8. Sons of Anarchy:The Sopranos is still a TV force, as evidenced by the crime family setup of this typically hard-edged new FX series. But the biker club element proved to be a potent genre tweak, and creator Kurt Sutter’s many tense character dynamics — revolving mostly around the tug of war between Katey Sagal’s knife’s-edged matriarch, on a mission to preserve the gang’s outlaw exclusivity, and the grown son (Charlie Hunnam) who senses a way to avoid counterculture oblivion – made for drama that was high in octane and low on exhaust sputter.
9. The Wendy Williams Show: The trial run last summer of the sassy and statuesque East Coast DJ’s tawk-and-gawsip hour was unpredictably fun, a salon confab whose lack of A-through-C-list guests seemed irrelevant when the host herself — a gleeful, intuitive and cheeky rumor analyst — was the main attraction. You can pretend her skills and topics of interest are somehow of lesser worth than what you get from opinion-mongering cable news hours, but you’d be kidding yourself.
10. Cranford: Gossip was also an integral element of this brisk and affecting BBC miniseries, a cleverly woven adaptation of 19th-century English writer Elizabeth Gaskell’s stories about the plucky solidarity among eccentric village women. What prevented this from being another stuffy exercise in costume porn and spinster charm, however, were its keenly observed sense of how people’s notions of charity inevitably evoke their class, its incredibly human performances — from Eileen Atkins, especially — and its unsentimental but never unemotional attitude toward mortality.
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