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The holidays bring many great tidings to us, no matter what your religious beliefs. If, however, what matters is some great heaping of pop culture at this time of year, all the boob tube can offer you is a lot of marathons, of holiday movies, of episodes of "The Twilight Zone", and of other not-so-awesome programming. Let's take a last look, then, at some of the best television shows of the last 10 years. It won't be the same as actually watching these shows, but reliving the memories isn't such a bad thing, especially at this time of year. I know I may have caused some anger - at the very least, I'm sure there's a difference of opinion - but if you can stomach it, we'll soon go through my picks for the top five TV shows of the past decade.

This is my last Best Of The Decade list, as I've already covered movies, and I've unfortunately not read enough new books or listened to enough relatively new CDs (though if I had to highlight any books or music, I'd mention "Pictures at a Revolution" by Mark Harris, the latter chapters of the Harry Potter series, "Funeral" by Arcade Fire, and "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" by Wilco) to make two top ten lists. Last week, I mentioned my list of honorable mentions of TV shows; for a quick refresher on the bottom half of the list, my choices for 10-6 were "Friday Night Lights", "Veronica Mars", "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart", "Mad Men", and the British and American versions of "The Office." Let's get to the rest of my list.

5. Battlestar Galactica
It took me a long time to get into this re-imagining of the 1970s science-fiction series of the same name. The four-hour miniseries, which serves as some kind of prologue to the overall program, was a bit dull, and completely disappointed me. However, with some strong convincing from a family member, and the praise being heaped on it by TV critics such as Alan Sepinwall of the Newark Star-Ledger and Maureen Ryan of the Chicago Tribune, I tried this series out again, right around the time that its final ten episodes were airing. Good thing I did. Much like "Friday Night Lights" isn't really about football, "Battlestar Galactica" isn't really about robots attacking humans. Sure, the main plot of this SciFi Channel series, in which the survivors of a universal attack by manmade robots called Cylons attempt to outrun these villains, is chock full of sci-fi tropes.
Still, the show's developer, Ronald Moore (of "Carnivale" and "Star Trek" fame), was more interested in asking questions about what makes us human, the true meaning of religious faith, the subtle differences between good and evil, and other heady existential issues. There were certainly episodes of "Battlestar Galactica" that were pretty crappy, much like another show further down this list, but when it was good, it was great. Moreover, this show was way more awesome than terrible; what with that, the phenomenal performances from actors such as Edward James Olmos, Mary McDonnell, and James Callis, and technical aspects (the Bear McCreary score is particularly noteworthy), this recently-ended series is, as the humans on the show would say, frakking brilliant.

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