10 New Shows We Can't Wait to Watch Next Season
The major networks just wrapped up a week of presenting their new shows to advertisers. Here are the 10 most promising shows from this year's upfronts.
NBC
Each spring, the major broadcast networks present their new TV shows to advertisers in hopes that they will plop down huge wads of cash for 30-second spots. Known as the upfronts, it's always an optimistic time, when tiny glimpses, log lines, and casting notices can lead to buzz over what's going to be the next must-watch show—even though history tells us most of these new series won't last to the end of their first season. This past week ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, and the CW all made their upfronts presentations for the 2016-17 season, and the mix is... Well, it's something. Shonda Rhimes has a Shakespeare adaptation for ABC, Lego Movie masterminds Phil Lord and Chris Miller have another outlandish high-concept comedy, and nearly every network will have a new show about time travel. In short, there's a lot of TV on the way. Below are the shows we can't wait to see in full when they debut next season.
- Kristen Bell. Ted Danson. *Parks and Recreation* and *Brooklyn Nine-Nine* creator Mike Schur. That’s a comedic pedigree that makes for a must-watch series. And Schur’s return to NBC features one of the best high-concept premises in a year with a lot of them. When Eleanor Shellstrop (Bell) arrives at the titular Good Place after being hit by a truck her mentor Michael (Danson) tells her she made it there because she helped innocent people get off death row. Only one problem: She didn’t actually do that. Comedy gold? Probably.
- In *Timeless*, a criminal steals a secret government time machine, and Homeland Security seeks out a history professor (Abigail Spencer) to lead a team that will travel back to restore the timeline and save the history of America. Spencer has been great in many thankless roles throughout her career, so it’s about time a network show stepped up and cast her as the lead. And considering the increase in time-travel shows we saw in 2016, this is looking very on-trend.
- In the latest show from Phil Lord and Chris Miller, Zorn (Jason Sudekis) is an animated warrior in the style of *He-Man* who rules an isolated kingdom in the Pacific Ocean. He leaves that world behind and makes the journey to Orange County to reunite with his son Alan (Johnny Pemberton) and ex-wife (Cheryl Hines), who’s now engaged to Craig (Tim Meadows). The trailer doesn’t offer much in the way of story, but it does have a few great one-liners. And a giant pet hawk. We're in.
- The latest from Lee Daniels is a rags-to-riches story featuring Queen Latifah, Lenny Kravitz, and Benjamin Bratt. Star (Jude Demorest) is an 18-year-old gifted singer who spent much of her life in the foster system. She takes her sister Simone (Brittany O’Grady) and moves to Atlanta to meet their godmother Carlotta (Latifah), and start a girl group with Alexandra (Ryan Destiny). It could have all the cloying flaws of Daniels' *Empire*, but a show that imitates the career trajectory of Destiny’s Child still promises some great drama.
- *Pitch* is a combination of the real-life story of Little League pitcher Mo’ne Davis, who captivated baseball fans in 2014, and something like *Rookie of the Year*. Ginny (Kylie Bunbury) is the first woman to play in Major League Baseball, a pitcher called up by the San Diego Padres. But instead of an injury granting her magical throwing powers, she’s developed a mean screwball, a pitch built after years of practice with her father Blip (Mo McRae). It looks hokey throughout the trailer, but it will also be hard not to love this kind of underdog story.
- The *other* Phil Lord and Chris Miller-produced series hails from creator Julius Sharpe, who came up as a writer for late-night TV and Seth MacFarlane’s animated comedies. *Making History* centers on Dan (Adam Pally), a sad sack computer science professor who invents a time machine and uses it to spend his weekends exploiting his knowledge of the future to make friends and become popular in colonial America. Yes, it looks like a lot of other time-travel shows, but there’s an earnestness and willingness to skewer historical figures here that's really smart.
- In *Conviction*, Hayley Atwell is Hayes Morrison, a former First Daughter who has drug problems, among others, that are getting in the way of her mother’s Senate campaign. To keep from going to prison, Morrison accepts a job as the head of a Conviction Integrity Unit in New York City, tasked with reexamining cases to determine wrongful convictions. The trailer looks shaky, but we’re hoping Attwell will be good enough to carry the show until it sorts out some issues.
- As Jack Bauer on *24*, Kiefer Sutherland fake killed more fake terrorists than anyone. But in the same season that Fox is rebooting *24*, it’s actually Sutherland’s new show that looks like the better political drama. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Tom Kirkman (Sutherland) is the titular designee, who gets sequestered during the State of the Union. When an explosion destroys the Capitol Building, Kirkman is next in line for the presidency. Yes, it’s a contrived premise, but it also looks to have real drama in its Washington power-grab dynamics.
- Based on the novel by Melinda Taub, and created by *Grey’s Anatomy* and *Scandal* writer Heather Mitchell, the fifth (fifth!) ABC show from Shonda Rhimes uses the ends of Shakespeare’s *Romeo and Juliet* as its starting point. It’s hammy in the way of the CW’s historical romance *Reign* and Starz’s *Outlander*, but this genre has a dedicated following, and Rhimes has displayed a golden touch that dwarfs other major executive producers. This will be fun.
- If nothing else, *The Great Indoors* is bringing Joel McHale back to TV. It’ll be hard to separate him from Jeff Winger on *Community*, but casting him as an outdoorsman returning to a magazine where he’s now the sole Gen Xer in a sea of Millennials might just work. Yes, it is a CBS sitcom, meaning *The Great Indoors* satisfies itself with low-hanging fruit like making fun of Millennials, but McHale’s wit, Stephen Fry, and the hope that it will soften its attitudes make it the one new show on CBS worth checking out.
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