Joan Juliet Buck finds there is nothing they can't do -- live forever, raise the dead, or smite enemies with strange powers.

by Joan Juliet Buck, Vogue, September 2007

This season's shows all seem to center on the pathos of the lonely supergifted. We have cops with superior powers, a pie baker who can raise the dead, and two unwitting recipients of classified government information and priceless gizmos. None of these heroes is able to enjoy their power, feel pleasure, or know love; their loneliness is a little like the loneliness of Frankenstein or Tony Soprano, but because they are on network TV and not HBO, they are kindly and relieve their pain by fighting on the side of good and performing the occasional miracle. The writers had fun this season.

New Amsterdam (Fox) is elegant, romantic hokum. John Amsterdam is a handsome, mysterious New York City detective with a strange accent. He is more than 400 years old, a survivor of early Dutch Colonial times. Wounded in a battle, he was given eternal life by a female shaman from an Indian tribe until the day he should find his true love. He's played by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, a star in Denmark, and New Amsterdam is directed by Lasse Hallström. The series is nostalgic, which befits a man who has truly seen it all.

John Amsterdam cannot stay with any woman for long. He's physically invulnerable and relaxes by making the same fine tables that he made as a master craftsman a century or two ago. One day, as he chases a perp into a subway station, a woman steps off a train and his heart stops. Could it be Her? Amsterdam crashes to the ground. The woman, who is a doctor, kneels by him but fails to save his life. Time of death is declared, and he's wheeled into the morgue. But Amsterdam revives and escapes back to his job as a homicide cop. He will now chase murderers and try to track down his true love. The criminals won't hurt him, but love will kill him.

The notion that love kills also drives Pushing Daisies (ABC), a fantasy about a pie baker (Lee Pace) who can bring the dead back to live by touching them, but only at a terrible price; he can also kill with one touch. He has a sideline resuscitating murder victims long enough to ask them who did it (a question that was central to Raines, last year's now-dead Jeff Goldblum show). He uses his gift to bring his childhood sweetheart back from the dead, but if he even touches her, she will die all over again. The bouncy pilot is directed by Barry Sonnenfeld.

The sensual British actress Michelle Ryan plays Jaime Sommers in the drama Bionic Woman (NBC). She starts off soft and yielding, with big sensitive eyes and a passive sweetness, a part-time bartender and college dropout who is in charge of her bad-tempered little sister. Her besotted boyfriend is a professor, and he's driving when the cab of an eighteen-wheeler carrens into them. Jaime is rushed to a top-secret facility where the boyfriend -- "a genius" -- operates on her. She wakes to new transparent legs veined in gold, a new arm, and a bionic eye. The plot is as fractured as that of a summer movie. There's a previous bionic woman named Sarah Corvis, who turned feral -- or perhas just short-circuited -- in the prologue, bureaking the heart of her lover, Kim, one of the grim-faced, shadowy laboratory people. Sarah Corvis was the one who tried to eliminate poor Jaime, stalks her at the bar where she works, and shoots at her from a distant rooftop. Plot overload may kill off Bionic Woman before we find out the extent of her new powers.

Chuck (NBC), hero of the series of that name, is played by the engaging, sweet Zachary Levi. He is a helpless dweeb, employed as part of the "Nerd Herd" at a store called Buy More. But a friend of his from college, a renegade CIA operative, sends him an E-mail with all of the agency's knowledge encoded into images, and once he's absorbed all the info in the fateful E-mail, he's a marked man. A blonde from the CIA materializes: Is she friend, foe, love interest, hit woman, or all of the above? Chuck has a nice snarky edge with a message that hints at a kind of rebellion. It will be gadgets versus free will once more.

In Life (NBC), the hero is Charlie Crews -- an LAPD cop wrongfully imprisoned for twelve years and released with a whopping payoff. He goes back to work for the police, now promoted to investigating murders. He owns a mansion, a great car, and an orange grove. He's played by the witty British actor Damian Lewis, whose red hair signifies unruly passions and whose tight mouth lets us know that there's more to him than meets the eye. His special powers come from the wisdom he's attained in stoic endurance during his prison years. His colleagues mock his constant spouting of pronouncements that ow as much to The Power of Now as to Lao-tzu, but he has a way with witnesses and criminals. Unlike John Amsterdam [of the FOX series New Amsterdam], who has 400 years of experience, Crews is missing a decade of technological advances in consumer products and is astonished by cell-phone cameras, Google, and instant messages. His partner, Dani Reese, has a dark little rehab past, but Charlie Crews is addicted only to fresh fruit. Lewis has just the right Brit-as-American grumpiness to give the character even more fun flaws than Hugh Laurie brings to Gregory House in House, and the series has a good chance at worming its way into our lives.

Caption: Don't look now: In Life, Damian Lewis, as Charlie Crews, just before his tractor hits his car.