KILLER ROLE: Actor Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter in scene from the film Red Dragon. Source: Supplied
SUPERNATURAL thrillers and serial killers feature prominently in the more than 90 TV drama series pilots in commission by the big US networks.
A haunted New York apartment block, a murderer who gathers an army of serial killers, the return of Hannibal Lecter and a modern-day Sherlock Holmes strutting around Manhattan, will all be competing to make it to air this year.
The pilot season in the US - where networks commission TV producers to go off and create "sample" one-off episodes of their story pitches - annually attracts a flood of young Australian actors to Los Angeles hoping to be cast.
Already Rebel Wilson has scored her own pilot, backed by talkshow host Conan O'Brien as executive producer, and Aussie actors Daisy Betts, Dichen Lachman and Dan Lissing have signed on for the US nuclear submarine thriller Last Resort.
Longtime America-based Anthony LaPaglia will head Americana, while Portia de Rossi tries for another TV hit with The Smart One, and Rachael Taylor will climb out from under the wreck of last year's axed Charlie's Angels for the chiller 666 Park Avenue - which sounds the most promising of the supernatural-infused pilots.
It will share scare space with Gotham, in which a New York policewoman discovers an unseen world within the metropolis; Hannibal (already picked up for a 13-episode season), which puts the serial-killer cannibal back on the streets; as well as the futuristic Beautiful People, where mechanical servants begin to rebel.
This year, the US has again gone dipping into the successful UK TV gene pool looking for a trans-Atlantic translation that works.
Long-running British sitcom Only Fools and Horses - which starred David Jason - gets a US makeover.
John Leguizamo and Dustin Ybarra will play the two brothers who, along with their grandfather, concoct a series of ridiculous get-rich-quick schemes.
And the UK modern-day Sherlock series - with Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman - will be re-imagined (again) as Elementary with Jonny Lee Miller as Holmes and Lucy Liu as Watson.
Of course, there are a few pitches that sound mightily familiar as they try to coat-tail recent hits on TV or film.
Shelter is based on rivalries and romances between staff and guests at a historic New England summer resort. Been there, done that with Hotel.
Also trawling old ground are Notorious, in which a female detective goes undercover as a maid's daughter to solve a murder in the wealthy family home in which she was raised; The Carrie Diaries, which features a younger Carrie Bradshaw from Sex and the City stepping into the limelight as she comes of age in the 1980s; and Save Me, starring Anne Heche as a woman who starts to believe that she is channelling God after she has an accident, which sounds like Enlightened or perhaps Heche Almighty.
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