What’s Dead
Two of the channel’s stalwart shows are being retired. Sons of Anarchy finished its sixth season in typically bloody fashion in December 2013 and will return for a seventh and final season late this year. There’s apparently also talks about a potential prequel set in the 60s. Justified has just concluded its fifth season and the sixth and final season will likely therefore air early next year.

What’s Back
American Horror Story reinvents itself each year, 2013 was Coven, looking at witches in the 1800s and modern day New Orleans. Season 4 will be Freak Show, set in the 1950s which sounds pretty good to me. The Americans is in the middle of a very enjoyable second series and has been renewed for a third, while the American adaptation of the Danish/Swedish The Bridge will start its second series in a couple of months. Archer is the channels adult animation and has been renewed for both a sixth and seventh season.

New Series:
The Strain (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvnsZcq3Nto, starts July): A plane lands at JFK with almost everybody dead and a team of doctors start investigating. Then the blurb is a bit vague but then there’s something about saving the city from “an ancient threat of humanity” and various sites mention vampires. It’s created, written and directed by Guillermo del Toro, so I’m going to watch no matter how generic the description sounds and how lacking in anything resembling content the trailer is.

Tyrant (starts June): Details are a bit thin on the ground but it appears to be about a fictional Middle Eastern country and the dictator’s son, who has been living by choice in America and is now being drawn back in. Could be interesting if carefully handled, but with no trailer or details it’s hard to know.