HBO take on the glamour and the sleaze of professional American football with their Entourage re-do, Ballers. Starring Dwayne Johnson as Spencer Strasmore, a retired athlete-turned-player agent, guiding their stars through the parties and the breakdowns en route to the top. Though Ballers looks like it’ll fall similarly short on the Bechdel test, Johnson brings a natural charisma that always felt out of reach on Entourage. Let’s just hope they manage to find a little depth and it’s not all surface when Ballers premieres on Sunday 21st June on HBO.

Mike Judge’s excellent tech scene satire, Silicon Valley, returns for a second season this spring. After wowing the judges during the season one finale’s TechCrunch event, season two will see Pied Piper founder Richard Hendriks have to make a business of the start-up, something that get more terrifying by the second. Starring Thomas Middleditch, TJ Miller, Zach Woods, Kumail Nanjiani, Martin Starr and Josh Brener, Silicon Valley returns Sunday 12th April on HBO.

A spin-off of AMC’s groundbreaking show, Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul follows lawyer James McGill (soon to be known as Saul Goodman) as his crooked firm fights cases for drug lords and criminals. Though Walt and Jesse aren’t expected to be involved with the first season, some familiar faces like fixer Mike Ehrmantraut will make a return with executive producer Peter Gould wanting Better Call Saul to stand on its own. The show takes place before the events of Breaking Bad, with creator Vince Gilligan involved here again. Better Call Saul premieres in two parts on February 8th and 9th on AMC.

Girls is back for a fourth season after a returning to form with season three earlier this year. Picking up as Hannah heads off to Iowa for a writing programme, things don’t seem to be going so well for the gang back in Brooklyn. As Adam faces a personal crisis, Marnie is still dating her bandmate who already has a girlfriend, Shoshanna can’t find a grown-up job and Jessa has yet to find a real purpose in life. Hopefully things get a little easier when Girls returns to HBO on Sunday 11th January.

Starring Frances McDormand and Richard Jenkins, Olive Kitteridge tells the poignantly sweet, acerbically funny and devastatingly tragic story of a seemingly placid New England town wrought with illicit affairs, crime and tragedy. Adapting Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name, the four-part mini-series is directed by Lisa Cholodenko (The Kids Are All Right) and produced by Tom Hanks’ Playtone. Olive Kitteridge is the fifth collaboration between Playtone and HBO in what has become a wonderfully fruitful partnership, catch the first two parts on November 2nd and the final two installments the following day, both at 9pm on HBO.

Since 1949, the Emmy Awards have been gripping television audiences across the world. The TV equivalent of the Academy Awards, the Primetime Emmy Awards, is a prestigious event that celebrate and reward excellence in US primetime programming. Show the rest of this post…

Starting off the season more battered and broken than ever, AMC have teased more of what’s to come when their breathing show, The Walking Dead, returns in the fall. Fighting their way to DC with an apparent cure, season five will chronicle the crew’s plight as they come up against some of their biggest challenges yet. Let the zombie killing commence on October 12th when The Walking Dead: Season 5 premieres on AMC.

From Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, adapting their own novel trilogy for TV, The Strain sees a plane land at JFK International Airport with the lights off and doors sealed. Dr. Ephraim Goodweather (Corey Stoll), the head of the Center for Disease Control Canary Team in New York City, is sent to investigate, finding two hundred corpes and only four survivors on board. Only when the bodies begin disappearing from morgues and a viral outbreak shows the hallmarks of an ancient strain of vampirism, Goodweather and his team are quickly embroiled in a battle to not only save themselves but their city and humanity itself. The Strain premieres July 13th on FX.