The 2016 TV schedule offers something for everyone
With the holiday season winding down, most of us are about to fall back into our usual routines. On the plus side, the long stretch of reruns is all but behind us and there’s a heap of brand-new series, along with some returning favorites, to look forward to as we forge ahead into 2016.
You like comedies? They’re in there. Dramas? More than you can count on one hand. Period pieces? Sci-fi? Police procedurals? Comic book characters? All that and much more is coming your way across multiple networks begin- ning in early January and extending well into the new year.
The inevitable slew of fall cancelations has left some gaping holes in the prime-time schedule, and there’s no shortage of new programming to fill them. January is pretty drama- and detective-heavy, with shows like NBC’s “Shades of Blue” and Fox’s “Second Chance” and “Lucifer” premiering.
NBC is hoping new comedies “Superstore” and “Telenovela” will be a hit, and the Dan Savage-produced sitcom “The Real O’Neals” debuts on ABC in March. But it’s Fox’s upcoming comedy that’s generating the most buzz, as the Seth MacFarlane-produced “Bordertown” replaces “American Dad!” as part of its “Sunday Funday” lineup starting Jan. 3.
Anything connected to the cartoon-comedy powerhouse MacFarlane is bound to garner attention. For “Bordertown,” he teams up once again with “Family Guy” writer Mark Hentemann, who also created this latest venture. The show follows neighbors Bud Buckwald (Hank Azaria, “The Simpsons”) and Ernesto Gonzalez (Nicholas Gonzalez, “Resurrection Blvd.”) and their families — residents of the fictitious state of “Mexifornia” on the U.S.-Mexico border. Bud is an exceedingly white border patrol guard resistant to diversity and cultural change, while Ernesto is a good-natured and enterprising Mexican immigrant working hard towards the American Dream.
“Bordertown” is rife with the same type of off-color humor that saturates MacFarlane’s other series and, for all its criticism, that humor is a big part of what has made “Family Guy” and “American Dad!” so successful. No doubt “Bordertown” will fit seamlessly behind “Family Guy” in the Sunday night lineup.
Veering away from the comedic, the “X-Files” revival premiering Jan. 24 on Fox is, unsurprisingly, generating a lot of hype, and fans of “Arrow” and “The Flash” are certainly looking forward to the superhero-packed spinoff “Legends of Tomorrow,” beginning Jan. 21 on CW. Looking further ahead into March, however, there are several new series kicking off the spring/ summer television season.
One of these is “The Catch,” the latest offering from Shondaland, set to premiere Thursday, March 24. Shonda Rhimes, the woman behind prime-time juggernauts “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Scandal” and, most recently, “How to Get Away with Murder,” has all but taken over ABC’s Thursday night lineup with her largely female-centered dramas. Her new soapy thriller follows fraud investigator Alice Vaughan (Mireille Enos, “World War Z,” 2013), who herself becomes a fraud victim at the hands of her soonto-be ex-fiancé, played by Peter Krause (“Parenthood”).
To be sure, there are plenty of new series to look forward to in 2016, but ravenous fans of existing shows have been champing at the bit for fresh material. ABC’s anthology series “American Crime” begins its sophomore season Jan. 6, and “The Walking Dead” delivers the second half of the current season on AMC starting in February. Later in the year, we can look for FX’s “American Horror Story” Syfy’s “Z Nation,” both of which have secured season renewals. Over on PBS, the British hit “Downton Abbey” begins the U.S. run of its final season Jan. 3.
Come April, however, it’s “Game of Thrones” fans that will have their appetites whetted when the fantasy drama series debuts its highly anticipated sixth season. The most notable element of the new season is that, for the first time, the show will not run parallel with George R.R. Martin’s book series, “A Song of Ice and Fire.” With the next novel still in the works and the show having caught up to the existing material, showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have no choice but to break entirely new ground with season 6.
As avid readers of the novels can attest, however, recent seasons’ storylines have begun to veer drastically away from the source material as it is. With Benioff and Weiss working under the advisement of Martin and having been apprised of events of the final two books, it’s not as if the upcoming season’s storylines have simply been picked out of thin air. Additionally, it’s been hinted that at least one story arc will backtrack into earlier book material previously unexplored onscreen. Either way, with “A Song of Ice and Fire” readers no longer smugly privy to what’s to come in “Game of Thrones,” this is bound to be the most unpredictable season to date — and that’s saying something.