Fall 2012’s Returning Favorite TV Stars… Before They Were Stars

Once upon a time, Neil Patrick Harris was a fresh-faced doctor who was one of the world’s first bloggers on the side. These days, though, he’s a reformed womanizing Manhattanite who we’re still not quite sure we believe is ready to settle down. The last season of How I Met Your Mother ended with Harris’s Barney Stinson finally walking down the aisle… though the show still has to show the events that brought him to his particular bride.

Michael C. Hall has had something of a dream career for any aspiring TV actor. After a successful five-year run on Six Feet Under came to an end in 2005, Hall barely took a breath before diving into the title role of a complex, vigilante serial killer on Showtime’s Dexter in 2006. Now he is about to enter his seventh season as Dexter Morgan, and it seems like he still can’t take a breath. After all, this season proves to be the most complicated for both Hall and his character, as the truth about Dexter finally comes out—and to the one person he feared being exposed to the most.

Mark Harmon was already a household name before NCIS premiered on CBS in 2003. This certainly helped the backdoor pilot for NCIS—which was really just an arc on JAG—take off after all. Harmon’s NCIS role of special agent Leroy Gibbs is one he has owned since 2003, and this upcoming tenth season proves to be no different. Things get extremely heated and personal for Harmon and Gibbs in the season opener, when the team hunts down Harper Dearing (played by Richard Schiff).

Though Lea Michele graduated from New Jersey's Tenafly High School in 2004, her Glee counterpart Rachel Berry only recently graduated from Lima, Ohio’s fictional McKinley High School and headed east, to the area of Michele’s own upbringing. In season 4 of Glee, Michele and Berry will be seen trying to “make it after all” in the Big Apple.

Joshua Jackson has grown up nicely since his days of love triangles down at the creek (Dawson’s Creek). In fact, he has grown up so much, he now has a daughter in the fifth and final season of Fringe, returning to Fox this fall. That’s right, last season saw a very special episode in which the series jumped forward in time to reveal what had become of the Fringe Division, and Jackson’s Peter Bishop met his adult daughter for the first time. Jackson has been taken on a roller coaster of emotional acting during his run on Fringe—from learning he is of another universe, to not being recognized by any of his loved ones, and now this. With only 13 episodes to go before Jackson says good-bye, we’re betting all of those things were just the tip of the iceberg.

Joel McHale was best known for being the sardonic host of pop culture news program The Soup—or maybe for his early millennial Burger King commercials—when he took the role of Jeff Winger on NBC’s Community. These days, though, it’s hard to remember a time before there was Winger, who brought us such gems as McHale playing pool in short shorts, reliving a childhood trauma over a foosball table, and delivering many a classic speech on friendship. The fourth season of Community promises to dive deeper into McHale’s range with the exploration of Winger’s absentee father… and probably some more romantic tension with Annie (Alison Brie).

Iam Somerhalder is one smooth-talking supernatural being! The star of the CW’s The Vampire Diaries has endeared fans to his ageless Damon Salvatore through his brooding eyes and wicked crooked smile, but what makes the vampire even more lovable is the genuine emotion he carries deep within him. Some may say that a vampire is the ultimate bad boy, but this particular one actually carries a lot of good intentions—including keeping those he cares about safe. (The fact that he cares about anyone at all should say something about his evolution too.) Now that his beloved Elena has been turned herself, he should be put to the test further in the upcoming fourth season.

The road to Revenge is a rocky one, but it barely seems that way for Emily VanCamp, who held her own in a series of supporting dramatic roles (Everwood, Brothers & Sisters) before taking the lead in ABC’s breakout prime-time soap opera from last season. As Emily Thorne, VanCamp was put to the test by having to play a woman constantly on guard and always covering her true emotions. The second season of the scandalous series proves to test the actress and her character even further, as secrets about Thorne's family get unburied and new love interests and foes alike cross her path.

Every teenager who grew up identifying with Angela Chase has to feel some kind of vindication now that her portrayer Claire Danes has returned to television as an adult actor in one of the strongest, most mature roles available for women working in the medium today. On Homeland, Danes gets to use a combination of her book smarts and street smarts and, yes, her innate intuition, to bring down the bad guys. Though the second season starts out slowly (after her electroshock therapy, Danes’s Carrie legitimately doesn’t remember the Isa connection and just wants to forget the rest of her Brody “mistake”), but it takes no time at all for her spark to come back, solidifying just how good she really is at this job.

Starring as Leslie Knope on NBC’s Parks and Recreation, Amy Poehler has been responsible for turning an abandoned pit into an empty lot (hopefully it will become a brand-new park by series' end), creating the Pawnee Goddesses (a troop that would put the Girl Scouts to shame), leading her team of lazy government employees to revive the Harvest Festival, and publishing a history of her town so extensive the local community college could use it as a textbook. Season 5, however, is sure to see Poehler and Knope’s greatest accomplishment, as Knope takes her seat on the city council to bring about real change to her little neck of Indiana.