NCIS, season 12

The season's long thread is Sergei Mishnev, a Russian with a sniper's patience and a private grievance against Gibbs, working the edges of cases until his message becomes explicit: he is recreating the past, and the past he likes best is a rifle and someone Gibbs cares for. Mid-winter he takes Diane Sterling - ex-wife to both Gibbs and Fornell, the franchise's best recurring spark - with a rooftop shot staged deliberately as Kate's, and the back half of the year is Fornell coming apart and Gibbs hunting with the door of his temper open.

The account closes in the snow, Gibbs declining to make it look like anything other than what it is.

Around the hunt, the year runs the team's middle-age files: Bishop's marriage fraying toward its end, DiNozzo senior and junior perfecting their double act, and a back-half case - a child hacker feeding a terror network called The Calling - that ends the season abroad: Gibbs, on a boat in Iraq, shot twice by the boy he tried to talk down, the finale cutting out on his body and the question of what comes back from that table.