NBC picks up three more dramas to make everyone as miserable as they feel right now

By Sean O'Neal | January 16, 2012 | 6:06pm

Aux Features TV

As evidenced by Bob Greenblatt’s elegy for an autumn at the TCAs, NBC is in a dark place these days, which could explain its recent fascination with monsters and monstrous scheduling decisions. The recent addition of Dracula to a slate crowded with Frankenstein, Hannibal Lecter, “edgy” Munsters reboots, and Dane Cook definitely speaks to the former, as does the slate of shows the network picked up over the weekend—particularly Do No Harm, a medical drama in which a “brilliant neurosurgeon” whose life is upended by his dangerous alter ego, and which is not explicitly described as a remake of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde presumably because ABC already has two of those in the works.

NBC is also hoping for some of that same creepy, slow-moving, Twin Peaks-aping atmosphere that The Killing used to such diminishing returns by prepping Midnight Sun, a remake of the Israeli series Pillars Of Smoke about the disappearance of a cult from an Alaskan commune. And for its third Western pick-up this development season, the network also gave the green light to The Frontier, a drama about a group of 1840s-era pioneers trying not to die along the journey from Missouri to California and most likely failing miserably. Next week, expect to see movement on a show where Greenblatt and his staffers just sit around listening to old Bauhaus records.