Continued success for shows such as I'm a Celebrity, but many programmes were an extension of established strands
• What was your favourite TV show of 2013? – open thread
This was the year in which television dramas escaped from the box, with House of Cards being screened on-demand only for subscribers to Netflix. But, if Netflix pioneered programmes without a TV set, it was sometimes tempting to suggest that the conventional networks had TV sets without the programmes.
In recent years, it has become common to comment on the retrograde nature of the Christmas schedules. Is it a mark of respect or creative desperation that the shows of Morecambe & Wise and The Two Ronnies are still at the heart of the seasonal schedules three decades after they were made?
This time, though, there is a feeling that the deja vu of late December reflects the trend of the previous 12 months. Almost everything we were seeing had been seen – either directly or indirectly – before.
What had seemed to many to be a tiring franchise after 13 series – I'm a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! – surprisingly achieved record ratings for the country's main commercial channel, which had itself contributed to the backward-looking mood of the schedules by dropping the name ITV1 and returning to the plain ITV, with which it had launched 60 years ago. Bruce Forsyth, who was already 25 when the first adverts appeared on TV, took on a lighter schedule on Strictly Come Dancing, but denied rumours of retirement sparked by a newspaper interview in which he acknowledged that even a healthy 85-year-old is in the final phase of life.
In terms of the health of his talent-show programme, though, the 54-year-old Simon Cowell has more to worry about than Forsyth. Declining ratings for The X Factor did not prevent ITV offering a new contract for that show and Britain's Got Talent until 2016, but Cowell has promised rule changes for next year, when his show will also have endured the lampooning from Harry Hill's Cowell musical, I Can't Sing!, which opens in London in February.
The renewed vitality of I'm a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! seemed to be due to the inclusion of Joey Essex from the reality show The Only Way Is Essex, even though Joey's inability to read a watch, revealed in an early episode, seemed a sign of the TV times to some.
A future chewer of Australian critter genitals in the jungle was surely revealed in Nev Wilshire, the boss of the cold-selling enterprise featured in BBC3's reality series The Call Centre. Nev, whose belief in humour as an inspirational tool seems to be genuine rather than an elaborate David Brent tribute act, was one of the two real-life characters to emerge from the 2013 schedules. The other was Jonny Mitchell, headmaster of Thornhill Community Academy in Dewsbury, who was the star of Educating Yorkshire, the most-noticed Channel 4 series of the year, although even this was at some level a retread, as the format of a school wired with remote-controlled cameras had already been tried in Educating Essex. Unlike most reality TV, however, Educating Yorkshire managed to be both entertaining and informative.
Almost everything else was the extension of an established strand. The most original drama was provided by the sports department, who offered something never previously seen on live TV – a British man winning Wimbledon – during a three hours in which Andy Murray dramatised psychological complexities and nerve-shredding plot-twists beyond the reach of fiction.
The stand-out invented drama of the period – ITV's Broadchurch, occupying eight Mondays between March and May – continued the national obsession with crime stories, although with the twist that this deliberately slow-paced examination of the impact of crime on detectives and victims was set in Dorset rather than Scandinavia and spoken (by David Tennant, Olivia Colman and others) in English rather than a subtitled Nordic tongue. And two crime successes on BBC2 – Top of the Lake and The Fall – also had geographical, rather than generic, distinction, through taking place in New Zealand and Northern Ireland respectively.
Each featured an American actress – Elisabeth Moss and Gillian Anderson – pretending to come from somewhere else, which was probably not a coincidence as potential for American sales remains an important element for British small-screen output.
Even the obligatory annual US hit that British executives wish they had made was, in 2013, not a new show. Breaking Bad, in which a dying chemistry teacher becomes a drug baron, had been running since 2008 on the US cable network AMC and only received widespread attention here on the brink of ending, due to a sudden slew of valedictory reviews in the States describing it as the greatest TV show ever, a title previously held by The Wire or The Sopranos.
The dying days of a character who had already occupied substantial screen time were also the theme of the most talked-about moment of British drama, which underlined the sense of the medium living in the past by forming the culmination of a project that began 24 years ago. David Suchet, after filming all 70 of Agatha Christie's stories about her punctilious Belgian detective, played a death scene in which viewers were able simultaneously to mourn a legendary character, the end of a marathon feat of great character acting, and – if you believe the more strident evangelists for Netflix – perhaps also for a way of watching television: once a week, at a time decided by the broadcasters.
If another actor set out to do a Suchet with another character now, would there even be an ITV in 24 years' time? Or, by then, if the industry can work out a way of making such a system pay, will everyone be watching online at a time of their choice?
However, the fact that this was also the year in which the BBC abandoned its experiment with 3D television – citing a lack of viewer interest – is a reminder that television is unlike telephones: new technological possibilities are not always adopted.
• What was your favourite TV show of 2013? – open thread Reported by guardian.co.uk 5 days ago.
• What was your favourite TV show of 2013? – open thread
This was the year in which television dramas escaped from the box, with House of Cards being screened on-demand only for subscribers to Netflix. But, if Netflix pioneered programmes without a TV set, it was sometimes tempting to suggest that the conventional networks had TV sets without the programmes.
In recent years, it has become common to comment on the retrograde nature of the Christmas schedules. Is it a mark of respect or creative desperation that the shows of Morecambe & Wise and The Two Ronnies are still at the heart of the seasonal schedules three decades after they were made?
This time, though, there is a feeling that the deja vu of late December reflects the trend of the previous 12 months. Almost everything we were seeing had been seen – either directly or indirectly – before.
What had seemed to many to be a tiring franchise after 13 series – I'm a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! – surprisingly achieved record ratings for the country's main commercial channel, which had itself contributed to the backward-looking mood of the schedules by dropping the name ITV1 and returning to the plain ITV, with which it had launched 60 years ago. Bruce Forsyth, who was already 25 when the first adverts appeared on TV, took on a lighter schedule on Strictly Come Dancing, but denied rumours of retirement sparked by a newspaper interview in which he acknowledged that even a healthy 85-year-old is in the final phase of life.
In terms of the health of his talent-show programme, though, the 54-year-old Simon Cowell has more to worry about than Forsyth. Declining ratings for The X Factor did not prevent ITV offering a new contract for that show and Britain's Got Talent until 2016, but Cowell has promised rule changes for next year, when his show will also have endured the lampooning from Harry Hill's Cowell musical, I Can't Sing!, which opens in London in February.
The renewed vitality of I'm a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! seemed to be due to the inclusion of Joey Essex from the reality show The Only Way Is Essex, even though Joey's inability to read a watch, revealed in an early episode, seemed a sign of the TV times to some.
A future chewer of Australian critter genitals in the jungle was surely revealed in Nev Wilshire, the boss of the cold-selling enterprise featured in BBC3's reality series The Call Centre. Nev, whose belief in humour as an inspirational tool seems to be genuine rather than an elaborate David Brent tribute act, was one of the two real-life characters to emerge from the 2013 schedules. The other was Jonny Mitchell, headmaster of Thornhill Community Academy in Dewsbury, who was the star of Educating Yorkshire, the most-noticed Channel 4 series of the year, although even this was at some level a retread, as the format of a school wired with remote-controlled cameras had already been tried in Educating Essex. Unlike most reality TV, however, Educating Yorkshire managed to be both entertaining and informative.
Almost everything else was the extension of an established strand. The most original drama was provided by the sports department, who offered something never previously seen on live TV – a British man winning Wimbledon – during a three hours in which Andy Murray dramatised psychological complexities and nerve-shredding plot-twists beyond the reach of fiction.
The stand-out invented drama of the period – ITV's Broadchurch, occupying eight Mondays between March and May – continued the national obsession with crime stories, although with the twist that this deliberately slow-paced examination of the impact of crime on detectives and victims was set in Dorset rather than Scandinavia and spoken (by David Tennant, Olivia Colman and others) in English rather than a subtitled Nordic tongue. And two crime successes on BBC2 – Top of the Lake and The Fall – also had geographical, rather than generic, distinction, through taking place in New Zealand and Northern Ireland respectively.
Each featured an American actress – Elisabeth Moss and Gillian Anderson – pretending to come from somewhere else, which was probably not a coincidence as potential for American sales remains an important element for British small-screen output.
Even the obligatory annual US hit that British executives wish they had made was, in 2013, not a new show. Breaking Bad, in which a dying chemistry teacher becomes a drug baron, had been running since 2008 on the US cable network AMC and only received widespread attention here on the brink of ending, due to a sudden slew of valedictory reviews in the States describing it as the greatest TV show ever, a title previously held by The Wire or The Sopranos.
The dying days of a character who had already occupied substantial screen time were also the theme of the most talked-about moment of British drama, which underlined the sense of the medium living in the past by forming the culmination of a project that began 24 years ago. David Suchet, after filming all 70 of Agatha Christie's stories about her punctilious Belgian detective, played a death scene in which viewers were able simultaneously to mourn a legendary character, the end of a marathon feat of great character acting, and – if you believe the more strident evangelists for Netflix – perhaps also for a way of watching television: once a week, at a time decided by the broadcasters.
If another actor set out to do a Suchet with another character now, would there even be an ITV in 24 years' time? Or, by then, if the industry can work out a way of making such a system pay, will everyone be watching online at a time of their choice?
However, the fact that this was also the year in which the BBC abandoned its experiment with 3D television – citing a lack of viewer interest – is a reminder that television is unlike telephones: new technological possibilities are not always adopted.
• What was your favourite TV show of 2013? – open thread Reported by guardian.co.uk 5 days ago.