Summer TV preview 2018: 12 shows to get you excited about the season of sun

Katherine Heigl joins Suits in its eighth season as Samantha Wheeler, a fierce and enigmatic lawyer who, as the actress puts it, “muscles her way” into Suits‘ central law firm, Specter Litt, in the wake of Mike Ross (Patrick J. Adams) and Rachel Zane’s (Meghan Markle) departure.

Needless to say, her new co-workers don’t respond too kindly to her at first, particularly Donna (Sarah Rafferty), who has always prided herself on her ability to read people.

“The fact that Donna can’t quite put her finger on Samantha is really fun to play,” says Heigl, 39. “Our first scene together was just like that—she’s trying to figure out Samantha, and Samantha’s not really giving much of anything away.”

Premieres July 18 at 9 p.m. ET on USA.

Sissy Spacek and André Holland star in this new anthology series based on the works of Stephen King.

Co-creators Sam Shaw and Dustin Thomason aim to take the author’s (arguably) most terrorized Maine locale and, um, terrorize it further.

Their vision is a Fargo-like series in which each season matches King’s tone and aesthetic, plucking characters and settings directly from his work.

“The germ of the idea was to think about the kinds of people who have the grit to stick it out in a place that’s been terrorized over and over again,” Thomason says of the town of Castle Rock. “Who stays in a place like that?”

Launches July 25 on Hulu.

Can anyone really have it all? That’s what Kat (Aisha Dee), Jane (Katie Stevens), and Sutton (Meghann Fahy) are asking themselves in the second season of their Freeform drama.

Jane ended last season by leaving Scarlet for a new gig.

“It was really fun to throw Jane, who’s had this amazing mentor in Jacqueline, into a situation where all of a sudden she didn’t have that,” new showrunner Amanda Lasher says of season 2.

As for the other girls, Kat returns from her trip with girlfriend Adena (Nikohl Boosheri)—who’s meeting the parents this year!—while Sutton has to ask herself if she can be with Richard (Sam Page) and be successful.

“Sutton is going to make a bold decision that will have fallout for her throughout the season,” Lasher teases.

June 12 at 8 p.m. ET on Freeform.

“How have you been able to find love, maintain love, thrive in your business and individual dreams, and build a family?”

Those are queries Mara Brock Akil, 49, and her husband, Salim Akil, 54, have heard for years.

Now the power couple behind Being Mary Jane and Black Lightning are providing “an honest answer to a sincere question” by pulling back the curtain on their 20-year love story with Love Is ___, their almost autobiographical drama starring Yasir (Will Catlett) and Nuri (Michele Weaver).

“[It’s] two kids from different economic brackets, different upbringings, coming together and recognizing each other and knowing that they can build something together, but also become better people individually,” says Brock Akil.

Debuts June 19 at 10 p.m. ET on OWN.

This new series adapts of Sydney Pollack’s 1975 feature, Three Days of the Condor, into a 10-episode TV show.

“I wanted to create something free of attachments,” she says of the ruthless investigator character, Marty Frost—one of the series’ new creations.

For Marty, disrupting the CIA’s boys’ club (led by William Hurt) means commandeering a case involving young agency analyst Joe Turner (Max Irons), whose anti-terrorism algorithm thwarts a villain’s (Brendan Fraser) plot to mount a chemical attack on U.S. soil, but also stirs a hornet’s nest of government secrecy and manipulated news.

All of this makes the show an “effective mirror” for our times, observes Sorvino, 50.

Debuts June 6 at 10 p.m. on Audience.

Adapted from Gillian Flynn’s hit novel of the same name, Amy Adams stars on Sharp Objects as Camille, a crime reporter fresh out of a psych hospital for her years of self-harm, who returns to her hometown to investigate the murders of two little girls.

In the limited series, Adams is gritter than we’ve ever seen her.

“It’s counterprograming, and it creates all this great internal confusion because Amy is this ray of light,” says creator Marti Noxon. “I had read Sharp Objects while I was going through my divorce. I was going through a lot of dark stuff. I’ve wrestled with addiction and eating disorders on and off throughout my life, and I was in a dark place, and I really related to Camille. After picking up the book, I just couldn’t shake her.”

Debuts July 8 at 8 p.m. ET on HBO.

Season 2 of The Sinner will star Carrie Coon (instet) instead of Jessica Biel (who still serves as an EP on the series).

But, like its first iteration, The Sinner still follows a single crime—in this case, an 11-year-old boy has inexplicably murdered his parents—and uncovers the killer’s motive through flashbacks and a police investigation, led once again by Bill Pullman’s Detective Ambrose.

Showrunner Derek Simonds hesitates to describe Coon’s character, Vera.

“There’s very little I can say because understanding her is a part of some of the reveals along the way,” he says apologetically. “She holds a lot of secrets, and she’s deeply, personally involved with the events of the crime. I’ll just say she’s a very formidable, complex woman.”

Premieres in August on USA.

Aubrey Joseph and Olivia Holt star on Freeform’s upcoming New Orleans-set series, which follows Tandy Bowen (Holt) and Tyrone Johnson (Joseph), two teenagers who discover that a childhood event left both of them with powers they can’t explain.

Tandy can sense people’s hopes and throw light daggers from her hands, while Tyrone can sense people’s fears and teleport. Together they can save their city.

Well, once they figure out how to be teenagers.

“Even though they’ve been forced to grow up because of everything they’ve been through, they’re still kids and they’re still finding themselves,” Joseph says.

Adds Holt, “The things that both Tandy and Tyrone are going through are what kids in 2018 are going through.”

Except for the superpower part of it all, of course, but they’ve got each other for that.

“They’re the answers to each other’s questions,” Holt says.

Debuts June 7 at 8 p.m. ET on Freeform.

Chenoweth joins season 2 of this comedy as an heiress accused of murdering her husband.

“Her clothes are as good as Lisa Vanderpump’s, and her comedy pays homage to Carol Burnett and Madeline Kahn,” says Chenoweth, 49.

And she sings.

“There are some Julie Andrews, um, sounds. So talk about playing everything I ever dreamed!”

Premieres July 19 at 9 p.m. ET on NBC.

Get ready to see Julianna Margulies like you’ve never seen her before.

On Dietland, the actress plays Kitty Montgomery, the glamorous and ambitious executive at Austen Media, where she oversees many magazines—including the one where our heroine Plum (Joy Nash) works.

“Isn’t she incredible?” creator Marti Noxon — who adapted the series from the 2015 Sarai Walker novel — says of Margulies. “She was excited by Kitty. She wanted to play someone delicious. She simply ate it up. But it’s also Julianna, so you still love her—which is what I wanted. Any great villain is someone you still want to be around all the time. She embodies that quality of ‘Come here, I have something really great and naughty to tell you.'”

Debuts June 4 at 9 p.m. ET on AMC.

Carlton Cuse and Graham Roland are both longtime fans of Tom Clancy’s CIA superstar Jack Ryan, so the former Lost colleagues jumped at the chance to create a brand-new adventure for the iconic action hero.

“It’s sort of a prequel to the versions of him that you meet in the movies and books,” Cuse says of their eight-episode series, which follows Jack Ryan in the “critical moment where he goes from being an analyst to being an operative in the CIA.”

Following in the footsteps of Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck, and Chris Pine is John Krasinski (with Wendell Pierce).

“One of the things that separates Jack Ryan from James Bond or Jason Bourne is that he’s infinitely more relatable,” says Roland. “There’s a level of Everyman in the character, which I think John has in him as well.”

Kraskinski’s Jack works with a CIA team that includes Pierce, Timothy Hutton, and Mena Massoud (a.k.a. the lead of Disney’s upcoming live-action Aladdin). Abbie Cornish costars as Jack’s doctor fiancée, and The Looming Tower‘s Ali Suliman plays the season’s big bad.

“The movies are Jack Ryan-centric, but the novels have all these great characters woven into the narrative,” says Roland. “The show is very much like that.”

Launches Aug. 31 on Amazon Prime.

In his first series-regular role, Kevin Costner plays John Dutton, a widower who owns and operates a massive Montana ranch named Yellowstone.

He runs his sprawling empire with the help of his children: brassy businesswoman Beth (Kelly Reilly), anxious attorney Jamie (Wes Bentley), and he-men herders Lee (Dave Annable) and Kayce (Luke Grimes). Together they struggle to stave off greedy politicians, developers, and local Native tribes who want a piece of the Dutton family’s very big pie.

“[Yellowstone] is being assaulted from all different directions, and not in the way the generations before had ever seen,” says Costner, 63. “Those before [John] were always able to arbitrate their problems in really violent ways. They weren’t used to having lawyers or PR people or political people or environmental people get in their lives.”

Debuts June 20 at 9 p.m. ET on Paramount Network.