show was overlooked at the Emmys and only received a single Golden Globe nomination, for Taylor Schilling in the lead role as a middle-class white woman who goes to prison for a drug crime she committed years before. That’s a shame because it has one of the strongest ensemble casts ever seen on television and some of the best writing as well.
No one knows when we’ll see the next season of Mad Men either, although Don Draper and company will be back in 2014 for the show’s final season, which will bring the characters into the 1970s.
The Channel 1 series The True Story will return on January 12 at 9 p.m. with the program “You, Me and the Next War,” directed by Yossi Ashdot. It’s about general Doron Rubin, who was a celebrated military colleague of Ehud Barak.
When he left the army and went into business, he accumulated debts and eventually headed off to live in Latin America. The True Story is known for its well-researched, hard hitting documentaries.