I’m bad at TV. I never actually watch anything unless it’s on DVD or Netflix. When I start watching something, it’s typically after the excitement’s died down and everyone on the internet has stopped talking about it. I never watch anything as it airs, and yet, somehow this year, I caught two shows whose episodes aired in 2014. That has to be a fluke. Never again.

I’ve written about Hannibal before, though not in a particularly good way. I liked the first season quite a bit, and watched the second season on Hulu a night or two after each episode aired, and I’m really impressed by how much Bryan Fuller and his team cranked everything up and pretty much threw out the typical procedural structure that the first season followed. Jack Thompson’s FBI team still goes after the occasional serial killer, yes, but that’s pushed to the background as Hannibal starts to become more and more of a terrible, manipulative villain. And with Will, oblivious through most of the first season, now onto him, the show starts becoming a bizarre game of chess between the two, coming down to the downright comic book idea of them sending other killers after each other.

That’s something I don’t think I dug too deeply into last year, but this show is operating on such a unique, theatrical level. It’s gothic opera, theatre grotesque, it’s turned more into a dark fantasy show rather than a realistic crime drama. Those elements were all there in the first season, especially the crime scenes which more resembled art installations, but season two just turned up the volume and threw restraint out the window in a way that’s really impressive. The violence gets even more grotesque too, with lots of awful things I won’t be forgetting any time soon and one crazy, incredible fight that wouldn‘t be out of place in the Raid 2.

Another element they turned up was the more romantic aspect of Will and Hannibal’s relationship. Fans throughout the first season ran off with any suggestion of the two being romantically involved, something I didn’t see at all and thought was just kind of ridiculous and, well, wrong due to Hannibal‘s abusive manipulations. But the second season threw subtext out the window and gave those fans the eroticism they wanted to see between those two, which, to me, is a pretty ballsy move and an example of the show knowing its audience.

And then there’s Michael Pitt’s unhinged performance as Mason Verger, the one person who truly gets under Hannibal’s skin. Oh man. In a show full of great actors, he outperforms everyone else. It’s a shame he’s not returning for season 3, it really is. His replacement has big shoes to fill.

The other show I watched, and which I dedicated the bulk of my TV binging to, was Person of Interest. I’d never heard of it before Tucker Stone and Sean Witzke started bringing it up on their podcast Travis Bickle on the Riviera, and I think it started popping up a little more in my feeds after that. The only people I personally know who actually watch it are one good friend of mine in Indiana and my parents. Which is weird.

I watched all three seasons this year, and the entire time I’ve been trying to figure out how to describe it to people. The best I can come up with is that it feels like a really good action comic written by Warren Ellis. There are shades of Global Frequency in there for sure, and it pulls heavily from other great sci fi works like the Terminator movies and Neuromancer. The show was created by Jonathan Nolan, you know, younger brother of Christopher Nolan and writer/co-writer for most of his films? Which is why I don’t get how the show isn’t more popular among people I know. I guess because it isn’t as obviously nerdy as shows with rabid fanbases are.

I mean, at first glance it doesn’t look like much. It follows a largely episodic structure with a weird yet prescient premise involving an NSA-developed Machine that spies on us all the time (and the show started airing BEFORE we learned about PRISM). It doesn’t really have the pedigree of a Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones, it‘s definitely much more like a standard network show. And yet, working within that structure of being another CSI or 24-esque “dad show,” it’s so weirdly subversive and is the best work of modern cyberpunk I’ve ever come across.

The show also manages to avoid getting on my nerves the way a lot of inherently geeky sci-fi shows do, especially those that Joss Whedon’s name gets attached to. One of the leads, Michael Emmerson as Harold Finch, is an expert computer programmer and hacker, the man who built the Machine itself. But he isn’t depicted as some fast-talking nerd with lots of dumb quips and poor social skills, he isn’t depicted the way every hacker in every Hollywood movie is portrayed. He’s very smart, but he doesn’t shove it in people’s faces, he’s compassionate, he’s kind of the heart and soul of the show. And then there’s Jim Caviezel as John Reece, the man in the suit with the gun, ex-special forces killer. Gravely voice, not too talkative or emotional, a pro who gets the job done, whatever that may entail. I was hooked from the first episode when he walked out into traffic wearing a ski mask (which had me thinking of Diabolik), firing a grenade launcher at an oncoming vehicle. As much as I love these two, it’s their female counterparts Root and Shaw who steal the show and make them look like they aren’t even trying. Especially Root, the sociopathic hacker who spends much of the second season referring to the Machine as God before becoming the one person who can communicate directly with it by making herself a cyborg. Oh, and Detective Fusco is basically a character who wandered off the set of the Wire, and even though he‘s often the comedic relief, he gets some great emotional beats and dirty work too.

Like I said, it’s episodic, yeah, but there’s always another plot weaving its way through single episodes, and that’s where the storytelling and the sci-fi conspiracy theory elements really get to shine and set the show apart from others. A lot of the single episodes are also fun genre riffs, like a Rear Window episode in season one and an episode in the third season where they help an expert art thief pull off one final heist, stuff that I get a kick out of. Throw in some great action scenes, appearances by cool character actors, and some excellent music choices (Radiohead, Unkle, Johnny Cash, Nina Simone) and it’s everything I want from this kind of show.

I still don’t think I did a good job here explaining it, but really, if you like good shootouts, stone-faced killers, government cover-ups, and cyberpunk craziness, you’ll enjoy Person of Interest, trust me.