It’s that time of the year when the American networks start letting us know what we’ll be scouring bit-torrent sites to download for the rest of the year.

NBC – home of the inestimable Heroes has confirmed a second season of the hit show – no surprise – but also that intermingled with the regular show will be episodes of a spin-off called Heroes: Origins – a series of one-off adventures set in the Heroes universe featuring previously unseen characters. One of those characters will be selected by the audience to return in the third season. Cool.

NBC’s SF will also include two new hour-longs well 44 minutes what with those damn adverts) Journeyman (about a newspaper reporter “who inexplicably begins to travel through time and change people’s lives”. Okay, it sounds like Quantum Leap, but it does feature Kevin McKidd who was the dog’s bollocks in Rome. Another Brit will front NBC’s other new SF show. Bionic Woman will (somewhat inexplicably) star Michelle Ryan who (apparently) used to be in EastEnders. The only thing I can see that this has going for it is that David Eick – the producer of the new BSG – is also on board Bionic Woman.

Fox, meanwhile, will also give a start to two new sf hour-long shows this year. The Sarah Connor Chronicles tells the story of the Terminator movie’s mother of the revolution between episodes two and three of the movie series. David Nutter (Smallville, Supernatural) directed the pilot by writer Josh Friedman (The Black Dahlia, War of the Worlds). The best news about this is that Summer Glau of Firefly/Serenity plays a terminator called Cameron (geddit!).

Fox’s other new genre show is New Amsterdam, about a 400 year old cop in New York. Why? What? Huh?

Fox might yet pick up Them – based on the graphic novel Six – for mid-season – it’s a show about an “extraterrestrial sleeper cell that goes native” – actually in the Michael Avon Oeming graphic novel they’re from another dimension, and the book is weirder than I can imagine a Fox show doing justice to.

ABC, meanwhile is offering Pushing Daisies – from Bryan Fuller. I have to confess I loved Fuller’s work on both the first season of Dead Like Me and the half season of Wonderfalls that eventually appeared on DVD, so I have high hopes for this, but the premise (a comedy about an investigator who can reanimate the dead, but only for a few seconds) sounds absurd – as well as oddly familiar. Didn’t Torchwood have something like this? Who’d steal and idea from Torchwood?

Sci-Fi Channel in the US are going to bring back Eureka for a second season – a show which I came to like in a “not committed to sitting and down and seeing every episode but not turning over if one happened to be on” kind of way. They’ve also committed to 22 hour-long episodes of Flash Gordon – staring Eric Johnson (?) and produced by Robert Halmi Snr & Jnr (who were behind the atrocious Tales of Earthsea adaptation Sci-Fi broadcast a couple of years ago). Don’t look for anything like a BSG revamp, this looks set to be aiming for silly rather than smart.

More interesting (and by that I mean potentially disastrous) from Sci-Fi is a six-hour mini-series called Tin Man (working title) which is a “wildly re-imagined fantasy take on Frank Baum’s classic book, The Wizard of Oz” due to hit screens in the US in December. With Zooey Deschanel, Alan Cumming and Richard Dreyfuss all cast, it sounds interesting but once again the presence of the Halmis as producers dampens expectations and details of the production – the Scarecrow will be called Glitch and will have half his brain missing, Lion will be called Raw “a powerful wolverine like creature” and the Tin Man will be called Cain and be a heroic former policeman and they’ll all follow DG (!!) on her journey through the Outer Zone (OZ – see what they did there?) to meet the Mystic Man. Jesus. H. Christ. On. A. Bike.