It’s time to say goodbye to Heroes. Now I know what you’re all thinking, “But Grey! It’s already canceled! It’s over! It can’t hurt your brain with its logical fallacies anymore!” This is true, it can’t. The beast is dead, or so it seems.
Heroes was canceled last week, and I have already danced gleefully on its fresh grave. The show was a bane of my existence in that I hated it so much, so very, very much, but I could not stop watching it. Not because they had me sucked in, but because I saw what the show could be and I kept watching it in hopes that it would reach something resembling it’s true potential. The same reason I’ve given to some runs in comics, and to be honest, I watched six seasons of Smallville, so I can watch damn near anything.
Alas, it never did, and now after the best effort the writers have put forth in that show since the first season done and wrapped up, it was too little too late. Heroes was an expensive show with horrible ratings, it had a decent cast with writers that never seemed to have a damn clue what they were doing. If something was buzzed about it became the main plot of the season until it lost its buzz, generally because people quit caring when you take a sub plot and make it a primary plot, and then they would just shift around. Characters and stories were reduced, reused, and recycled on the fly to the point where the show was becoming incredibly paint by numbers.
It was created as the networks answer to ABC’s megahit, “Lost”, a show with a giant ensemble cast and all kinds of cool plot twists and a ton of crap going on at once. Lost had already proven to be a huge success, and it was most definitely the time to counter program it. Heroes was their answer, you had a big ensemble cast, lots of plot twists, but instead of a smoke monster and plane crash people had super powers! And black ops government people tried to abduct them! And, to be honest, the first season they definitely batted in a home run, but while Lost’s first season was more like a three run homer, Heroes was more of a single run homer with a bunch of errors.
The chief error was ignoring one of the most important steps the Lost creators had followed when planning their show, you see, the guys over at Lost planned out an ending to the series. They knew about how long it would last, and what the inevitable conclusion would be, so from there it was just a matter of pacing out the seasons to lead into it. Heroes, on the other hand, didn’t plan past their first season. They blew their load, resolved all of their plots, and left very, very little to come back to in a second season…well, I mean, the characters were all still there, but it was all new plots.
Lost’s first season ended with them finding the hatch, which gave us my favorite character in the show, Henry Ian Cusick’s Desmond Hume (DES!). It left us with a big question….”What is in the hatch????” that got people through that summer until the next season began (not me, as I actually didn’t get into Lost until this past November when I found the first five seasons on Netflix). Heroes first season ended with Linderman dying, Sylar not killing everyone, and….well, they resolved all of their little subplots and gave us an “Everyone lives happily ever after” ending. The two cliffhangers? Sylar not being dead and Hiro being shuffled back into the past.
Which is more win? A mysterious hatch in the middle of the jungle and the raft group being attacked and Walt being kidnapped, or the bad guy not being dead and Hiro being sent to feudal Japan? Which of those feels less phoned in? Especially when I point out that Hiro was handled in a 30 second vignette at the end of the episode.
With season two, Lost continued telling its mystery, introducing us to Desmond, Ana Lucia, and the always awesome Mr. Eko. They deepened the story and gave us more and more and more, and they even gave us the Henry Gale story arc.
Heroes gave us time travel. Lots and lots of time travel. Hiro was in the past, the future was going wrong, there was a Latin chick with little acting ability with her homely ‘twin brother’ and her eyes killed people, and Sylar was powerless! And after eleven phoned in episodes? The season was over, and the fans universally realized something about Heroes. The writers didn’t know what was happening in the long term.
I’d tell you how the third and fourth seasons continued this trend, but I really don’t have to. Heroes never really managed to maintain a creative vision, they wrote it for the season, and they listened far too much to the internet.
Buzz characters is a term I use to describe more or less any character, in any medium, that debuts as a supporting character with no real long term plans, but fan reaction thrusts them to the center of the spotlight. It’s not a bad thing, I mean, anyone who watches Family Guy no doubt loves Glen Quagmire, The Evil Monkey, Herbert the pedophile, and The Giant Chicken that fights Peter. Buzz characters one and all, they were initially created for one note jokes but people loved them so much that they are incredibly centric characters. The show wouldn’t be the same without them.
When Heroes launched they passed off the feeling that Peter, Nathan, Hiro, Mohinder, and Matt were the main characters, with Clair and Nikki/Jessica on the support. Sylar was always intended to the bad guy, and Noah Bennett (then known as Mr. Bennett or HRG) was expected to be killed off relatively early. But people liked Noah, and he wound up becoming the big hero of the show….even if he was a prick. And people loved the cheerleader, so they made her the cornerstone of the entire show where everything worked around her and she was easily the most important character on the show. The problem was that in long doses they were painfully uninteresting. Hayden Panettiere went from cute to grating really, really quickly, to the point now where I can’t tolerate her presence in anything…..so at least she doesn’t do anything that gets good reviews.
They put too much faith in their buzz characters, they saw the internet rumbling about how much they liked a character, so they force fed the character to us until we stopped liking them at all. In the first season Hiro was fun, and was a great comic relief with his own naiveté. By the end of the show his “YA-TA!”‘s were rage inducing and you wound up hoping for his death so it would stop. They over exposed him like so many other characters because he was, for a time, popular.
They wrote the show to try and garner higher marks from reviewers, to try and boost their ratings, and they really did everything but plan out a long term bible for the show. I mean, if I want to see a show about people with powers where shit just happens and there’s no long term payoff, then I’m just going to turn on Smallville. At least then I can yell at Superman for not flying.
Now, to be completely unfair, I’m going to saddle a bit of blame here on Jeph Loeb. He wrote and produced for the show, and for as much as I loved the Long Halloween, and I liked Superman/Batman, Ultimates 3 was horrible, Ultimatum was an abomination, and then…..Rulk. He’s a horribly inconsistent writer who follows simple formulas, sometimes to success, but often to mediocrity, and while I’ve never seen his Heroes scripts, the show began to watch like bad issues of his comics, and that…..failed to inspire confidence.
I was happy when I heard he was leaving the show, figuring that maybe it had a chance to pick back up. I watched the fourth season, and I gave it an open mind and….it still sucked. Sylar continued to bounce back and forth between if he was a hero or a villain. Clair continued to be the focal point of every episode, despite how boring her storylines were. Bennett kept being a morally ambiguous ‘good guy’, and Hiro kept pissing people off. Peter’s powers were all over the place as they couldn’t figure out how to balance them right and…..it was all too little too late.
They kept trying to bring the fans back to the show, but we just weren’t having it. We wanted something fresh, and new, and that would make us sit at the edge of our seats wanting more. I’m writing this right now between the last new Tuesday episode of Lost, and the two and a half hour Sunday night finale. I’ve lost about six hours of sleep so far staying up thinking about the show and what will happen. I’ve never thought about Heroes like that, there’s just nothing to think about. They didn’t engage their viewers in a way that they kept wanting to know more about what was going on. They created the online comics, and the alternate reality webgames and all of that, but Primatech Paper was a poor man’s outhouse when compared to the Lost Experience and the way they developed so much of the shows sub plots and organizations by way of the internet between seasons.
Alas, no amount of rambling can really change the bottom line. Heroes is over, whether a TV movie happens or not, as an ongoing serialized weekly episodic program, it’s done. Some will say it’s too late, others that it’s too early, but the ratings tell the story. It went from one of the highest rated shows on television to a complete ratings disaster, and it was a fault of the writing.
The only lesson to really take out of this is that people want an engrossing story that makes sense and doesn’t fall back too heavily on familiar plot twists. While the familiar is not always a bad thing, just because something worked before doesn’t mean that it will work again. Heroes, as a show, went back to the well too many times, and the viewers walked away. It’s a cautionary tale about how easy it is to fall from the top.
It’s like the WCW of episodic network TV.
The Gold Standard?
