ERIC BALFOUR ‏ @ERICBALFOUR
Here ya go... #Haven Season 3 premieres in the US on September 21st at 9/10C on @SyFy

By MIKE HALE
Published: May 31, 2012
The list of new television shows arriving this summer is a long one — that’s true of every part of the calendar nowadays — but the season feels quieter than it has in recent years. Cable networks like USA, TNT and Syfy that have aggressively introduced high-profile series seem to be in a consolidation mode, with the season’s biggest news — outside of “The Newsroom” on HBO — involving award-winning shows embarking on their final go-rounds: “The Closer,” “Damages,” “Breaking Bad.”

In the wake of “Downton Abbey” many of the summer’s more interesting-sounding shows are British imports on channels like Encore, Ovation and DirecTV’s Audience Network. There’s a lot of cultural mixing and matching: “Hit and Miss,” a British mini-series being shown by DirecTV, stars the American actress Chloë Sevigny (as a hit woman who used to be a man); “Copper,” set in post-Civil War New York, is the first original drama for BBC America.

But it isn’t all Emmy winners and foreign accents; the summer also brings new shows starring Charlie Sheen, Bristol Palin and Snooki, as well as the return of “Dallas.” Here’s a chronological guide to some season highlights.

‘LONGMIRE’ (A&E, SUNDAY) Set in Wyoming and filmed in New Mexico, this contemporary western stars Robert Taylor (Agent Jones in “The Matrix”) as a widowed frontier sheriff who looks and acts the part — when he’s not using a French press to make his morning coffee. The obligatory female sidekick is played by Katee Sackhoff of “Battlestar Galactica”; the series is based on the Walt Longmire mystery novels by Craig Johnson.

‘PUSH GIRLS’ (SUNDANCE, MONDAY) This reality series is being pitched as a female counterpart to the cult-favorite wheelchair-rugby documentary “Murderball”: its subjects are attractive Los Angeles women — a model, an actress, a former competitive swimmer — who are paralyzed from the neck or waist down.

‘SAVING HOPE’ (NBC, THURSDAY) The latest Canadian show to be used as a summer rental by the American networks looks like a cross between “Life on Mars” and “A Gifted Man”: a big-deal surgeon (Michael Shanks) lies in a coma after a taxi crash, but his spirit walks around the hospital trying to help out and chatting with the ghosts of the less fortunate patients.

‘THE RUNAWAY’ (OVATION, JUNE 9) Fans of the dapper Eli Gold on “The Good Wife” can see another side of the man who plays him, Alan Cumming, in this six-episode British melodrama about a pair of star-crossed lovers in the East End of London. Mr. Cumming shows up in Episode 2 as a kindly drag performer who takes in the young heroine after she’s escaped from a brutal women’s prison.

‘THORNE’ (ENCORE, JUNE 12) David Morrissey (“State of Play,” Season 3 of “The Walking Dead”) stars, along with Eddie Marsan, Sandra Oh and Natascha McElhone, in this two-part crime drama from Britain’s Sky satellite-TV network, which is beginning to join BBC and ITV as a source of dramas for the American market.

‘DALLAS’ (TNT, JUNE 13) It’s Southfork, the next generation: Josh Henderson and Jesse Metcalfe play the squabbling sons of the oilmen J. R. and Bobby Ewing in this revival of the hugely popular nighttime soap, back after a 21-year hiatus. Larry Hagman is back as evil J. R., and Patrick Duffy returns as good Bobby, and Linda Gray, Charlene Tilton, Steve Kanaly and Ken Kercheval will also reprise their roles. And if it doesn’t work out, TNT can just pretend it was all a bad dream.

‘41’ (HBO, JUNE 14) The 41st president, and the first one named Bush, is the subject of this documentary directed by Jeffrey Roth (“The Wonder of It All,” about men who walked on the Moon) and produced by Jerry Weintraub. The odds are good that it will be sympathetic: When Mr. Weintraub was the subject of an adoring HBO documentary, “His Way,” George H. W. and Barbara Bush were among the people interviewed.

‘BRISTOL PALIN: LIFE’S A TRIPP’ (LIFETIME, JUNE 19) America’s most famous pregnant teenager lets us in on her life as a single mom in this reality series, first announced more than a year ago.

‘SNOOKI & JWOWW’ (MTV, JUNE 21) The Mutt and Jeff of “Jersey Shore,” Jennifer Farley (JWoww) and Nicole Polizzi (Snooki), terrorize Atlantic City in this spinoff series. It seems likely that most of the funny moments are in the trailer at mtv.com, including the pregnant Snooki’s declaration that “the fact that I can reproduce is very scary.”

‘THE NEWSROOM’ (HBO, JUNE 24) After a successful detour into feature-film screenwriting (“The Social Network,” “Moneyball”) Aaron Sorkin returns to television with a 10-episode drama about — what else? — television, his third behind-the-scenes look at the medium, after “Sports Night” and “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.” Jeff Daniels, who’s great in the trailers, plays a cable-news anchor, with colleagues played by Emily Mortimer, John Gallagher Jr. (of “Spring Awakening” on Broadway), Alison Pill, Dev Patel (“Slumdog Millionaire”), Sam Waterston and Jane Fonda. There will be journalism and idealism, but Mr. Sorkin has said that it will really be about the relationships.

‘ANGER MANAGEMENT’ (FX, JUNE 28) Charlie Sheen, whose antisocial behavior got him booted from CBS’s “Two and a Half Men,” resurfaces in the cozier environs of FX playing another funhouse-mirror version of himself. Named Charlie, as were his characters in “Spin City” and “Two and a Half Men,” the protagonist is a former baseball player whose anger issues derailed his career; now he’s a therapist helping others to calm down. What could go wrong? Along with new seasons of “Wilfred” and the excellent “Louie” on Thursday nights, “Anger Management” should be part of the most diverse block of prime-time comedies on television.

‘TWENTY TWELVE’ (BBC AMERICA, JUNE 28) Hugh Bonneville, known to Americans as the Earl of Grantham in “Downton Abbey,” plays a different sort of well-meaning bureaucrat in this comic mockumentary about the team assigned to take care of logistics for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.
‘ENDEAVOUR’ (PBS, JULY 1) The new season of “Masterpiece Mystery!” begins with the pilot episode of a series that fans of British mysteries have been anticipating and dreading: the prequel to “Inspector Morse,” set at Oxford in 1965 and starring Shaun Evans as the young constable and opera buff Endeavour Morse. The feature-length pilot drew more than eight million viewers in Britain, a very healthy number.

‘THE CLOSER’ (TNT, JULY 9) The last season of one of the most successful dramas in cable history, broken up into three chunks spread over more than a year, limps to an end with six final episodes. Kyra Sedgwick’s Deputy Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson of the Los Angeles Police Department will say farewell on Aug. 13, immediately followed by the premiere of the spinoff series “Major Crimes,” with Mary McDonnell continuing her role as Capt. Sharon Raydor, Johnson’s friendly nemesis.

‘HIT AND MISS’ (DIRECTV, JULY 11) From Paul Abbott, creator of “Shameless” and writer of “State of Play,” comes this mini-series starring Chloë Sevigny, equipped with an Irish accent and a prosthetic penis, as a transgender assassin who discovers that she fathered a son. It’s currently showing in Britain, where a critic for New Statesman wrote that it would be “hard to overstate the initial weirdness” of the show.

‘BREAKING BAD’ (AMC, JULY 15) The story of Walter White, former high-school chemistry teacher turned meth cook turned murderer, enters its fifth and last season, though there’s a catch: the “season” is divided into two eight-episode sections, and the second won’t appear until next summer.

‘POLITICAL ANIMALS’ (USA, JULY 15) Eight years after he created the charming politics-and-family drama “Jack and Bobby” (don’t call them the Kennedys), the producer Greg Berlanti turns to politics again with this six-hour mini-series starring Sigourney Weaver as a former first lady and failed presidential candidate who is now secretary of state (don’t call her Hillary). Ms. Weaver, in her first regular role in a television series, leads a promising cast that includes Carla Gugino as a reporter, Ciaran Hinds as the former president, Dylan Baker as the vice president and Ellen Burstyn as not-Hillary’s mother.

‘SULLIVAN AND SON’ (TBS, JULY 19) The Irish-Korean-American comedian Steve Byrne stars in this new sitcom as a lawyer who takes over his parents’ Pittsburgh bar, where the obnoxious patrons include characters played by Christine Ebersole and Brian Doyle-Murray. The show runner, Rob Long, has barroom comedies in his blood: he worked as a producer on 50 episodes of “Cheers.”

‘COPPER’ (BBC AMERICA, AUG. 19) Tom Fontana, having crossed the ocean to make “Borgia” (not to be confused with Showtime’s “Borgias”) for Canal+ and other European networks, returns — more or less. His new series, a period piece set in the turbulent Five Points district of Manhattan after the Civil War, stars Tom Weston-Jones of “MI-5” as an Irish-American cop whose wife has disappeared; Franka Potente plays a madam. Presumably it will be less violent than Martin Scorsese’s Five Points film, “Gangs of New York,” but with Mr. Fontana, who created “Oz,” you never know.