So. Much. TV. That’s the startling takeaway from this year’s summer lineup, which includes everything from Charles Manson to Kate Winslet camping to another season of Orange Is the New Black. Once upon a time—a simpler time—summer was a doldrums reserved for reruns of your favorite fall shows and crappy fare networks needed to burn off. No more. We surveyed an overwhelming glut of new and returning series hoping to draw you away from the beach this summer and painfully reduced them to 35 shows you should check out. Apologies to your tanning ambitions.
Photo Illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Daily Beast
May 28; 9 pm ET
Sure, most of us are just biding time until David Duchovny returns as Agent Mulder in the breathlessly anticipated reboot of The X-Files next year. But in the meantime, Duchovny will be chasing down a different kind of harrowing creature on NBC’s new miniseries Aquarius: Charles Manson. He’ll play a Los Angeles police officer in hot pursuit of the Helter Skelter cult leader in the days leading up to the murder of Sharon Tate. Adding more intrigue to the project: NBC is taking a page out of the Netflix playbook and releasing all 13 episodes of the series online and on-demand on the day it premieres on NBC. Will the new model work to drum up buzz and ratings for the flailing network? It’s too soon to tell. But the truth is out there. (Heh.)
May 30; 9 pm ET
Do we really need another Marilyn Monroe story? It’s only been four years since Michelle Williams eked an Oscar nomination out of a very questionable performance of the screen siren. Mira Sorvino and Ashley Judd did the whole Norma Jean/Marilyn personal/public life thing about a decade ago. And Smash turned the life of the icon into glorious musical theater camp. Despite Marilyn overload, there’s a certain marriage of story and network that’s undeniable with this four-part miniseries airing on Lifetime. Plus, it has Susan Sarandon on board as Marilyn’s mother and Kelli Garner offering a star-is-born take on the star, as she deals with the mental and emotional frailties she inherited from her mum.
June 1; 8 pm ET
Twelve seasons into its run as what is probably the most consistently entertaining and, as a talent search, most impressive reality TV competition, So You Think You Can Dance is facing the same ratings and buzz woes as its fellow aging brethren in the genre (R.I.P. American Idol). Still, nothing stops the ebullience of this series, its best-in-the-biz host Cat Deeley (when is she getting her Emmy?), and its fleet of jaw-dropping dancers. Having barely landed another season, the series is switching things up this year with a format change—contestants must choose to compete as Team Street or Team Stage—and two new judges joining veteran Nigel Lythgoe at the table: Jason DeRulo (meh) and Paula Abdul (yes yes yes yes yes!).
June 1; 10 pm ET
This series is on our must-see list for one reason, and, kind of one reason only: Lily Rabe. The rising actress (and daughter of Jill Clayburgh and David Rabe) has already proved herself the dramatic secret weapon in a number of New York stage roles and recent TV series, most recently on American Horror Story and The Good Wife. She excels when she’s providing the emotional grounding in otherwise offbeat and eerie universes, which makes The Whispers, a series about a supernatural force that’s manipulating innocent children to act as pawns in its mysterious cause, perfect for her. Spoooooky. Well, kind of. The Steven Spielberg co-produced drama isn’t quite as scary, at least in its pilot, as you want it to be. But it has promise. And Lily Rabe. And creepy kids. So we’re still endorsing it…but with, you might say, a whisper.
June 2; 8 pm ET
The Walking Dead, unsurprisingly, is the most tweeted-about show on television. The runner-up, however, isn’t what you might expect. It’s not Mad Men, which just ended its run, or one of Shondaland’s wildly popular series. It’s an ABC Family soap opera aimed, largely, at tweens: Pretty Little Liars. So what are the youths tweeting about? When the series, which began as a sort of Gossip Girl-meets-murder mystery, premieres its sixth season, the Liars are trapped in a dollhouse, and will spend the first half of the season trying to escape. I don’t know what most of that means, but presumably if I’m on Twitter on June 2, I’ll find out.
June 4; 10 pm ET
Hannibal carries the part-dubious, part-prestigious distinction as the Best Show on TV That No One’s Watching. Now entering its third season on NBC, Hannibal has long shed any skepticism of being yet another attempt at capitalizing on a known brand for lack of an original idea, and instead imbued the familiar tale of Hannibal Lecter with more inventiveness, originality, and macabre psychological intrigue than anyone could’ve predicted. The thriller-horror series is visually stunning, in all of its gorgeous gruesomeness, and boasts an unparalleled acting duet from stars Hugh Dancy and Mads Mikkelsen. Add a slithering performance from Gillian Anderson (yay X-Files!) as Hannibal’s psychiatrist, and you have a criminally underrated series. We should fix the underrated part.
June 5
There’s equal parts thrill and trepidation any time the Wachowski siblings attach themselves to a project. They made The Matrix! Yay! They also made Jupiter Ascending. Horror of horrors. For Sense 8, the duo with the questionable track record is teaming with Netflix for a sci-fi series that centers on eight people from different walks of life from around the world who find themselves suddenly and mysteriously linked physically and emotionally. It’s the kind of trippy, complicated, tangled sci-fi folderol that the Wachowskis were once the reigning rulers in mastering, and the early trailer looks intriguing. But as with everything Wachowski these days: proceed with caution.
June 6; 9 pm ET
Arriving a full season before Empire became the biggest thing TV has seen in a decade, Starz's drama Power played in the tension between the worlds of the rich and famous that its characters live in and the underworld of the international drug trade that they came from—and still have one designer-shoed foot in. The series is from executive producer Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson (lover of all things Hillary Clinton) and Courtney Kemp Agboh, forever a saint to TV fans everywhere for her being a vet of The Good Wife. Following nightclub owner and drug kingpin James "Ghost" St. Patrick, season 2 of the series will chronicle whether he can safely get out of the drug game, which he's been using to float his legitimate business, and more importantly get out alive. The success of Empire has shined a sort-of spotlight on Power, which trades in such similar themes. Will it be among the first shows to coast on the wave of the Fox hit's mammoth success?
June 8
After quiet, yet respectable, success with its first original scripted drama, Girlfriends Guide to Divorce, Bravo is branching out with its first scripted comedy. Odd Mom Out is spectacularly on-brand for the network, lampooning the culture of Upper East Side moms and wives that the network veritably built its reality TV empire on. (Hello, Real Housewives of New York.) The comedy is based on Jill Kargman’s 2007 novel Momzillas, and she plays a satirical version of herself in the series: a Bambi finding her footing—in stilettos, no doubt—among the vicious lionesses stalking the urban jungle of the Upper East Side. Bravo is really pushing the show. Has Sir Andy Cohen ever steered us wrong?
June 12
The smartest of us have already canceled all our plans for the weekend of June 12. There’s still time for the rest of you. No summer series has already drummed up as much excitement as Season 3 of Orange Is the New Black, which is back and ready for binging, an interminable year after its triumphant, award-winning second season solidified the show’s status as TV most original, most essential, and most entertaining offering. Season 3 picks up with last season’s Big Bad, the terrifying Vee (Lorraine Toussaint) having met her demise, the return of Alex (Laura Prepon) to Litchfield, and the introduction of Mary Steenburgen as a key player in a the juicy Pornstache/Daya/Bennett baby-drama triangle. Plus, no more Larry! Christmas in June, folks.
June 18; 8 pm ET
Astronaut Wives Club has had a fraught journey to the screen—it was originally slated to air last summer and was then omitted from ABC’s lineup when it announced its slate for this summer. But the series is finally getting liftoff and, while delays like this typically don’t bode well, its premise is so winning that the show still deserves the benefit of the doubt. As detailed by its title, it focuses on the community of women who supported their husbands during the 1960s space race, and the effect the monumental time in history had on the women who held up the men who made it. JoAnna Garcia Swisher (Reba), Yvonne Strahovski (Chuck), and Odette Annable (Banshee) are among the actresses sporting Betty Draper fashion and, hopefully, Betty Draper complexity in the series.
June 21; 10 pm ET
Dwayne Johnson, née The Rock, has time and again proven his Midas touch when it comes to blockbuster movie franchises. For the first time, he’s harnessing that massive popularity for the small screen, playing a retired football player who finds a second act as a playboy manager in the HBO comedy Ballers. The trailer for the show alone, climaxing with a shot of Johnson’s epically ripped body getting out of bed, explodes with testosterone and inescapable whiffs of Entourage—perhaps not surprising since Mark Wahlberg, who produced that show, is also one of Ballers’s executive producers. That apparent shameless ostentatiousness should be both the appeal and the flaw of Ballers.
June 21; 10:30 pm ET
Completing a summer comedy lineup that’s wayyyy different from the quiet observational comedy of this past winter’s pairing of Girls and Looking is The Brink. Airing after Ballers, the series follows three corrupt politicos—Tim Robbins’s secretary of state, Jack Black’s foreign service officer, and Pablo Schreiber’s Navy fighter pilot—as they weather a geopolitical crisis and attempt to stave off World War III. There’s an interesting thwarting of expectations when it comes to tone here. Rather than play a possible Pakistani military coup as grim, or tense, The Brink is, especially for HBO, surprisingly broad comedy—albeit infused with the network’s trademark dark humor.
June 21; 9 pm ET
Now that Mad Men is off the air, what will legions of critics and TV writers opine and flex their literary muscles about week after week? True Detective Season 2, you’re arriving right on time. The first season of HBO’s neo-noir crime drama was candy for TV obsessives eager to breathlessly analyze the series’ mythology, foreshadowing, and culturally resonant themes. Following the model set by American Horror Story, Season 2 features a new cast, a new setting, and a new story. Colin Farrell, Vince Vaughn, Rachel McAdams, and Taylor Kitsch—possibly the most intriguing TV drama cast ever assembled—are in for Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey. Los Angeles is in for New Orleans. But time, as far as we know, is still a flat circle.
June 24; 10 pm ET
Christian Slater, bless his heart, is a bit of a black widow when it comes to TV. Mind Games, Breaking In, The Forgotten, My Own Worst Enemy: all were one-and-done series that didn’t survive their first seasons. Slater’s giving it the old college try again, this time with USA’s hacker drama Mr. Robot. Questionable title aside, it’s the most intriguing—and certainly timely—premise yet for one of Slater’s series. He’s an anarchist who recruits a brilliant, antisocial young programmer to help bring down corporate America. There’s a slick grittiness to the trailer that should be right at home on USA, and may help break Slater’s unlucky streak.
June 28; 9 pm ET
Humans has a bit of an unusual origin story. It was developed as a co-production between Xbox—yes, the video game console—in the U.S. and Channel 4 in the U.K., but AMC stepped in when Microsoft shuttered Xbox’s original programming studio. Given the discussion of new technologies and distribution platforms, the series’ premise is rather fitting. Starring William Hurt, it’s set in a parallel present where the must-have gadget for households is a highly developed, artificially intelligent robot servant, one that is eerily similar to humans. As the series develops, the lines between human and machine are blurred—and our interest in this provocative series made all the more crystal clear.
June 30; 10 pm ET
“You can’t do a slasher movie as a TV series,” says one of the characters in the trailer for MTV’s small-screen take on Wes Craven’s big-screen cult classic—proving, at the very least, that the new series is going to hew closely to the franchise’s penchant for nailing all the tenets of the horror genre while mocking it at the same time. Given the popularity of American Horror Story, banking on a horror TV series is smart for MTV. Banking on nostalgia is even smarter, given the success the network’s found with its popular TV adaptation of Teen Wolf. Plus, technology has come a long way since Drew Barrymore pleaded for mercy on her giant cordless phone. MTV plans to have fun with that: cyberbullying and a viral YouTube video both play a part in the new Scream’s murder spree.
June 30; 9 pm ET
James Patterson, whose book is the source material for CBS’s big summer thriller Zoo, knows what most of us are thinking—and he wants us to dismiss those thoughts. “People always say the book is better than the movie,” he told reporters at a CBS press event. “In this case, I think the series is going to be better than the book.” How humble! Zoo, from its logline, seems to be The Walking Dead, but with animals. Eek! Animals begin viciously attacking humans across the globe, and as the assaults become more cunning, calculated, and coordinated—and therefore more threatening—the trend is ruled a pandemic and a select group of humans are spearheading the fight to contain it. Among those humans: Bob Benson! The swoonworthy James Wolk (Mad Men, Shameless) plays the renegade zoologist—two words I thought I’d never type in succession—charged with saving the world.
July 8; 10:30 pm ET
Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele—Key & Peele—have used their Comedy Central sketch comedy platform as a springboard to be, well, just about everywhere. The duo had a guest arc on FX’s award-winning drama Fargo. Peele showed up in Children’s Hospital, and will be in Netflix’s upcoming Wet Hot American Summer. Key has popped up on Parks and Recreation, did a voice in The LEGO Movie, is in this weekend’s Tomorrowland blockbuster, and is the funniest part of Pitch Perfect 2. Oh, and he crashed Barack Obama’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner speech. With all that going on, it’s a treat to see them back at home, skewering race, stereotypes, and cultural biases better than anyone else for Season 5 of Key & Peele.
July 8; 9 pm ET
The Spoils of Babylon, the IFC miniseries that aired last year, was so weird most people didn’t know what to make of it. That is until they tuned and discovered that the outrageously campy spoof of those epic, event-style miniseries of the ‘70s—like The Thornbirds—was absolutely hilarious. Perhaps that was to be expected, considering Will Ferrell, a game Tobey Maguire, and Kristen Wiig—who even managed an Emmy nomination alongside the likes of Jessica Lange, Cicely Tyson, and Helena Bonham-Carter for her role—were on board. Wiig and Ferrell are back for the second installment of the franchise, The Spoils Before Dying. This time they’re spoofing murder mysteries and will be joined by Maya Rudolph and Haley Joel Osment. And it will still, if we’re lucky, be really, really weird.
July 9; 10 pm ET
From Game of Thrones to The Walking Dead and every TV drama hoping to capitalize on those fan bases in between, there’s an overabundance of gratuitous and graphic violence on television. And here we have Sundance’s quiet burner of a drama, Rectify, a series very much about grisly crime, but that trades in the spiritual and emotional aftermath of it that lingers, not the bloodbath. The show, at its simplest, is about a man falsely accused of murder who is released from jail and struggling to assimilate back into his community. No series on TV is as confident and meticulous in its measured, patient storytelling—and few are as gripping. Season 2 had more episodes than its first sensational season, allowing more time to get to know the supporting players, a depth that will be explored further in Season 3.
July 12; 10 pm ET
Allison Janney will be back for four episodes in the third season of Masters of Sex. That’s reason enough to tune in to the next installment of Showtime’s series, about the sexual research of Masters and Johnson. Janney’s Emmy-winning performance on the show as a woman who has her sexual awakening after years with a gay and suicidal husband (a similarly wonderful Beau Bridges) is breathtaking in every way. Adding intrigue to the new season is a time jump, from 1961 to 1966, the dawn of the sexual revolution. On top of that Virginia Johnson (Lizzy Caplan) and Bill Masters (Michael Sheen) are now firmly a couple—paired and ready to change the world’s relationship to sex.
July 12; 9 pm ET
Power struggles have always been the hallmark of prestige cable dramas—stemming back to The Sopranos all the way up to Game of Thrones—and no series on TV trades in it as stressfully as Ray Donovan. Now in its third season, the Liev Schreiber-led drama is introducing none other than Katie Holmes (!!!) to the cast as a businesswoman fighting for power in her own family, and who wants to hire Schreiber’s Ray Donovan—kind of a grittier Olivia Pope fixer-type—to help her get it. The series is stacking up the guest stars in its new season: Ian McShane, Cheryl Ladd, Jack Wagner, and Elliot Gould are also on board.
July 13; 10 pm ET
Running Wild With Bear Grylls torpedoed itself on our radar last season when photos of Zac Efron rappelling down a waterfall shirtless on the show leaked to the press. Give this show every Emmy Award. Can anything in Season 2 of the reality series, which has survivalist Grylls carting celebrities out into the wild to live on nothing but the clothes on their back and some bugs for a few days, possibly top that? Kate Winslet, Drew Brees, James Marsden, Kate Hudson, Ed Helms, and Jesse Tyler Ferguson are all on board for the new season, maybe as eclectic a group of celebrities as there comes. And potential for toplessness with that crew: High.
July 15; 10:30 pm ET
TV Land has carved a niche for itself in the original comedy market with series starring sitcom veterans you used to see on the channel (Hot in Cleveland, The Exes, The Soul Man), creating a brand based on nostalgia while still offering something very new. Impastor, however, is quite a divergence from that formula, and an intriguing risk for the network. The logline: A deadbeat is on the run from loan sharks, and to save his ass he steals another man’s identity—only to learn that the man is a small town’s new gay pastor. The potential for comedy is certainly there—fish out of holy water—and it’s refreshing humor, too, that promises to shade TV Land’s otherwise perpetual sunniness.
July 17
Fourteen years after Wet Hot American Summer gathered a Who’s Who of the future stars of comedy—Amy Poehler, Paul Rudd, Elizabeth Banks, Bradley Cooper—for a cult classic about counselors at a summer camp, Netflix is reuniting the original cast, and then some, for an 8-episode reboot. It will be a prequel of sorts to the film, taking place on the first day of camp in 1981, as opposed to the last-day setting of the movie. Kristen Wiig, Jon Hamm, and Chris Pine will join the cast, presumably filling some screentime for some of the busier returning stars. (Bradley Cooper, for example, was only able to shoot a single day of the series.)
July 22; 9 pm ET
There’s a lot to be said for self-awareness, and Syfy, to its credit, seems to have it in spades. The network is leaning in to the punchline of its Sharknado TV movie franchise as campy, hot-mess disasters. In fact, it’s becoming the whole entertaining point of them. The fabulously titled Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! stars a hilarious roster of D-listers and has-beens—Tara Reid, Ian Ziering, David Hasselhoff, and Frankie Muniz, to name a few—and, one actually hopes at this point, the same shamelessly cheesy low-budget special effects that made the first two films such a talking point for the network.
July 26; 9 pm ET
There was a vocal group of critics who feared that E! and the Jenner-Kardashian family was grossly exploiting the sensitive transition of Bruce Jenner to living his life as a woman for ratings and publicity when it was announced that the network would be producing a docuseries about Jenner’s journey. This is the Kardashians, after all. But after Jenner’s riveting, honest, and educational interview with Diane Sawyer and the recent two-part special of Keeping Up With the Kardashians that wasn’t just respectful, but progressive and important television, those worries should all but be eschewed. What’s more, E! may even be a more perfect choice for the series than we think, capable of not just showing the complexity and significance of Jenner’s transition, but imbuing it with fun, humorous, human elements as well.
August 4; 10 pm ET
The comedy partnership doubling as BFF-ship of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler is a thing of legend by this point. But when it comes to chemistry, timing, marriage of wit, and marriage of delivery, the strongest comedy partnership on TV actually belongs to best friends Lennon Parham and Jessica St. Clair, the stars of the USA comedy Playing House. The two actresses are, individually, scene-stealers in their own rights. Parnham just about ran away with a recent episode of Veep as the hilariously noncommittal adviser Karen. You undoubtedly remember St. Clair as the poor doomed sales clerk in the poop-filled Bridesmaids dress shopping scene. Combined, they have nearly 80 credits to their names, but it’s when they work together as they do on Playing House—which they also created and write—that they’re at their best.
August 5; 9 pm ET
There’s so much raunch and scandal being employed to woo viewers to their TV sets over the summer that it’s refreshing to find a comedy option that’s unapologetically simple and sweet. Mr. Robinson, starring The Office veteran Craig Robinson, is a throwback laugh track sitcom about a formerly rough-edged musician who finds a second act navigating office politics and adolescent hormones as a music teacher in a middle school. In other words, it’s basically School of Rock, with bigger kids. And that’s just fine.
August 17; 9 pm ET
To call watching Chasing Life an emotional experience would be an understatement. The series centers on a 20-something budding journalist whose career and new romance are both about to take off when she is diagnosed with cancer. But while a plot like that sounds emotionally draining, Chasing Life is actually emotionally cathartic, staying on the right side of a tone that could easily veer toward mawkish inspiration porn. It resists the temptation to use a cancer storyline for emotional manipulation, with the resilient spirit of the lead character, April, radiating off screen. Season 2 begins a short time after April gets engaged, and chronicles her struggle to reclaim her life from her cancer diagnosis. The series, though sometimes a little too soap-y, is an excellent example of how a cancer storyline can still very much be a human one.
August 22; 9 pm ET
Blunt Talk is the fruition of the creative partnership you never knew you needed: Seth MacFarlane and Sir Patrick Stewart. The Family Guy scribe, who has employed the venerable actor to voice characters in both that show and his comedy hit Ted, will executive-produce the series, which was created by Bored to Death mastermind Jonathan Ames. Stewart stars as a British journalist hellbent on conquering American cable news. He creates a nightly news show to use as a platform for instructing Americans on the way they should live, think, and behave. Or, to reduce the series to a simple sell: It’s a comedy where Patrick Stewart mocks Americans. Enjoy!
August 31; 9 pm ET
When TV writers and industry folk try to pinpoint the time that MTV arrived as a legitimate entity in the original scripted series business, they point to the launch of Awkward, a painfully funny and relatable comedy about coming of age in, well, an awkward age to grow up in. The show’s upcoming fifth season will be its last, featuring promposals, graduation, possible engagements, and lots of woeful uncertainty about what the future holds. Ashley Rickards, with her snarky voiceovers and sharp wit, has been a revelation as Jenna Hamilton, the eyes through which we’ve re-experienced high school in all of its glorious inelegance. After five seasons, finally seeing her toss her graduation cap in the air will be so vicariously satisfying.
TBD
You’re the Worst—don’t be fooled by its title—is hands-down the best romantic comedy on TV. Why? Rather than flood its first season with grand romantic gestures by Prince Charmings for their Katherine Heigl stand-ins, it featured two flawed leads, who may actually be very bad people, actively trying not to fall in love with each other. It’s these selfish buffoons, played to confusingly endearing perfection by Aya Cash and Chris Geere, who became the likely romantic heroes of the summer, the ones we could most relate to and root for. Hey, love is a battlefield, after all. FXX doesn’t have a firm premiere date yet for You’re the Worst, other than that it will return in late summer. The wait is the worst.
TBD
Also returning at a yet to be specified date in late summer is FX’s popular fantasy football comedy The League, which is coming back for its seventh and final season. The series has been a worthy descendant of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, another deranged version of the classic friends-hanging-out comedy type, but with lovable losers and raunchy brutes as the friends. After seven seasons and a prodigious number of dick jokes, the final 13 episodes will have the crew—featuring Mark Duplass, Nick Kroll, and Paul Scheer, three of the busiest men in comedy, among them—gunning for the elusive Shiva trophy for the last time.
