Flavorwire is celebrating Memorial Day with The Year in TV, a series of features on the 2012-13 TV season, which ends this month.
Summer has commonly been a wasteland for television, but with the staggered seasons of original cable programming, the next few months feature a surprisingly terrific line-up of returning favorites as well as new series on cable, network TV, and on Netflix. While you’ve probably already made it through the fourth season of Arrested Development twice already, here are ten other series worth checking out this summer.
The Killing
Premieres: June 2 at 8pm, AMC
In the third season of AMC’s slow-burning mystery series, detectives Sarah Linden and Steven Holder (Mireille Enos and Joel Kinnaman, the only returning series regulars) join up again to solve a completely new murder case. Peter Sarsgaard joins the dreary Seattle-set police procedural.
Under the Dome
Premieres: June 24 at 10pm, CBS
CBS tries to revive the Steven King miniseries, a long-forgotten relic of the ’90s that fell out of fashion in the 21st Century. The 13-episode limited series (code for: “If this is good, we’ll bring it back next year”) follows a small New England town mysteriously cut off from the rest of the world by the sudden appearance of a giant dome.
Orange Is the New Black
Premieres: July 11 on Netflix
In this ensemble dramedy, based on Piper Kerman’s memoir, a Brooklynite must serve a one-year sentence in a women’s prison. Created by Weeds writer Jenji Kohan, it’ll be a chance to see if Netflix’s original programming can handle a comedy series that doesn’t have a built-in audience like Arrested Development.
True Blood
Premieres: June 16 at 9pm, HBO
The sixth season of HBO’s overcrowded horror soap opera sees some changes backstage (creator Alan Ball stepped down as showrunner), but it’ll be business as usual in that nutty Louisiana hamlet of Bon Temps: vampires, werewolves, and witches abound per usual, and this season brings aboard creepy Rutger Hauer as Sookie Stackhouse’s fairy great-grandfather.
Ray Donovan
Premieres: June 30 at 10pm, Showtime
Liev Schreiber and Jon Voight star in this new drama series from the creators of Southland. As the titular character, Schreiber must clean up the messes of Los Angeles’s rich, famous, and powerful, but when his father (Voight) is released from prison, he realizes that he doesn’t have the same control over his own personal life.
Camp
Premieres: July 10 at 10pm, NBC
In perhaps the oddest show of the summer, Rachel Griffiths stars at Mackenzie “Mack” Granger, the proprietor of the Little Otter summer family camp. In this hour-long comedy-drama, teens find their first loves, college-aged kids get wild, and parents prove their own lack of maturity. Meanwhile, Mack Granger must deal with the dissolution of her marriage when her husband leaves her for a younger woman.
The Bridge
Premieres: July 10 at 10pm, FX
It’s a big summer for police procedurals, and The Bridge is yet another new drama inspired by a European series (the Swedish/Danish Bron). Starring Diane Kruger and Demián Bichir as detectives (American and Mexican, respectively), the moody series follows a border-jumping serial killer.
The Newsroom
Premieres: July 14 at 10pm, HBO
Aaron Sorkin’s art-imitates-life drama returns for a second series, and this time the show will dig up all of the emotional ups-and-downs centered around the Occupy movement and the Romney/Obama campaigns. Who wouldn’t want to relive 2011-2012 all over again?
In the Flesh
Premieres: August 3 at 10pm, BBC America
Knowing that there’s no sense in reworking a British series for American audiences, BBC America shipped over this import — a drama about the human side of the zombie population. After medication is invented to keep the undead’s yearnings for brains at bay, it turns out that zombies have emotions just like humans. Who doesn’t love a little character drama about the walking dead?
Breaking Bad
Premieres: August 11 at 9pm, AMC
Let’s be honest: this is the only thing we’re really gearing up for this summer. The last season of Breaking Bad is sure to be a thrilling roller coaster ride — and an emotional one to boot, as a nation says goodbye to its favorite lovable meth dealers.