Bryan Cranston - "Walter White", Breaking Bad
Hugh Dancy - "Will Graham", Hannibal
Jon Hamm - "Don Draper", Mad Men
Peter Krause - "Adam Braverman", Parenthood
Damian Lewis - "Nicholas Brody", Homeland
Clarke Peters - "Albert Lambreaux", Treme
Matthew Rhys - "Phillip Jennings", The Americans
In each successive season of Breaking Bad, Walt's adversaries feel less like villains and more like markers on an irreversible path away from his humanity. Sometimes I find the show hard to watch because Cranston lays the grasping core of Walt's boundless ambition so bare. He makes the journey into nihilism feel unnervingly fearless. Dancy's work is intensely physical, but restrained - he looks like he feels Will's hauntedness in his bones, like it's eating away at him from the inside out. In past seasons, I've been impressed with the way Jon Hamm marks differences between Dick Whitman and Don Draper. Here, the circumstances of life conspired to create situations where he couldn't stop Dick from showing through Don's cracks, and Hamm made that dissembling a disconcerting facet of this season. The maximum is supposed to be six, but I couldn't choose between Krause and Peters so I just put both. They're characters on different sides of a cancer diagnosis, and both have some king-of-my-castle, control freak tendencies. Adam tries to hold it together and be supportive as a spouse in a situation without a playbook, and Albert copes with an illness that threatens to derail his hard-won authority while he refuses to relinquish the stubborn energy that makes it feel like he will outlive everyone. Lewis holds different Brodies all together in one man, not only shrouding his intent but showing how at sea he is in trying to figure out which has primacy. Rhys presents a bit of a contradiction, as a spy whose heart constantly threatens to appear ever-stronger on his sleeve, then overwhelm his mission.
Honorable Mentions: Andre Braugher, Last Resort; Steve Buscemi, Boardwalk Empire; Jonny Lee Miller, Elementary; Timothy Olyphant, Justified; Wendell Pierce, Treme; Kevin Spacey, House of Cards
I wouldn't be surprised to see: Kevin Bacon, The Following; Hugh Bonneville, Downton Abbey; Michael Chiklis, Vegas; Jeff Daniels, The Newsroom; Michael Emerson, Person of Interest; Nathan Fillion, Castle; Kelsey Grammer, Boss; Michael C. Hall, Dexter; Jeremy Irons, The Borgias; Andrew Lincoln, The Walking Dead; William H. Macy, Shameless; Eric McCormack, Perception; Jeremy Piven, Mr. Selfridge; Dennis Quaid, Vegas; Tom Selleck, Blue Bloods; Aden Young, Rectify
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