Talk > Anime/Sci Fi > Nearly 90 pilots... "especially heavy on the supernatural"

This year, nearly 90 pilots are battling for slots on the schedules of CBS, ABC, NBC, Fox, and the CW, all of which are desperate to replace aging hits and find those few breakout shows.

This year’s crop is especially heavy on the supernatural, imported formats (especially from Israel), period dramas (which range from the frontier era and the Gilded Age of Shonda Rhimes’ The Gilded Lilys to the 1980s of Sex and the City prequel The Carrie Diaries), remakes and prequels (Mockingbird Lane! Hannibal! The Carrie Diaries!), Beauty and the Beast (there’s not one but two competitive projects based on the fairy tale), and—oddly enough—a fascination with cults, which turn up in several pilots.

Elementary looks good, but I'll watch anything with Jonny Lee Miller in it after two great seasons of Eli Stone. A modern-day Sherlock Holmes solving crimes with the NYPD should be fun.

Edit: Only 3 episodes per season, is that correct?

666 Park Avenue from Warner Bros. Television and Alloy Entertainment, is based on the Gabriella Pierce book. The series revolves around a young couple who manages one of the most historic apartment buildings in New York City -- which happens to be the spot of supernatural occurrences that complicate and endanger the lives of the building's occupants.

Dave Annable, Vanessa Williams, Terry O'Quinn and Mercedes Masohn are among the stars of the series.

Last Resort, meanwhile, revolves around the renegade crew of a nuclear submarine who go on the lam after being given a sketchy order to deploy their weapons. The crew then declare themselves the world's smallest sovereign nation with nuclear capability.

The series, from "The Shield"'s Shawn Ryan, stars Andre Braugher as the crew's captain and comes from Sony Pictures Television.

A young Carrie Bradshaw, a DC Comics archer, and a beauty and beast are among the new faces you'll see on the CW next season: The network announced five new dramas Friday that include the "Sex and the City" prequel "The Carrie Diaries," "Arrow," and an update on the CBS drama "Beauty and the Beast" starring "Smallville" veteran Kristin Kreuk.

The network's other two new shows are the medical drama "First Cut" and "Cult," about a dark TV show that draws legions of violently obsessed fans.

[...] Still uncertain is the fate of the "Hunger Games"-esque pilot "The Selection," which follows a young girl chosen to compete for the hand of a prince in a war-torn nation.

Elementary looks good, but I'll watch anything with Jonny Lee Miller in it after two great seasons of Eli Stone. A modern-day Sherlock Holmes solving crimes with the NYPD should be fun.

NBC gets into the sprawling serialized drama game with Revolution, from creator Eric Kripke (Supernatural), director Jon Favreau (Iron Man) and executive producer J.J. Abrams (Lost), which imagines a world in which all forms of energy have ceased to exist. Set years after a destructive incident in which the entire planet went dark, the dystopian drama revolves around a group of characters who set out to reunite with missing loved ones and solve a global mystery: what caused the blackout and who was behind it?

In this twisty psychological thriller, based on Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, gifted Boston neurosurgeon Jeffrey Kohl (Steven Pasquale) tries to contain his violent and maniacal alter ego, who threatens once again to throw his professional and personal life into chaos. After five years of successfully containing "Ian Price," Kohl learns that his alter ego has build up a tolerance to the drug treatment that has kept him in check... as Ian unleashes his revenge on Kohl.

Hands down one of the best pilot scripts of the season, Vegas (formerly known as Ralph Lamb), created by Nicholas Pileggi (Goodfellas) and Greg Walker (Three Rivers) and directed by James Mangold (3:10 to Yuma) tells the real-life story of Ralph Lamb (Dennis Quaid), a rancher who became known as the "cowboy sheriff" of Las Vegas in the 1960s. Under his leadership, he merged the police force and sheriff's department into one law-enforcement agency, tangling with local thugs, Hell's Angels, and mobsters, each of whom was looking for a piece of the Vegas dream. Quaid is joined by Jason O'Mara, Carrie-Anne Moss, Michael Chiklis, Taylor Handley, James Russo, Michael Reilly Burke, and Michael O'Neill.

In thriller Zero Hour, Anthony Edwards (ER) stars as Hank Foley, the editor of Modern Skeptic magazine who has spent 20 years debunking various conspiracy theories and urban legends. But when his wife Laila (Jacinda Barrett) is abducted from her antique clock store, Hank gets pulled into a centuries-old mystery, one that has roots in a Doomsday device coveted by the Nazis during World War II and kept secret by a clandestine group of priests. What is it about a set of seemingly innocuous clocks that has one man ruthlessly killing anyone he comes in contact with to obain? And just where does the treasure map he's unearthed lead? The far-flung adventure, created by Paul Scheuring (Prison Break), finds Hank teaming up with an FBI agent to track down Laila and get to a powerful force that could change the fate of humanity before his adversary does.

It's hard to describe the CW's psychological thriller Cult, from creator Rockne S. O'Bannon (Farscape) and executive producer Josh Schwartz (Chuck), because the premise is pretty trippy in itself. There's a show-within-the-show which is also called Cult, and which may be linked to the deaths and disappearances of several people who watch the show, viewers who become obsessed with the show's Lost-like mythology and the central figure, Billy Grimm (Robert Knepper). But Billy Grimm is just a character, played by actor Roger Reeves. Right? Or he is a disembodied boogeyman? Or are people preying on Cult viewers and driving them insane? These are some of the questions raised within the pilot episode, in which blogger Jeff Sefton (Matthew Davis) investigates the disappearance of his Cult-obsessed brother and teams up with a production assistant (Jessica Lucas) who works on the show in order to uncover just what is going on. Alona Tal (Veronica Mars) also stars.