63 TV shows to watch in 2015

(Image credit: Stephan Rabold/SHOWTIME)

last updated 17 August 2015

Every year, the TV landscape gets a little more crowded. There's never been a better time to be a TV viewer, but with so many options, it can also get a little overwhelming.

Which TV shows are worth your time? Let The Week be your guide. Read through our list of the most promising shows of the season, and add a few new names to your DVR lineup. (We're only including shows with a set release date, and will update the list as other great shows nail down their premiere dates.)

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

David Simon — best known as the creator of The Wire and Treme — returns to HBO once again for the miniseries Show Me a Hero, which offers a fictionalized take on a real-life public housing dispute that began in Yonkers, New York, in the late 1980s. The cast, which includes Oscar Isaac, Alfred Molina, and Winona Ryder, is terrific, and no one is as adept at mining highly politicized issues for drama as Simon is.

More than 20 years after Star Trek: The Next Generation finished its run, Patrick Stewart is finally returning to headline another American TV series. Stewart plays Walter Blunt, a newscaster forced to rebuild his credibility after he's arrested while driving drunk with a prostitute. Created by Jonathan Ames, who previously ran HBO's Bored to Death, Blunt Talk offers the same distinctive mix of debauchery and pathos.

How much Walking Dead is too much Walking Dead? AMC is gambling that the massive, loyal audience that has turned the zombie series into cable's biggest hit will be hungry for this "companion series," which tells an all-new story within the same universe. In addition to a new cast and a Los Angeles setting, Fear the Walking Dead will take place at the beginning of the zombie outbreak, giving fans greater insight into the societal collapse that was merely implied in the original series.

Netflix's latest original drama offers a fictionalized take on the rise of Pablo Escobar's Medellin drug cartel, as told from the perspective of both Escobar (Elite Squad's Wagner Moura) and a DEA agent tasked with capturing him (Game of Thrones' Pedro Pascal). The story of Escobar's rise and fall is as bloody and dramatic as anything you'd find in fiction, and the 10-episode series will have the opportunity to chronicle it in painstaking detail.

Comedy Central's unique cocktail of alcohol, comedy, and history goes down as smoothly as anything on television. The concept is simple: Host Derek Waters invites comedians to recount their favorite stories from American history, while gently goading them into drinking as much as possible. Their sloshed ramblings are then performed as historical re-enactions by a cast of big-name actors and comedians. The upcoming third season will highlight American cities like Las Vegas and New Orleans.

Hailed by many critics as the best sitcom of 2014 — and without question the raunchiest — You're the Worst follows a pair of self-absorbed Angelenos (Aya Cash and Chris Geere) who begin a tumultuous relationship after a one-night stand. You're the Worst has earned praise and a devoted group of viewers by fearlessly relying on the inherent likability of its two leads while depicting them at, well, their worst.

The longtime host of Comedy Central's The Colbert Report takes over the late-night chair that was vacated by David Letterman in May. There are a lot of questions left to be answered about Colbert's move to mainstream late-night: How much will he break from Late Show's conventional format? And how will viewers respond to seeing Colbert outside of the "Stephen Colbert" character he played so successfully? But whatever form the new Late Show takes, Colbert is a quick-thinking and engaging entertainer, and it'll be a blast to have him in a regular TV slot again.

To the great relief of its small but passionate group of fans, Hulu swooped in to save this perennially low-rated sitcom just a week after Fox cancelled it. Though The Mindy Project will now be a streaming-only series, creator and star Mindy Kaling has promised a relatively seamless transition: The all-new fourth season will consist of 26 episodes, parceled out once a week, just as they would be on a conventional network.

NBC's new action/drama is as high-concept as it gets: A woman (Jaimie Alexander) wakes up nude, covered in tattoos, in the middle of Times Square, with no idea who she is or how she got there. Series creators Martin Gero and Greg Berlanti have invited comparisons to The Bourne Identity, which offered similar spy-fi thrills, and Alexander is a magnetic actress who's long overdue for a mainstream breakthrough.

A kind of small-screen sequel to the 2011 thriller of the same name, Limitless stars American Sniper's James McDorman as a regular joe whose life is upended when he takes the miracle drug NZT, which allows its users to unlock the full potential of their brains. Bradley Cooper, who starred in the original Limitless, is slated to make occasional appearances, and the dumb-but-fun premise should offer a unique wrinkle on the well-worn genre.

Kenya Barris' acclaimed sitcom, which follows a wealthy black family navigating the racial, cultural, and political lines of modern-day America, returns for a second season. There are few shows that tackle these issues in any way — let alone with so much humor — and black-ish's talented cast, which includes Anthony Anderson, Tracee Ellis Ross, and Laurence Fishburne, pulls it off with depth and style.

Terrence Howard leads the gleefully soapy Empire as Lucious Lyon, a hip-hop mogul who must decide how to dispose of his vast fortune when he's diagnosed with ALS. Riffing on both King Lear and The Lion in Winter, Empire proudly wears its serialized ambitions on its sleeve, from an unusually large cast for a network drama (including a scene-stealing role from Taraji P. Henson) to a series of new songs from Timbaland. The second season ups the count from 12 episodes to 18, offering even more chances to pile on soapy twists.

After briefly capturing the zeitgeist with its buzzy first season in 2006, NBC's Heroes crashed hard with goofy, convoluted plotting and needlessly grim characters. But the core concept, which follows a group of people across the world who discover they have superpowers, is still compelling — and this 13-episode sequel series promises to return to the roots of what made Heroes such an out-of-the-box success in the first place.

Even the best sitcoms tend to obsess over the same basic subjects — work, friends, family, and dating. That's why the first season of The Last Man on Earth was such a breath of fresh air: By following Phil Miller (Will Forte), one of the only survivors of a post-apocalyptic event, the series grounded its character-driven comedy in a truly unique situation. The second season picks up where the first left off, as Phil contends with the irritations of daily life in an increasingly crowded post-apocalypse.

South African comedian Trevor Noah takes over the Daily Show anchor chair previously occupied by Jon Stewart — and given the cultish devotion Stewart amassed during his 16 years on The Daily Show, Noah has a big job ahead of him. The scrutiny brought on by the new gig has already led to controversy over Noah's old jokes, but it's not like Jon Stewart emerged fully-formed, either, and Noah's unique perspective on American culture offers plenty of opportunity for a fresh spin on The Daily Show's well-worn format.

In a meta tweak on his real-life persona, Rob Lowe stars in The Grinder as Dean Sanderson, an actor best known for playing a hotshot lawyer on a TV series titled The Grinder. When the series ends, Sanderson returns to his hometown and joins his family's actual law firm — to the chagrin of his lawyer brother Stewart (Fred Savage), whose actual legal career has been overshadowed by his famous brother's fictional one.

HBO's polarizing drama — which takes place in a world reeling from a rapture-like event that saw the inexplicable disappearance of two percent of the world's population — returns for its sophomore run. Showrunner Damon Lindelof has promised a more streamlined and plot-driven second season, as the Garvey family heads to a Texas suburb that was inexplicably spared from the sudden disappearance of its citizens.

It's been a rough few years for Homeland, which has seen steady erosion from the massive critical acclaim of its first season after misguided creative choices and goofy plot twists. Still, Claire Danes and Mandy Patinkin's performances remain as impressive as ever, and the new season — which jumps ahead two years and moves the story to Berlin — is a chance for a quasi-reboot that could bring Homeland back to previous glories.

Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas' iZombie offers an even less conventional take on the murder mystery. Rose McIver stars as Liv Moore, a coroner who happens to be a zombie (albeit one who's mostly in control of her cravings). Liv discovers that by eating the brains of the murder victims that pass through her office, she can partially recall their memories, enabling her to help in solving crimes. The zombie genre may be overstuffed, but iZombie is one of the most unique and engaging evolutions yet.

Amazon's promising new comedy series riffs on the coming-of-age comedies of the '80s with the story of a college kid (Submarine's Craig Roberts) who spends his summer working at a country club in 1985. Directed by Pineapple Express' David Gordon Green and featuring talented, underutilized actors like Paul Reiser and Jennifer Grey, Red Oaks is one of the stronger pilots to emerge from Amazon's ongoing attempt to launch a full slate of original shows.

More than 20 years after Army of Darkness, Bruce Campbell picks up his boomstick again for Ash vs. Evil Dead, the first TV installment in Sam Raimi's beloved horror-comedy series. The presence of Raimi and Campbell — as well as the anything-goes approach offered by a premium network like Starz — offer more than enough reasons to watch, but Ash vs. Evil Dead also offers a pair of intriguing new sidekicks in Jill Marie Jones and Ray Santiago.

Amazon's bold and ambitious alternate history series, which is based on the Philip K. Dick novel of the same name, is set in a world where the Axis won World War II, dividing the United States into two large territories controlled by Germany and Japan. It's an unsettling, enormously elastic premise that allows for essentially infinite stories, exploring the full ramifications of a vastly different world.

After successfully reinvigorating its sophomore drama Agents of S.H.I.E.LD., Marvel is delving into its past with the limited series Agent Carter. The story picks up in the mid-1940s, shortly after the events of Captain America: The First Avenger, as Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) embarks on a series of top-secret missions while combating the sexism of the era. This is Marvel's first project centered on a female protagonist, and a look back at the events that set up for blockbusters like Iron Man and The Avengers should provide a fresh and intriguing take on the Marvel universe.

Girls' cultural footprint may be larger than its actual viewership, but there's still plenty to admire about Lena Dunham's unique depiction of life and love in your twenties. Season four takes a bold step by shifting the narrative away from Brooklyn, as Hannah Horvath (Dunham) begins a program at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. (Don't worry — the rest of the cast, including Adam Driver and Allison Williams, are staying put.)

Following similarly beloved shows like 30 Rock and The Office into that good night, NBC's last truly brilliant sitcom ends its run with a final string of episodes that were teased in a flash-forward at the end of season six. Expect the show's final 13 episodes to serve as an extended love letter to the well-drawn characters and brilliant cast, from the relentlessly positive Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) to internet favorite Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman) — as well as some intriguing new characters, like a hapless employee played by Jon Hamm.

Comedy Central's wonderfully loopy series returns for a second season, as Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson navigate the travails of living in New York in your twenties. Aside from its two enormously appealing leads, Broad City's brilliance is in its elasticity; the series has no problem diverting from reality for any number of fantastical asides, offering scene after scene full of hilarious and unexpected turns.

It's been a long, long wait to see the next chapter in the chilling serial killer drama, but The Fall is finally set to pick up at the end of the first season's cliffhanger. Gillian Anderson stars as a police inspector on the trail of a sociopathic killer (Jamie Dornan, soon to debut as Fifty Shades of Grey's Christian Grey). The entire second season drops on Netflix on January 16, so set your binge-watching schedules accordingly.

Nearly 20 years after its premiere, Terry Gilliam's cultishly beloved sci-fi movie makes its way to the small screen, with X-Men alum Aaron Stanford stepping in for Bruce Willis in the main role. Stanford stars as James Cole, a time traveler sent back to prevent the terroristic release of a virus that will kill the vast majority of the world's population. It's going to be tough to live up to the dark vision of the original movie, but the basic premise of 12 Monkeys offers more than enough story for a TV series to expand upon.

The books and stories of Elmore Leonard have long been among Hollywood's favorite sources of adaptation — but there's never been anything as impressive as Justified, which successfully improves upon Leonard's original conception of U.S. marshal Raylan Givens, who appeared in several of his novels. Timothy Olyphant gets top billing, but he's equaled by Walton Goggins as Boyd Crowder, a grandiose, speechifying criminal who serves as Raylan's greatest threat and occasional ally. This is Justified's final season, and the series — which has never been afraid of a high body count — is likely to go out with a bang.

FX's thrilling Cold War drama, often described as the best show nobody's watching, deserves every bit of critical acclaim that's been thrown at it. Real-life couple Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys star as a pair of deeply embedded Russian spies living as a married couple just outside of Washington, D.C. The Americans has the darkness and moral complexity to stand up alongside TV's best dramas, and the nail-biting tension of its twisty narrative only stands to increase in its third season.

You can't change the channel without finding a grim drama focused on a murder mystery, but there are promising signs that Fortitude will be a cut above your standard entry in the genre. Stanley Tucci stars as a detective who travels to a tiny Arctic community to solve a vicious and mysterious murder, leading a cast that also includes English acting luminaries like Michael Gambon and Christopher Eccleston.

It's been more than a year since Walter White cooked his last batch of crystal meth, and AMC is returning to the world of Breaking Bad with Better Call Saul, a prequel series following the shady lawyer played by Bob Odenkirk in the original series. Messing with the history of a show as revered as Breaking Bad is a tricky prospect, but it's also an intriguing one — and while Walter White and Jesse Pinkman aren't slated to appear, viewers will be thrilled to see the return of fan-favorite character Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks).

Tina Fey co-created Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, which tells the story of a young woman (Ellie Kemper) who leaves a doomsday cult to start a new life in New York City. It's an offbeat premise for a sitcom, which is part of the reason that Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt has had an unusually bumpy path to its premiere. The series was originally supposed to debut a 13-episode first season on NBC this spring, but in a complex series of maneuvers, the network ceded the sitcom to Netflix, which picked up two full seasons on the spot. Let's hope it's a better fit for Kimmy Schmidt, which always seemed a little too quirky for NBC primetime.

It is almost unbelievable that Community has survived to its sixth season. The cultishly adored sitcom, which follows an offbeat group of students attending a community college, has weathered storm after storm: perpetually low ratings, the firing of its showrunner, the re-hiring of its showrunner, and the departures of numerous cast members (including three who were there from the pilot). Community's latest hurdle came last year, with an outright cancelation from NBC. It seemed like fans would be denied their often-cited wish for #sixseasonsandamovie when a last-minute reprieve came from an unlikely source: Yahoo! Screen, a fledgling video service that acquired that exclusive rights to the show's sixth season. To make up for cast departures, the new season of Community will introduce several new characters, including two new regulars played by Paget Brewster and Keith David.

After several misbegotten stabs at period dramas, Starz scored with this buzzy adaptation of Diana Gabaldon's series of historical fantasy novels. Caitriona Balfe stars as a World War II combat nurse who travels back in time to Scotland's civil war in 1743. It might sound a little goofy, but Outlander sells the premise with style, leaping deftly from genre to genre for a story that's not quite like anything else on television.

Hilary Mantel's brilliant novel about the court of King Henry VIII — told from the perspective of his often-maligned advisor Thomas Cromwell — gets a lavish small-screen adaptation. Tony-winning stage actor Mark Rylance stars as Cromwell, leading a cast that includes Homeland's Damian Lewis as King Henry. Wolf Hall's dense reappraisal of British history packs in all the political intrigue of Game of Thrones, and a faithful adaptation should prove no less addictive or hypnotic.

What's left to be said about Mad Men? AMC's brilliant drama, which centers on a Manhattan advertising firm in the 1960s, has already secured its place among the great shows in television history. Last year's set of episodes, which made up the first half of Mad Men's final season, were some of the best in the show's entire run, and the show's sprawling ensemble cast is as deep (and uniformly excellent) as ever. With just seven episodes left, it's going to be hard to say goodbye to Mad Men, but that's no reason to miss a single second of the show's final hours.

A justified critical darling, Louie C.K.'s experimental sitcom is one of TV's most unpredictable shows; by playing freely with form and style, C.K. ensures that viewers never know what they're going to see when they tune in. With Louie C.K. serving as creator, writer, director, and star — as well as a host of other jobs — Louie is one of TV's few true auteur projects. Watching an episode is like getting a glimpse into the acerbic comedian's brain.

Marvel extends its superheroic empire with the first of four Netflix-exclusive dramas. Charlie Cox stars as Daredevil, a blind superhero who fights crime using his enhanced other senses. (The remaining three shows — centered on Jessica Jones, Iron Fist, and Luke Cage — will premiere later, with a miniseries combining all four characters to follow.) Daredevil has a fiercely loyal following among comics fans, but the first major adaptation of his story, which starred Ben Affleck, failed to connect with audiences in 2003. Since then, Marvel has essentially rewritten the book on superhero adaptations, and it's hard to imagine it will botch the opportunity to reintroduce a character with so much potential to mainstream audiences.

Over four seasons, HBO's fantasy drama has achieved the kind of buzz most networks can only dream about, turning once-obscure phrases like "Winter is Coming" and "Red Wedding" into entrenched cultural catchphrases. Though many of the best moments from George R.R. Martin's novels have already occurred in the TV series, the fifth season of Game of Thrones is likely to be the most sprawling, with fan-favorite characters like Tyrion Lannister and Arya Stark scattered across the world. TV shows rarely come more ambitious, or more compulsively watchable, than this.

Building on a third season that was easily the show's best, HBO's scathing political satire returns as Julia Louis-Dreyfus' Selina Meyer — thrust into the nation's highest office after the unexpected resignation of the president — battles to keep her role in a contentious election. Veep is the ideal political satire for our time: hilarious, profane, and unfailingly committed to the idea that politicians on both sides of the aisle are petty, self-absorbed idiots.

The second season of Orphan Black was a step down from the addictive, propulsive first, but no matter how much it went off the rails, the sci-fi head-scratcher would be worth watching solely on the basis of its star. Over the course of the series, Tatiana Maslany has successfully played more than a dozen separate characters (all clones), and the third season adds a new adversary in a set of male clones (Ari Millen).

The genesis of Happyish is a sad story: the dramedy originally starred Philip Seymour Hoffman, who had already filmed the pilot before his sudden death. Those who have seen the originally Happyish pilot have testified to Hoffman's brilliance in the lead role, and while it's a shame that viewers will never get to see him in a recurring TV role, the new version of Happyish — which replaces Hoffman with Steve Coogan — still has plenty of promise. Happyish follows Thom Payne, a middle-aged ad executive who pushes back against a youth-driven culture as he staves off his own sense of irrelevance.

Forget Homeland and The Affair — the best series on Showtime is Penny Dreadful. This wonderfully morbid period horror-drama packs in all the best elements of gothic fiction: ornate dialogue, gorgeous locales, a lavish orchestral score, and a never-ending stream of creepy, otherworldly creatures to tempt our heroes into succumbing to their darker sides. Anchored by an unmissable performance from Eva Green and an impressive comeback role for Josh Hartnett, Penny Dreadful is TV's most compelling horror show.

M. Night Shyamalan's offbeat thriller series is so clearly inspired by Twin Peaks that it almost borders on plagiarism — but if you're going to crib, you might as well crib from the best. Matt Dillon stars as a Secret Service agent sent to investigate the disappearance of two fellow agents in a small Idaho town, only to discover that the entire town is a bizarre slice of Americana filled with strange secrets. Based on Shyamalan's recent pedigree and the ludicrous teaser video, Wayward Pines could easily turn out to be a fiasco — but it definitely doesn't look boring.

Bryan Fuller's arty, gory take on the fictional killer is one of network TV's most unjustly overlooked dramas: gorgeous, strange, and embedded with a tense psychological depth. As Hannibal, Mads Mikkelsen is good enough to make you forget about Anthony Hopkins, and Hugh Dancy is every bit his equal as Will Graham, the troubled FBI profiler whose pursuit of Hannibal brought him to the brink of insanity.

The cultishly adored comedic film — which follows a group of counselors through a surreal series of misadventures at a summer camp — is finally getting its long-discussed prequel in the form of a Netflix limited series. Impressively, the series has managed to assemble pretty much everybody from the movie's insanely stacked cast, including Amy Poehler, Bradley Cooper, Paul Rudd, and Elizabeth Banks.

Scott Meslow is the entertainment editor for TheWeek.com. He has written about film and television at publications including The Atlantic, POLITICO Magazine, and Vulture.

Subscribe to The Week

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

Sign up for Today's Best Articles in your inbox