Hey, what are you up to this April? Thinking about going outside a little to enjoy the spring sunshine? Maybe heading to a baseball game or hitting the golf course or working on the garden a little bit? Well, sorry. That’s not going to happen. Your TV has now claimed all of April. There’s no time to go outside. You can take a machete to your overgrown lawn sometime in June.
Just scroll through the list of shows premiering in April. Looking for some critically-acclaimed dramas? Cool. Better Call Saul (April 10, AMC), The Leftovers (April 16, HBO), and Fargo (April 19, FX) return within two weeks of each other, and will be running at the same time as The Americans and Ryan Murphy’s Feud, which premiere over the next couple weeks and should be in various deep and/or intense stages of their seasons as the returning shows start dropping. And that’s before we even get to the new shows rolling out during the month, which include a 13-episode Hugh Hefner documentary titled American Playboy (April 7, Amazon), Handmaid’s Tale (April 26, Hulu) and an adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (Starz, April 30).
But you probably want to balance out all that drama with a few laughs, too, right? Also cool. Archer (April 5, FXX), Angie Tribeca (TBS, April 10), Brooklyn Nine-Nine (April 11, Fox), Veep (April 16, HBO), Silicon Valley, and Catastrophe (April 28, Amazon) are back, too. Just ballparking it without actually doing the math, that’s like half of TV’s best comedies dropping over a three-week span.
Need a little nostalgia fix? How about a Prison Break revival (April 4, Fox), all-new episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000 (April 14, Netflix), and Peter Capaldi’s final season on Doctor Who, the last of which is not technically “nostalgia,” I suppose, as its just a continuation of a long-running series. But Doctor Who has been on TV in one form or another for over 50 years, so I’m including it in this paragraph anyway. I stand by this decision, just as I do my opinion that the show would be better and more interesting if the title had a question mark at the end.
Or have you, like me, been staring up at the sky during thunderstorms and screaming to the heavens “Why, Lord? Why is there no show or miniseries that stars Matthew Perry as Ted Kennedy and Katie Holmes as Jackie O., or maybe, say, Pierce Brosnan as the head of a Texas oil-drilling family? Whyyyyyy?” Well, it turns out someone up there was listening all along (and is maybe getting tired of us being so dramatic about it), because we’re also getting The Kennedys – After Camelot (April 2, Reelz) and The Son (April 8, AMC).
(In all honesty, I’m not sure I’ll have time for either of these given everything else that’s premiering between now and the beginning of May. But please know that I am deeply in love with both of them for reasons that have nothing to do with their actual content. I’ve seen enough Pierce Brosnan movies to have an image in my mind of The Son that features multiple oil robberies. Like maybe one where he rolls a bunch of 55-gallon drums down a big hill. And I don’t know if you put this together yet, but if you want to be technical about, casting Perry and Holmes means Chandler and Joey are playing Kennedys. Different Joey, sure, but if you’re not picturing Matt LeBlanc as Jackie Kennedy right now, I suggest you start.)
And that’s not even all of the shows premiering in April. I still haven’t mentioned iZombie (April 4, The CW) or The Get Down (April 7, Netflix) or Bosch (April 21, Amazon) or about a dozen other shows. And it’s only late-February. There could still be more premiere dates to come. And summer movie season starts in April now, too, with The Fate of the Furious hitting theaters April 14. So if you’re a pop culture junkie and you have any long-term projects you’re thinking of tackling (painting your bedroom, doing a 5000-piece puzzle, developing some sort of semi-respectable social life that will stop your friends from trying to pity-drag you out for dinner like you’re their 92-year-old hermit Nana), you might wanna think about knocking it out in March.
