Heroes — It’s time to stick a fork in it…
As much as it pains me to say this, I can’t continue to write weekly reviews or comments about Heroes anymore. After the incredibly entertaining first 
season, I was giving season two some slack. Like many fans I was chalking up a lot of the issues to the writer’s strike. I see now that this was way off the mark. The issues facing this show run much deeper than the writer’s strike or any single writer.
A recent interview with the creator of Heroes yielded a fairly surprising admission.
I’m not reporting this as news, but I would like to hold up for inspection a quote from series creator Tim Kring. Thanks to Aint It Cool News that reported this interview with Kring at the 2008 Screenwriter’s Expo:
“I was primarily fascinated by the origin story. Once the original story is over, and the character has no more questions about what’s happening or existential drama, then the questions become just about plot, and then it becomes harder for me personally to connect to.”
So there we have the series creator basically saying that he lost interest in his own material. As soon as the origin stories wrapped the show suddenly became choppy and boring finally transitioning into outlandishness.
During the course of series two and now into series three we have subplots that are developed briefly and dropped without explanation, new characters constantly being introduced then forgotten about and main story arcs that build, disappear, then suddenly snap back to the forefront.
Through season one, we saw the characters change in a well crafted manner similar to how Lost has so expertly managed the emotional voyages with it’s characters. It’s a very satisfying journey to suddenly realize the character you despised most a dozen episodes ago is now the strongest hero or protagonist in the drama—as long as the character got there logically. Lost is genious at this character-based story telling. Heroes did it well early, but now the characters are simply empty robots and names that only make sense in the context of what this week’s 60 minutes needs them to be.
Granted, Hereos has never been quite as intellectually challenging as Lost, but it certainly rivaled it in pure entertainment value during the first year.
However, during this week’s episode I was positively bored silly. It’s not that the episode at its heart was boring, but ultimately, the show and the characters have pushed the audience, or at least me, so far away from the original vision that the disconnect is now almost completely insurmountable.
We’ve gone in our house from anxiously awaiting the start of Heroes at 9PM Mondays to waiting until 9:30 and starting it on the DVR so we can zip through the commercials and just get it over with quick. We did this yesterday and somehow our DVR stopped recording 5 or 10 minutes before the end of the episode. By this time the live broadcast was over. My wife and I had the initial reaction of “Damnit!” I said that I guess we could go online and catch the end of it. Then I think we both realized that we didn’t care enough to expend the effort.
After the first season wrapped they took a wrong turn. The show should have hired good drama writers. Instead, they completely dropped the story and character drama in favor of childish and outrageous twists and turns, inconsistent characterizations, and aimless and simplistic story arcs.
If I look over the past few years of Battlestar Galactica in comparison I see a great Science Fiction drama. However, those characters and those situations are rooted in timeless moral, ethical and cultural struggles. You could rework the basic story and characters from Galactica with minor changes and make it a period piece set in the ancient Roman Empire. You could put it anywhere and in any time and it would work because when the end credits of Galactica roll I’m left contemplating what’s going to happen to the people. Maybe I got old and boring, but with Galactica you have a soap opera wrapped up in a package that an 18-40 year-old male is not embarrassed to admit watching.
With Heroes it’s become just a matter of what can we have the characters do this week? No development, no character drama, only increasingly outrageous situations that the writers are hoping will intrigue the audience. It’s absolutely the worst example of what cut-rate pulp science fiction can be.
If Kring really cares about the future of the show, and quite honestly I’m not sure he does, then he needs to bring some top rate drama writers with no ties to sci-fi or fantasy and tell them to write 13 scripts about the people.
Last night’s episode ended with everyone losing their powers. I seriously doubt that this will last long, but maybe if it did, that would hold promise.
Kring’s new imaginary writing staff should be told that for the first 13 episodes of season four, none of the characters have powers. We’ve told the stories about the birth of these characters abilities, now write us a story about these people. Give me a solid foundation and consistent development. In the second half of the season we figure out how to start building the drama of their powers returning around a solid story about the people.
It’s a true tragedy. One of the things that I really appreciate about the program is its consistent nods and reverence to some of the classics of the past. Casting George Takai and Nichelle Nichols from Star Trek was just a joy to watch. Even bringing William Katt in from Greatest American Hero made me grin with pleasure. Robert Forster was stroke of brilliant casting. All completely wasted, though.
For the time being, I can’t come up with 500 words a week to write about the show because it’s just become an embarrassment to watch.
I will continue to endure the pain through the end of the season, and if some miracle occurs I will be the first in line to say that show has hope again, but at this point I can’t remember ever watching a show ever die such a slow painful death week by week.
Technorati 
Del.icio.us 
StumbleUpon 
Digg 
Facebook 
Mixx 
Reddit
Tags: Heroes, TV Reviews
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
2 Responses to “Heroes — It’s time to stick a fork in it…”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
November 27th, 2008 at 6:19 pm
“I can’t remember ever watching a show ever die such a slow painful death week by week.”
I don’t know… the last few seasons of The X-Files were a bit of a trial, and it’s only habit that keeps me tuning in The Simpsons every Sunday. Always sad to watch a beloved show wither and die.
November 28th, 2008 at 5:35 pm
I would only debate a couple of these things:
1. The Simpsons occasionally pays off. Though, admittedly, I stopped watching regularly a while ago.
2. The X-Files has always gotten a bad rap for the last 2-3 seasons. I NEVER felt that is got that bad. Though it was much less consistent, there were still quite a few smashing Monster of the Week episodes even in the final season. Robert Patrick was a good casting choice and I think he prolonged the watchability of that show. There was good X-Files in every season.
Now with Heroes, I probably mis-wrote what I meant. While Simpsons has and is dying a slow horrible death like someone with a slowly progressing terminal disease, I should have said that Heroes got stunningly and staggeringly bad overnight. The real tragedy is that not only did it get bad in season 2, they fucked it up SO badly that they laid the ground work to almost make the entire series unsavable. As it stands now, not only is it sub-par compared to season 1, it is terribly bad television. The only reason it has an audience are the handful of us that hope they can fix it, but ultimately, it has to rank as pretty damned near one of the worst hour long drama on television right now, if not in the bottom handful all time.