This week I’m taking a look at what television has to offer us this year by previewing some of the new releases in the States. Not sure if all of these are going to make it to our screens but I imagine the lions share will.

1. Fargo: This one is starting on Channel 4 on Sunday 20th April so we don’t have long to wait for this mini-series based on the much loved Coen brothers movie of the same name. Set in 2006 it stars Billy Bob Thornton as a drifter who arrives in the town of Bemidji, Minnesota and influences the town folk with his violence and malice, including put upon insurance salesman Lester, played by Martin Freeman.
2. The 100: I was given the heads up on this by head of workhorse so I’m sure it’s a good one. Set 97 years after a nuclear war has destroyed civilization, when a spaceship housing humanity’s lone survivors sends 100 juvenile delinquents back to Earth in hopes of possibly re-populating the planet. This series comes from the CW, a network that gave us such classics as Gilmore Girls, Veronica Mars, One Tree Hill, Gossip Girl and 7^th Heaven. Enough said.
3. Salem: Salem is a historic period drama set in the 17^th Century during the infamous Salem Witch Trials.
4. Wayward Pines: This might just be this generations Twin Peaks as Secret Service agent Ethan Burke, played by Matt Dillon, goes to the bucolic town of Wayward Pines in search for two missing federal agents. He soon realizes that he may never get out of Wayward Pines alive…
5. Leftovers: Based on a Tom Perrotta (Little Children) novel of the same name, this HBO series takes place in the wake of a global “Rapture”—which may or may not be the Biblical rapture—and centers on the people who didn’t make the cut, and are left behind to their suburban lives.
6. Helix: This is a science fiction thriller television series by Ronald D Moore who re-imagined the highly popular Battlestar Galactica . The series follows a team of scientists from the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention who travel to a research facility in the Arctic to investigate a potential outbreak of disease. While there, they find themselves stuck in a life-or-death situation that could decide the future of mankind.
7. Better Call Saul: For those folks suffering from Breaking Bad withdrawals comes this prequel about Saul Goodman, played by Bob Odenkirk, before he became Walter White’s lawyer.
8. Resurrection: Or as I like to call it, ABC’s answer to The Returned. The series follows the residents of Arcadia Missouri whose lives are upended when their loved ones return from the dead, unaged since their deaths. Among the returned is Jacob Langston, an eight-year-old boy who drowned 32 years earlier. Having somehow been found alive in China he is brought back to America by an Immigration Agent named J. Martin “Marty” Bellamy. His surprise return inspires the local sheriff, whose wife presumably drowned trying to rescue Jacob, to learn more about this mystery.
9. Tooken: Who could resist this Tina Fey comedy starring Ellie Kemper as a woman who escapes a cult and decides to start her life over in NYC.
10. Halt and Catch Fire: Set in the early 1980s, series dramatizes the personal computing boom through the eyes of a visionary, an engineer and a prodigy whose innovations directly confront the corporate behemoths of the time. Their personal and professional partnership will be challenged by greed and ego while charting the changing culture in Texas’ Silicon Prairie.

LAW