Everybody needs a hero, and everybody in television wants the next Heroes.

TV is infamously imitative and Heroes was the just-concluded season's buzz rookie. Ergo, about one in four of the 29 new series unveiled last month by the broadcast networks will feature characters with superhuman powers or some paranormal trait. To put this into perspective, there will be more Heroes knockoffs than new sitcoms, the genre that until recently has been the backbone of episodic television.

Each of the five networks will have at least one new series with a supernatural twist. NBC has only four freshmen; three fall into this category. The slumping Peacock is so enamored with the genre it is bringing back Bionic Woman, which wasn't a big hit the first time around, lasting only two seasons. Journeyman revolves around a newspaperman with the ability to time travel and change lives. The title character in Chuck is a computer techie who unwittingly downloads government secrets into his brain and becomes an international operative, as well as a pawn in an intramural skirmish between rival security agencies.

NBC's only conventional drama, Life, is standard cop boilerplate: An officer unjustly imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit gets out and returns to the force.

Relying on these high concepts more than star power, NBC has no big names in the casts of any of its rookie series. Combine this with a dearth of solid lead-ins, and it will be a challenge for any of the newcomers to attract a substantial sampling.

All of this undoubtedly contributed to Entertainment President Kevin Reilly losing his job only two weeks after rolling out his fall line.

CBS and Fox each have series that blend fantasy with romance. CBS's Moonlight is a fable about a guy who married a vampire and became one. He eventually comes to detest the ways of his spouse and now has eyes for a mortal woman. But his feelings for her are so strong he is reluctant to cajole her into his situation, so he continues to yearn for her from a safe distance.

In Fox's New Amsterdam, a 400-year-old New York detective (who doesn't look a day over 30) hides the secret that he was made immortal by the spell of an Indian princess, whose life he saved in 1642. The catch is, if he falls in love, he'll become mortal and die.

Pushing Daisies on ABC isn't far removed from these two. A young man has known since childhood he can resurrect the dead by touching them. His kryptonite is that if he touches them a second time, they return to the dead. This becomes a real conundrum when he brings back his childhood sweetheart, for whom he still carries a blazing torch.

The CW entrant into this genre, Reaper, is a shade lighter. A slacker discovers that his parents' response to a dire family emergency was to sell his soul to the devil. This forces him to become a sort of bounty hunter for Satan, tracking down escapees from Hell.