Heroes Writers Sacked - Show in Distress

Posted by ScuzzBuster

November 10, 2008

I’m going to put in my review of Monday November 10th’s Heroes before it airs. Here it is:
Uneven. Unthoughtful. Unexciting. Borderline insulting to the intelligence, at least to the majority of fans still left that really enjoyed the first season.

The show started a slide in the first 60 minutes of season 2 and it’s just gotten worse.
The good news is that NBC is finally recognizing that there is a serious problem and finally dropped the hammer on Jesse Alexander and Jeph Loeb, co-executive producers and head writers, shit-canning them earlier this month. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the slide in quality directly that lead to this, it was the fact the slide in quality finally lead to the fans voting with their remotes and turning off the show in massive numbers each week as season 3 has limped on.

While the change is great news –-the change that is, I’d rarely claim someone losing their job as “great”—it’s probably too late for Heroes unless they find someone to almost reboot it from scratch. My first suggestion would be to bring in Patrick Duffy to come out of the shower at the beginning of season 4 and casually announce that all of season 2 and 3 had been a dream. Beyond that, it’s going to take a cleansing by fire of this show to fix it.

The problem now is that even when we are given a new episode that isn’t totally awful, it’s in spite of this hot mess that’s been created with sloppy writing and uninspired storylines. We now have a program that took a fresh approach to the super-hero genre through it’s original 20 episodes or so and has turned it into a poorly scripted fantasy soap opera that has basically turned into a giant cock measuring contest to see which character this week can accumulate the powers that are closest to omnipotence.

The show has gotten horrifically sloppy. Characters powers have gotten so ridiculous that the writers are having to contrive situations to mute them to maintain any suspense, drama, or sense of peril for them, or even worse and more frequently, just simply ignoring these powers in circumstances where they could simply wave a hand or twitch a nose and bring the scene or situation to an immediate resolution.

The other mass failing of the program is the complete lack of understanding that by instilling virtually every character in the show with powers and multiple characters that can obtain or already have all the powers of all the characters rolled into one, you’ve completely taken away the uniqueness and personal struggle that they have. The power to heal suddenly becomes immortality. The power to steal suddenly becomes a game where virtually anyone on the show in any given week can become God. Any number of the main crew of this season’s Heroes could virtually destroy the planet with one swift stroke. It all adds up to a whole lot of meaninglessness.

For whatever it’s worth, the canning of the two writers says that NBC is probably willing to weather the sliding ratings through and probably order half or full season 4 to give it one last shot. To fix this thing, though, it’s going to take a napalm-style cleansing of this thing. They are going to somehow have to undo a lot of damage to bring this thing back to some semblance of an intriguing program again.

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