‘Wet Hot American Summer,’ ‘Ballers’ & more: Summer TV’s most intriguing new shows

The broadcast network TV season officially ended on Wednesday night at 11 p.m. As always, there will be some stragglers still finishing up their seasons (the CW's “iZombie” still has three episodes to go, for instance), but we are essentially entering into the summer TV season. And that season is busier than it's ever been, as the broadcast networks keep trying to reclaim the territory they years ago ceded to cable, cable channels taking advantage of the reduced broadcast competition to unveil some of their biggest and best stuff, and Netflix continuing to release whole seasons of interesting shows every 3-5 days or so.

I'm still figuring out which shows I intend to cover weekly (though “True Detective” seems an easy choice) vs. periodically (as mentioned many times, I tend to enjoy “Rectify” more when I don't write about it too frequently), how I will handle the different streaming shows (perhaps continuing last summer's two-at-a-time “Orange Is the New Black” experiment), and even what the summer rewind series is (though I'm about 95% sure on that, and will announce it early next week). But there's certainly going to be a lot of interesting new and returning material to talk about.

Today, Dan and I have broken down the newbies that seem most intriguing to us. We haven't seen very many screeners so far, so in many cases we're making guesses based on talent, or premise, or some other auspice. I suspect we will eventually wind up disliking several of these, but right now we're in the possibility phase of things.

Look in the next day or two for our picks of the returning shows we're most excited about, and tell us what summer series you're most eager to discover or revisit.

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