Whether or not you were lucky enough to get Friday off, the holiday weekend following Thanksgiving is a great opportunity to play couch commando with some catch-up TV. But what to watch? With 2014 being a great year for television, the choice can be a bit overwhelming.

But have no fear! Scroll through the gallery for Cult of Mac’s 9 must-watch TV shows to gorge yourself on this weekend. Just remember to get up and take a walk every hour or so.

Photo: NBC

The Leftovers starts with one of the most intriguing high concept ideas for a show since Lost: What would happen if 2 percent of the world’s population — roughly 140 million people — suddenly disappeared without explanation?

Taking place three years after this so-called "Sudden Departure,” The Leftovers has just completed its first season, and been consistently watchable since the beginning. With strong characters and a compelling premise, I can’t recommend this show highly enough.

Photo: Warner Bros. Television

In a world that has experienced Chris Nolan’s Dark Knight series, and with Zack Snyder’s Batman V Superman on the way, it would be fair to ask why we need to see Gotham City make yet another screen appearance. The twist with Gotham, of course, is that this is a world before Batman, in which Bruce Wayne’s parents have just been shot, and the Rogues' Gallery we know and love are still becoming the characters we will know them as.

Gotham is uneven in places, but it’s also got gems of brilliance that make you realize how great this show could become. Speaking personally, I’m a huge Batman fan, but also one that’s incredibly picky about comic book adaptations. And I’m certainly watching Gotham.

Warner Bros. Television

Quite simply, The Walking Dead is a phenomenon. Now in its fifth season, the show’s premise — about a ragtag group of survivors in a post-apocalyptic world filled by flesh-eating zombies — isn’t showing any sign of slowing down.

And with the show’s producer claiming they still have enough ideas to fill seven more seasons? It’s not going away anytime soon.

AMC Studios

The year’s breakout hit, True Detective should be required watching for most everyone. The show tells the story of two Louisiana State Police homicide detectives as they hunt for a serial killer across seventeen years.

While that may sound like something you’ve seen before, not only does True Detective excel as a crime drama, it also incorporates supernatural horror themes: making this the perfect blend of, say, Zodiac and H.P. Lovecraft. And did I mention the superb Matthew McConaughey performance?

Photo: Anonymous Content/HBO

The show that made Benedict Cumberbatch an A-lister, Sherlock is a terrific BBC crime show now having completed three seasons. Adapting the Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes stories, but placing them in modern day London, the show plays out in 90-minute mysteries that work both as self-contained dramas, and The Odd Couple-style comedy.

It’s both brilliant and — at only 9 episodes — not too difficult to catch up on. Start it today and you’ll be finished by Monday!

Photo: BBC

On paper, making a TV show about Hannibal the Cannibal which didn’t feature Sir Anthony Hopkins seemed the worst idea this side of inviting Dr. Lecter to cater for your dinner party. In practice, Hannibal has turned out to be a triumph: with lead actor Mads Mikkelsen delivering a portrayal of the cannibalistic doc that arguably surpasses his iconic predecessor.

As great as the movies Silence of the Lambs and Manhunter are, none of the other adaptations of Thomas Harris’ novels have been particularly great. Hannibal shows us how much life exists in this franchise.

Photo: NBC

Given the complexity of its interweaving storylines and family ties, honestly the only way to watch HBO’s superlative fantasy drama series Game of Thrones if you’ve not seen it before is starting back at episode one. From there, you’ll literally have no choice but to plough through it in a giant butt-numbing marathon.

With four seasons having aired so far, and two more already ordered, you might be hard-pressed to make it through the whole thing before work starts again on Monday, but once you start you’ll definitely give it your best shot.

Photo: HBO

Thanks to a money-hungry decision to split the final season, a la Breaking Bad, the last episodes of Mad Men won’t air until next year. On the plus side, that means this is the perfect time to play catch-up before the world goes Don Draper crazy one last time.

If for some incredible reason you’ve never seen Mad Men before (and how I envy you if that’s the case), the show follows the lives of a few Madison Avenue ad men and women during the 1950s and '60s. We’ve now reached the point of the Apollo 11 moon landing, and things are set for a grand finale.

Photo: HBO

There have been geek comedies I’ve absolutely hated (The Big Bang Theory springs to mind) but Mike Judge’s Silicon Valley hit the mark perfectly. Following the trials and tribulations of a tech startup and its oddball assortment of founders and employees, Silicon Valley skewers a scene that will be immediately recognizable to anyone who has spent time in San Francisco.

Claiming that this could wind up being HBO’s best ever comedy sounds like it’s overdoing it, but in my view Silicon Valley has all the ingredients to become a genuine classic.

Photo: HBO

Everyone knows that a hero is defined by the villains they go up against. Or to put it another way, every great comic book needs an equally great antagonist to truly kick it into high gear.

Scouring through the pages of our favorite print and digital back issues, we've assembled a list of the meanest, the nastiest, and the most compellingly evil four-color baddies to ever walk the face of, well, a flat sheet of paper. We've purposely left out the undisputed greats -- The Joker, Magneto, Lex Luthor, Steve Ballmer -- to make room for a few of the more interesting choices.

Who made the grade? Click through the gallery above to find out.

But while Dini’s animated version of Freeze was good enough to become the standard portrayal of the character in most forms of media, more recently I’ve been loving the reinvention of Mr. Freeze seen in DC’s New 52. (SPOILERS) You see, in this universe it turns out that Nora was never Freeze's wife at all, but rather a woman born in 1943, who was put into cryogenic stasis at the age of 23 after being diagnosed with an incurable heart condition.

Writing his doctoral thesis on Nora, Freeze fell in love with her, and became obsessed with finding a way to bring her back to life. One cryonic chemical accident later, and the already unhinged Dr. Victor Fries is transformed into Mr. Freeze. It’s a clever re-imagining of Freeze’s origin which makes him less sympathetic, but a whole lot creepier.

In a series full of vicious vampires, Vicente takes the (presumably blood-soaked) biscuit: not only torturing, murdering and eating people, but also planning to blow up the Alaskan pipeline — something that would result in a whole lot more slaughter than you’d normally expect from a vamp.

Oh, and his wife Lilith is pretty damn crazy, too.

Post-New 52, Doctor Light has been rethought somewhat, with DC shying away from the more horrific aspects of his character incorporated over the past decade. Why does Doctor Light make this list? Because whatever you thought of Identity Crisis, it marked a high (or low) point for super villain nastiness in comics’ darkest and most nihilistic era.

An artificial intelligence created by the Computer Tyrants of Colu, an alien world which prizes logic and knowledge above all else, Brainiac has an almost indestructible body and a brain that is constantly hungry for knowledge and power. In a long and storied career, he’s perhaps still best known for taking the Kryptonian city of Kandor — one of the last surviving relics of Superman’s home world — and shrinking it down to the size of a bottle.

If I had to choose one, however, it would likely be the series’ premier antagonist, the Saint of Killers. Picture Javier Bardem’s cold-blooded character Anton Chigurh from No Country For Old Men, and then take it up several levels of badass. A grim killing machine charged by God to be a killer for hire, the Saint is a murder machine with a mullet: someone so vicious he even manages to kill (SPOILERS) both God and the Devil.

His tragic backstory (his family were killed, which brought about his fall from grace) just makes him a more interesting, multifaceted character.

In a grisly inversion of Batman’s origin, Black Mask murdered his own super-wealthy parents by burning down their mansion with them inside. Becoming one of Gotham City’s major crime boss players, Black Mask has proven utterly ruthless and totally sadistic. Oh yes, and he once tortured Catwoman's brother-in-law to death with power tools, and then did some horrible things with the remains. Yum yum!

The Governor does far more than that, too — torturing several characters, while killing the daughter of Rick and Lori. The fact that he does this without any apparent sense of remorse just makes him all the more terrifying. On the plus side, he does find himself on the receiving end of a suitably unpleasant death.

Who would have thought that the nastiest character in Robert Kirkman's zombie epic would turn out to be a flesh-and-blood human?

To be extra evil he probably upvoted a few Justin Bieber videos while he was there, too.

Tentative excitement about Michael Bay's upcoming Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie made me revisit the original comics by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird. Along with a refresher course in just how much I love the art and overall tone of that original series was a reminder of what a great villain Shredder can be.

If you’ve only ever seen one of the Turtles cartoon series, be prepared for a wake-up call at the hands of a razor-gauntleted crime syndicate boss who's got his fingers in everything from drug smuggling to assassinations. Far more revenge-minded than in the cartoon, the comic book Shredder is a highly skilled strategist and master of ninjistu. Oh, and he once bounced back from decapitation by being resurrected as a shark. When did the Joker ever manage that?