2018-19 Fall TV Season Preview

After a seemingly very short but sometimes excrutiatingly hot summer, fall is now upon us. Days are getting shorter, leaves are turning beautiful colours, and people in Western countries are getting ready for Halloween while us in Hungary brace ourselves for the annual awakening of smartasses crying „Halloween is a dumb American holiday, TRUE Hungarians celebrate All Saints’ Day!” That’s always so much fun.

But more importantly, fall means most of our favourite TV series are coming back, with proper, long, beautiful seasons, instead of that ten episode summer nonsense. If you’re a big-time TV addict like me, you probably have a good idea of your seasonal schedule by now, and I figured since it’s going to be one of the main concerns of this blog, I’ll go into a bit of detail about mine. Yay!

I use MyEpisodes to keep track of my numerous watchables, but since I’m an old fashioned lady at heart, I also have a hand-written version next to my laptop. I usually start with only a handful of titles each fall, then keep adding to it as new series premiere, while crossing out the ones ending, right into next summer, then begin a nice, new, clean one in September. This was my table for this past season:

It’s not entirely complete since the last series I added to it was The Affair in June, so it’s missing a few of the later premieres, and also Netflix shows that air all their episodes in a single day are excluded by nature, but you get the picture.

As always, I had to say goodbye to a few old favourites as the year progressed, as well as potential new ones that were cancelled well before their time. Me, Myself and I was a wonderful little sitcom with a truly original premise, and I can’t fathom how it didn’t grab more people. Kevin (Probably) Saves the World and Deception certainly deserved more than one season each too, the former being basically the definition of feel-good fun, the latter a highly entertaining twist on your usual procedural format, both of them sporting incredibly likable casts of characters which were a joy to watch. The same can be said about longer-lived but unfortunately cancelled all the same favourites of mine The Mick, The Librarians and Hap and Leonard. I will also be sad to see The Last Man on Earth go - even though it could sometimes be annoyingly inconsistent in its quality, for the last few seasons it really felt like it finally found its groove. Two shows that, on the other hand, lost their original groove as more and more episodes passed or never had any to begin with – Life Sentence and LA to Vegas, respectively – will be easier to let go of. Trollied had a good long run and will be back this Christmas with a special episode to give the fans and the characters some closure, but after that it’s also done, as is The Joel McHale Show, which, God, I will miss enormously. Joel’s patter could be tired at times but the clips never failed to make me laugh.

At least some of my shows got to finish on their own terms before bowing out. Unreal returned this summer with a surprise last season, its second in only a few months, and by God was it terrible. I really think this show played itself out and they chose the right time to finish it. Long-running comedies New Girl and The Mindy Project both gave their characters their well-deserved happy endings, which cannot really be said about The Originals, yet strangely it had one of the most aptly planned series finales I have seen in a long time. Even though I wasn’t entirely satisfied by the fate of some of my favourites (Hayley and Elijah deserved to be together and it’s and affront to basic human decency that they didn’t end that way), ultimately I was still left with the feeling that it ended exactly how it was supposed to. And then, of course, there’s Once Upon a Time. Despite the hot mess it made of itself for the last two seasons, this show will always have a special place in my heart, and I’m still bracing myself for the first autumn in six years when I don’t have new episodes to look forward to every week. Thankfully, at least one of its main actors will be back with a brand new series (Josh Dallas in Manifest), so that’s at least a little bit of a consolation. 

Coming back to our TVs are, of course, all the Arrowverse shows: Arrow, The Flash, Legends of Tomorrow, Supergirl and Black Lightning. I’m decidedly more excited for some of them than others, but that’s neither here nor there. Supernatural is also back, yay! Will it ever not be back? Can we even live in a world where Sam and Dean are not on our screen saving the universe week in, week out? I mean, hell, I only got into this show before season 8, but can you imagine how its eventual ending will be for someone who’s literally been here for it from the start? 14 fucking seasons. That’s more than half of my life, man. RESPECT. 

What else is back, let’s see... The Good Doctor, This Is Us, Empire, How to Get Away with Murder, Blindspot, and The Walking Dead are all back! Lucifer, after a brief period of being officially cancelled, also will be back, as will Brooklyn Nine-Nine, buuut both of them only in 2019. Bummer. My fall sitcom palette will be pretty full nevertheless: Fresh Off the Boat, Modern Family, Superstore, The Good Place, and Mom are all wonderful returning shows you should all watch if you don’t already. Also, not on my fall 2017 list because it’s astonishingly been off air since spring 2017, but It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is also back for season 13! As for the talk show side of my list, The Graham Norton Show and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver are obvious mainstays, the first to always brighten my week and the second to make me think and roll my eyes in equal measure. Officially renewed but without return date so far are At Home with Amy Sedaris, Drunk History and Silicon Valley. They might make their comebacks in 2019 along with The Detour, Another Period, and Not Going Out, or maybe sooner. We’ll see.

But wait, it’s not over yet! There’s an unprecedented number of shows coming back for their very last seasons, or so it seems to me, but most of them won’t arrive until mid-season: iZombie, The 100, You’re the Worst, Mr. Robot, Gotham, and The Affair will all bow out around this time next year. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend won’t wait for so long and instead debut as early as October, whereas Agents of Shield’s fate is kinda still up in the air. Is it even the last season? Probably, but there’s always hope.

Add to that all the shows I managed to catch up on over the summer, and here’s how my preliminary table looks right now for the 2018-19 fall TV season:

NICE. Add to that all the new shows I’ll inevitably start and decide to keep watching, and it looks like I have a pretty full schedule! Obviously I won’t be able to review every single episode of every single series on the list, but I can certainly try to do my best!

See you in the comments!