TV review of the year 2013: Why Borgen dominated our living rooms Birgitte Hjort Sørenson as Katrine Fønsmark and Sidse Babett Knudsen as Birgitte Nyborg Christensen All you need is Birgitte and her brains; Katrine and her thrilling teeth; Kasper and his incredible disappearing and reappearing beard. If you've got all that, and all the endlessly ravelled problems of liberal democracy, you've got a show. Or rather, the Danes have got a show. On top of being a small country compared with the UK, Denmark is a small country compared to, say, Australia. Denmark has barely a quarter of the population of Australia. There was a time when Australian Cultural Imperialism dominated the viewing world, as millions of people plugged into the dream by which Kylie Minogue lived next door: a small big attraction from a big small nation. After that, genuinely small nations got the same idea, and now the Danes are taking over the planet. The Aussies might come back. For a while, they had a smartly tailored female prime minister whose brief time in office could serve as a model for a series, although the awkward truth is that she was a dunce, and spoke her first language, English, rather less well than Birgitte speaks it as her second. Australia's current foreign minister, Julie Bishop, might be a better bet: classy, glossy, and easy on the ear. Alas, there is a strike against her. Once, when she was shadow treasurer, she walked off the job, saying it was too hard. Imagine Birgitte doing that. If the heroine of Borgen can drive us to such thoughts, they are nothing beside the mental turmoil induced in the viewer by the heroine of Homeland (Channel 4). Yet another big import to have a season near the start of our year and also at the end, Homeland steadily went so far off form that it set up a new headquarters in the basement. Strangely the effect has been enjoyably mysterious, as you sit there wondering if Brody might have stayed in his cell just to get out of watching Carrie doing her nut. Finally Brody and Carrie got back together and stared deep into one another's eyes; a beneficial event, because it obliged Carrie to keep her head still, instead of flinging it about in a ratty fashion. She is, of course, supposed to be ratty - she's one of those bipolar operatives that intelligence agencies are always putting in key positions - but the grimacing can get tiresome for the viewer. Luckily there was a hilarious five-minute sequence in which Brody was brought back from near death and fully retrained for a mission into the sandy territory of the bad guys. Claire Danes and Damian Lewis in Homeland But with Homeland the Americans once again proved that their big stuff for export, even when it goes bad, has more clout than almost anybody's. Even such medium stuff as The Americans (ITV) was a chastening demonstration of the resources they can bring to a Cold War flashback story about espionage in Washington. Ruthless young female Russian spies used such unfair methods as floating around in their underwear in order to divert clueless FBI officers from the path of rectitude. The atmospherics were so heady with pheromones that it was sometimes hard to notice how good the script was. The year's clearest indication of how much the script can matter was another American import, Masters of Sex (Channel 4). In this gripping story of an inhibited male scientist having his personality released from prison by his gifted female assistant, we would be less gripped if the marvellous actors had nothing interesting to say or do. As things are, the struggles of the sex expert William Masters (Michael Sheen) to say what's on his injured mind are always worth the wait; and his far more liberated colleague Virginia Johnson (Lizzy Caplan) is the very voice of creative, sensitive intelligence, as well as being - the point is relevant - bewitchingly nifty. Masters wondering where to look when Johnson took her clothes off was my Image of the Year. Elisabeth Moss and Jacqueline Joe star in Top of the Lake Photo: BBC Masterminded by the talented Jane Campion, Top of the Lake (BBC Two) was an import from New Zealand. It had wonderful settings but it would have looked underpowered without its American star, Elisabeth Moss from Mad Men. A ghost-ridden import from France, The Returned (Channel 4) tried to look as non-American as possible but might have done better to have admitted outright that its whole concept was in thrall to Twin Peaks. Here in Britain, it seemed that the best hope for a thriller series was to look a bit American if it could. Hence The Fall (BBC Two) roped in Gillian Anderson as its headliner. Alas, the show fell apart under the pressure of its having been unexpectedly renewed for another season: an elementary blunder. With this project as with many others - Broadchurch, Mayday - the impression given was that Britain was trying for an international hit, but didn't know quite how to do it. This stricture, of course, did not apply to the people behind Doctor Who. They continued, in this 50th year of the series, with their plan to take over the universe. In the many countries that screen Borgen, there might be a few attempts to create a local version; but in the many more countries that screen Doctor Who, nobody will try to copy it. Too fruity, too nutty, too British. But in our family it was more common to get a television drama serial out of a boxed set than out of the box. The family was divided by The Borgias: there was a breakaway minority group that thought the show too silly. For the majority group, however, it was must viewing, if only for the heroic efforts Jeremy Irons expended on proving that the dialogue he had been given to speak was not really all that far south of Shakespeare. I myself belonged to both groups: there comes a time in a man's life when he envies the energy even of sheer hokum. Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul in 'Breaking Bad' Photo: AP There could be no quarrel about the status of Breaking Bad, which my younger daughter and I are still binge-watching four episodes at a time. The story is the hero. The actual hero, Walter White, aka Heisenberg, is played by an actor (Bryan Cranston) who deserves praise for his readiness to stand around in his Y-fronts, but who plays almost every scene with his mouth hanging open. So do I nowadays, but I want to see a star performance, not my mirror image. A star beyond doubt, Kevin Spacey helps to make A House of Cards not just good, but sensationally good. Chalk up some points for Britain, because the same story started out as a series made by us, and starring the late, great Ian Richardson. Great but not world famous. Spacey is world famous; and increasingly the world is the target market. But even when our aims were more limited, we turned out some good stuff. I suppose Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon in The Trip (BBC Two, repeated this year) will be found funny anywhere that people know what Michael Caine sounds like: one simply doubts that the Danes will get it. Some of the best one-offs - Victoria Wood's Loving Miss Hatto (which was a highlight of last year's Christmas schedules) was a good example - were focused strictly on us. All the better: the first secret of confident imperialism is to be strong at home. Read: The 10 best TV programmes of 2013