In last week's column I named the first six shows on my annual year-end Best Of list: AMC's "The Walking Dead," PBS' "Downton Abbey," Showtime's "Homeland," CBS' "The Good Wife," ABC's "The Middle" and NBC's "The Voice." Here are the rest, plus eight very deserving runners-up.

As I did at the end of 2011, I'm once again breaking with the traditional format most critics use for their annual Best Of lists by identifying the 12 television programs that most impressed me during the past year.

As much as I think I can keep track of all new digital innovations, it's close to impossible now. There are so many technological advancements that have the potential to upend television as we know it today, as shown by the announcements at last week's TV of Tomorrow conference.

One of the strangest things happened on "Glee" a few weeks ago. Just before McKinley High's sectionals competition, the coach asked a student to lead the team in a prayer. On a show that aims to shock, nothing could have been more unexpected. From day one, the series has been hostile to religion. Christians have been portrayed as hypocritical, repressed, cruel, and unforgiving. (Twice already, the narrative has featured manipulative Christian-themed clubs run by the school's head cheerleader of the moment.)

Following last week's column -- in which I singled out Comedy Central's "Tosh.0," ABC's "General Hospital," AMC's "The Pitch," Syfy's "Face Off" and Me-TV's prime-time presentation of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" as deserving of special recognition -- here are more noteworthy series from 2012 that aren't going to turn up on very many (if any) of this year's Top-10 lists.

We often hear from media industry executives that the rate of industry change is accelerating. This year's On-Screen Media Summit, which took place last week in New York, parsed the areas of change across the on-screen landscape both in and out of home.

Since 2007, the TV industry has been using the so-called C3 metric -- which measures the number of people who watch a show's commercials either live or after three days of DVR playback -- to buy and sell primet-time advertising. Now, with DVR playback constituting a much larger share of the TV audience, most of the big broadcast networks want to change the metric to C7, which would give them credit for commercials viewed a full week after the original airing.

The next few weeks will bring with them a cavalcade of 10-best lists from TV critics across the media landscape. Before all that excitement begins, here is the first installment of my annual year-end look back at shows from the previous twelve months that likely won't turn up in anyone's "Best of" columns, but are nevertheless deserving of special recognition.

OOH measurement has always been problematic until now. What struck me while talking to Pearl Media President / CEO Josh Cohen was the use of new passive technology to provide more accurate passive OOH measurement applications such as NFC (near -field communications) currently being built into smartphones.

When it comes to commercials, does placement matter anymore? That was the first thing I thought of at a key moment during the last episode of AMC's "The Walking Dead," when a series of grisly, gory and grotesquely noisy shots of several walkers hungrily and sloppily feasting on the entrails of an unfortunate hermit was followed by an instant cut to the title card for the show, over which an announcer's voice said, "Brought to you by KFC."