All That Nerdy Stuff » Heroes

Why Heroes was Cancelled–and Deserved It!

Jason Ward — Tue, 18 May 2010 07:14:52 +0000

I remember when I began watching the first season of Heroes, a little nervous of this seeming X-Men Lite show from the very beginning. But over the course of that first season I found that very shortly I could scarcely wait to watch the next episode as the mystery of the villanous Sylar and his role in destroying New York City unfolded. The show seemed to have everything it needed: an engrossing plot, a frighteningly powerful villain with a plan, a cute girl, comic relief, political tension, the mysterious Mr. Linderman, and of course, a character with the proper soul of a Hero, Peter. I’ve talked about Heroes before, of course, and like the show itself my hopes and thoughts for its future have fluctuated from the positive to the abysmal. So goes the nature of a show that nobody had a clear vision for, and as much as I sort of wish I was, I’m not remotely surprised that it’s now officially been cancelled by NBC.

So now the question is, why was Heroes cancelled? This is a topic that could go on forever, and I’ve already reviewed a few other blogs and media outlets dishing ever so briefly on the topic, so now I think it’s time I had a bit of say, myself.

1. Let’s start with the obvious: following the first season, the show failed to ever execute a cohesive, well-planned plot or villain again. Sylar, in season one, was a masterpiece of a television villain, played to near perfection by Zachary Quinto. Season 2 didn’t really have a villain at all, Season 3′s “Villains” arc suffered a similar fate (Arthur Petrelli was OK, but really just a crusty, much less intimidating retread of Sylar), and while Season 4′s Samuel character was an interesting character, he was a useless villain with an ability so lame that all anyone had to do was run away from him in order to take it away. And while it was clear early on that the writing team on the show really tried to make the final season much better, and to a large part they succeeded, there were simply too many other problems, which we’ll get to.

2. Character development. Perhaps only a little less annoying than its plot issues was the show’s character development, specifically because, there pretty much wasn’t any. By the end of the final season, Claire was still the same whiny, self-flagellating brat she’d been since season one, only by then it had gone from being the endearing mark of a character going through something new and scary, to that place where you’re just sick and tired of hearing her whine about being different. Come on, Claire, get over it and move on, already! The same was true of One-Note-Nathan, who like any living politician stereotype, wobbled endlessly between the side of good and the side of evil. By the time he died, I was glad to see him go, and a lot of other people were too. There are only so many times you can watch the same character flip-flop back and forth. Pick a damn side and let’s get on with it.

3. Meaningless deaths. In the first season, we got some real deaths, and they were pretty damn sad. Charlie, Isaac, Simone, all were reasonably well developed (less so in Charlie’s case, but she was developed very well in a short space) and that worked out. Unfortunately, nobody ever died and stayed dead again after that. Charlie ended up being brought back during the fourth season, which really served no greater purpose than to ruin the original story’s sadness; Nathan, even after being killed in season 3′s finale, kept right on coming back to life via Sylar in season 4; Nikki, the show’s most annoying character from the very first episode, came back as a clone. Time after time, characters were shot, beaten, maimed and blown to smithereens, only to somehow return again. If there are no real death stakes, what’s the point of killing the character at all?

4. Stakes and consequences. The stakes rarely got any bigger on Heroes, either in the sense of devastating plots or in the sense of transformational character events. No, Arthur draining off Peter’s powers does not count. What characters needed were life-altering events like you’d find on better shows such as Angel or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which was unilaterally a superior Superhero show to Heroes. There, we watched the writers do horrific things to established, recurring characters, killing off some, utterly reshaping the character of others. No character on Heroes ever faced stakes where they would have no choice but to cut down the person they love the most in order to save the world. No character on Heroes ever fell in love only to have that loved one brutally murdered before their eyes. And when Heroes characters died and returned, there was no price to pay, no shift in the balance of the world’s power, no consequences. When Buffy died while saving the world and was (months later) resurrected, there were consequences first for her character, which was fundamentally transformed by the trauma of death and bliss of Heaven, and later for an entire season as her return had triggered a shift in the balance of the world’s power that ultimately lead to the deaths of several of her allies and goodness knows how many additional innocents. Heroes never played with stakes like that.

5. Lack of advance planning. Heroes creator Tim Kring has said publicly that they do not plan the series very far in advance, preferring to write by the seat of their pants so as to always introduce new story possibilities. I suppose as theories go, that’s all well and good, but it’s still no excuse for not establishing an overall framework for where your story will go. How can you possibly write a series that says something if you don’t have anything in mind you want to say? And therein lay perhaps the root of Heroes’ problems: it doesn’t really have a message. Buffy was about female empowerment; Angel was about the neverending battle between good and evil; Star Trek was about an optimistic view of the future and humankind’s ability to succeed in it; Veronica Mars was about both female empowerment and the ability to understand and deal with the world logically even when it wasn’t very logical; Battlestar Galactica (new version) was about how humankind is a screwed-up mess with no true direction, just a fantasy.

What is Heroes about? I have no idea, and really, neither do its creators. And that was ultimately its biggest failure, and the most prominent reason why not only did it fail, but it earned its failure.

Heroes keeps on surprising me

Jason Ward — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 04:36:45 +0000

Heroes, as I recently discussed here, has made it a habit this season of making me eat my hat. I’ve been shocked to observe that, following a very mediocre intro episode that got the season off to a battered limp, every single episode subsequent has been very good. This week’s was no different. The show caught me off guard on three separate occasions, so if you haven’t seen the episode yet and don’t want to know, you’re hereby advised to avert your eyes.

The first surprise I found involved Blank-Sylar, who quite unexpectedly reverted to the form of Nathan-complete with Nathan abilities and memories intact-who promptly realized he was standing in Freakshow, USA and flew away. Subsequent to Nathan getting his ass shot to death a few episodes back, and the recent news that Adrian Pasdar had been canned from the show without even being told by the producers until he read it in the script, I really didn’t expect to see him back. Of course, I should have accepted by now that Heroes only rarely kills off characters for really-reals, so maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. In any case, I was.

The next surprise was really a two-fer, and came when the ever-annoying Matt Parkman, whom I believe should have been killed off a long time ago, finally manned up, stopped whining, and acted like a Hero instead of a crybaby. If you’ve seen the episode, you know by now that Parkman manipulated Sylar-now in control of Parkman’s body-to write a murder note on a napkin at a diner, which resulted in his being surrounded by cops. Shockingly, Parkman then forced Sylar to act like he was pulling a gun, which of course lead to his being shot repeatedly, apparently falling to both their deaths. Sylar hit the ground with a soggy thud, and Parkman disappeared. In a perfect world, this is the way these two characters-both long past their usefulness-meet their ignominious ends.

In any case, the episode went off extremely well, and the final few minutes were practically dripping with a sense of foreboding about the future. A major conflict appears to be brewing, and as I realize we’re 8 episodes into the season, I’m actually a little shocked that there’s no sign of it involving some character travelling to the future only to uncover some horrific event that they have to stop. Bravo to Heroes for breaking out of a very weak plot trend!

Unfortunately there’s also some worry that comes from having now watched the trailer for next week’s episode. There are SPOILERS after the jump, so if you don’t want to know and you haven’t seen the trailer, stop here and enjoy life!

So, the sad truth is that the writers-utterly unable to keep a secret or kill off a major cast member with any permanence, apparently, have already revealed the return of both Parkman and Sylar. The trailer for next week’s episode features the two quite prominently, alive and healthy thanks to Peter Petrelli. Evidently the cops in Texas have decided it might be a great idea to rush their would-be-murderer to a hospital in New York City, where Peter works. Evidently, NYC is just a hop, skip and a jump away. From Texas.

While I can’t be too surprised about this move, I am very, very disappointed in the writers. Not only have they ruined, in the space of less than one episode, what was a poetic and shocking death for two of the series’ major mainstays who really have needed to be put down for awhile now, but they’ve put us right back where we were two episodes ago: with Parkman being haunted by Sylar, a plot thread that was stale the moment they introduced it.

Perhaps they have something better planned, but I don’t know and I sure don’t bet on it. Although Heroes is in the middle of enjoying its second best season to date, some of the inherent problems of the series remains. Why it is that the writers are unwilling to permanently end the lives of major characters is beyond me, and utterly disappointing. They really should look to shows like Angel and Buffy the Vampire Slayer for inspiration, both of which were not only better written shows about superheroes, but they both used the deaths of major characters to superb effect.

Tell us what you watch, win a game!

The Web N3rd — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 21:57:25 +0000

I’m just going to admit it right now: I am lazy and forgetful about certain things. One of those things involves giveaways, and this is one that I meant to do waaaaaay back during E3 of this year. Sadly, I suck, and I tucked these snazzy little cards into a backpack pocket and promptly forgot about them. However, you’re in luck: they’re still valid!

So what I’ve got are three copies of Battlefield 1943, which is a digital download. I have two copies for Playstation 3 and one copy for Xbox 360. The way this will work is simple: In the comments, tell us what your three favorite nerdy shows are and a sentence or two about why you watch them. We’ll sift through the comments and choose from those who make their case with the most…I dunno, I want to say “elegance,” but on the other hand, maybe “humor” would be a better criterion. In any case, get commenting and we’ll select the three luck winners on Halloween!

Heroes: I’m eating my hat, dammit!

Jason Ward — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 08:01:24 +0000

OK, so I admit it: I don’t wear hats because they make me look goofy. And like hats, Heroes is now making me look goofy, and it’s doing it in a very unexpected way: it’s good again. I know, I know-I’ve spent a fair amount of time giving the show shit-which it’s deserved-only to suddenly find myself nibbling at the tasty feathers of crow while the show carefully and meticulously crawls out of the hole it spent the last two seasons digging itself into.

So here’s the recap: in the three episodes since the lackluster season premiere, Heroes has demonstrated once again that it knows how to build a careful narrative in which its characters can demonstrate a little growth, a nugget of exploration, and, as is desperately needed by a show about people with super powers, a surprising glow of humanity. In the time since the now infamously ill-received premiere, every episode has been carefully plotted to bring the show’s core characters back into the foreground while some of its more useless or annoying characters and their shtick remain conspicuously absent.

The ever-annoying Nathan Petrelli appears to finally be permanently dead, Ando has been left behind in Japan while Hiro rejoins the New York division of Heroes, Inc (OK, I made that part up) as he tries to make right some wrongs from his past before his tumor kills him. We’ve only had to tolerate Matt-I’m-such-a-whiny-bitch Parkman for (I think) one episode, and although his “Sylar is in my brain” storyline so far has been a little cliche (and more than a little reminiscent of Battlestar Galactica’s vision of Cylon #6 in Gaius Baltar’s head), it’s been done to surprisingly good effect as the “evil Sylar” has Parkman hard at work systematically destroying his own life. Now if they just kill Parkman, things will get even better in the Heroes-verse.

In any case, it appears that things are finally approaching a turning point as we creep toward the midway of this volume’s 12 episode story arc, “Redemption,” with all of this season’s major cast members showing what can only be described as “impressive growth” (it’s like the stock market, but with super powers!). Luckily our core cast has shrunk significantly, with the ousting of such fan-non-faves as Mohinder and several of the throwaways of the last two seasons.

We’ve watched Peter both embrace his nature as a hero and yet return to a more “mundane” life as an EMT. We’ve watched Hiro continue on his hero path even as he faces the fact of his own impending death. We’ve watched Noah flounder as the older man looking back on his life to see how the choices he’s made have caused more harm than good, particularly to himself and those closest to him. And of course we’ve watched as Nathan’s past came back to bite him in the ass for the last time, causing the face and abilities of Gabriel Gray to re-emerge with a mind and personality so completely blank that even when confronted visually with the physical memories of his past as a monstrous villain, he’s refused to believe or return to that form. At least…so far. I have a feeling that the new villains, now attempting to re-awaken the old Sylar, are going to end up having that bad choice’s consequences demonstrated on their own hides.

Next week will mark the halfway point for this volume’s story arc, and if it holds up this will be the fourth consecutive good episode-something Heroes hasn’t had since the first season. They’re on a roll right now; let’s hope they can keep up the good work and, going into this season’s second act, show us something that will make us keep wanting to come back for more. If we’re very lucky, the end of this volume may just have fans asking once again, “more, please!”

Heroes Season 4: On the way to the grave

Jason Ward — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 21:22:07 +0000

I’m just gonna go ahead and say it: Heroes’ season 4 premiere was a masterpiece of mediocrity. I had high hopes when I heard that Brian Fuller had returned, but those were of course dashed to pieces when he left again, and as the premiere demonstrated, for good reason. Let’s talk a bit about what’s wrong with Heroes and what might have made things a little better.

1. Sylar. He was an awesome villain in season 1 and a complete waste of time in season 2. He was tepidly interesting in season 3, and in season 4 he’s a Cylon #6 ripoff embedded in the brain of one of the show’s least interesting characters, Matt Parkman, while his real body is waltzing around under the control of Nathan Petrelli–who should have died 2 seasons ago and stayed that way. When they first put Nathan in control of Sylar’s body they could have done something interesting–let the audience forget he was really Sylar.

Explore Nathan as Nathan for half the season while the new villains do their worst and just when things seem to be at a low point, worsen them–by letting Sylar re-emerge as dominant, with no warning whatsoever and no sign of an underlying Nathan. Instead, though, we get to endure Sylar as a hallucination to a boring character while Nathan starts to feel powerful enough to, no doubt, do something stupid yet again.

2. Claire. OK, look. In season 1, it was cool: Save the Cheerleader, Save the World. Catchy line, smartly written concept, made sense when you finally got all the puzzle pieces. Our heroes saved the fucking cheerleader. They saved the world. Now send her the fuck away. She’s BORING. She’s WHINY. She treads on two sidewalks: I love my daddy, I hate my daddy. Boo-fucking-hoo. Clair-bear? Go away. I don’t care where you go, but stay there.

3. Nathan. OK, I get it: We’ve written ourselves into a corner where it’s impossible to kill Sylar, but everybody WANTS Nathan dead. So we kill Nathan…and copy him into Sylar? Why do that, especially if you’re not going to bother using it well? Nathan is annoying and stupid and utterly predictable. How many episodes until he once again flips like any other politician and does something stupid again?

4. Hiro. In the beginning, Hiro was my favorite character. I enjoyed his child-like excitement and devotion to being the good guy. He was a great counterpoint to some of the other characters on the show, but now it’s old. He’s no different today than he was at the start of Season 1, even after experiencing the defeat of being unable to save the waitress he spent 6 months falling in love with, after losing his father, after finding out his childhood hero was just a bunch of bullshit. How can he be unaffected by these kinds of events? We’ve had this fantastic glimpse of a future bad-ass Hiro who’s been tainted by pain-and by now, he or something damn close to it should be the Hiro we see every episode, now the goofy 10 year old. In the finale of Season 1, we really should have had Ando be killed-brutally-by Sylar, only to die in Hiro’s arms and change him forever.

5. Powers-Why the hell does every character have to get powers eventually? Giving abilities to Ando and Mohinder was just stupid. Let’s spell this out clearly: For a super powered hero to be somebody the audience can relate to, we need normal people to counter-balance and ground these characters in reality. This is a lesson Tim Kring and friends should take from what is arguably the best superhero show of all time: Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She was super powered, and aside from a couple of side characters like Spike and eventually Willow, nobody else was. These characters helped keep the show on an emotional level that was real and something we could connect with. Heroes had that in season 1 with several non-powered characters, but now who do we have? Just Noah. And he’s not exactly a fount of emotional depth, is he?

When I first watched the premiere season of Heroes, I was blown away by how well it was executed (for the most part, anyway; it did have a few misfires like most shows do) and how each episode made me eager for the next. Then the ending came and…well, it was pretty much underwhelming. Not a catastrophe, but more of an “Oh. Is that all?” And it’s been downhill ever since. Now all I feel is apathy at a brilliant concept that’s been so poorly executed I just don’t know what to make of it. If only Joss Whedon had been in charge instead.

Nerdy TV: What the hell is wrong with Heroes?

Jason Ward — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 06:59:00 +0000

Heroes is a troubled show. Moreover, it’s been a troubled show since episode 1 of season 2, and it doesn’t really appear that’s about to change. Tonight I finished catching up on the Season 3.5 (or if you prefer, Volume 4) episodes aired so far and I’m more convinced than ever that this show has lost its way probably forever. Like most seasons, it started off in a somewhat interesting way-with the “wave with the wind” politician Nathan Petrelli turning on the Heroes and convincing the president to create a task force to round them up and–do something with them, though it’s increasingly unclear as to what the plan was.

Meanwhile “Claire bear”, the most worthless character on the show, continues to whine about how she “should be doing more”, while Nikki-Clone continues to flip sides with her rat looking face, just like her good buddy Nathan. Meanwhile Parkman–who’s inexplicably gone from being a cop to a detective to a security guard and now to nothing–somehow has the ability to paint the future. I was so glad when they took away Hiro’s ability to go into the future and see what’s coming while simultaneously killing off the remaining ‘paint the future’ character, and now they’ve done what? Given the ability to the second most worthless character on the show. In all honesty I’m becoming quite tired of this routine, and unless the writers do something to fix this show they’re going to flush it completely down the toilet. But where did the laundry list of mistakes with Heroes begin?

Luckily that question is easy to answer: Heroes, Season 2, Episode 1. From the beginning of its second season, Heroes took a massive plunge in quality, creativity and interesting use of its characters. Starting us off several months past where we’d just left at the end of Season 1, with all our characters in wildly different locations and situations and no explanation why, was a mistake. Nathan’s sudden hardening as a “good guy” was welcome, but proved to be quite short lived as he returned to jackass form later in the season–a process he repeated in the first half of season 3. While I’ll give the writers credit for creating a believable politician-because let’s face it, most politicians living today are nothing more than opportunists and poll followers-in a TV show character who’s ostensibly one of the good guys, this behavior is just plain annoying.

The mistakes kept coming. Season 2′s trek through Mexico with Sylar and his new illegal alien pals was boring and their powers were stupid (“I cry mascara and people die!” “I grab her arms and bring them back! Together we do nothing at all!“). Blissfully they killed off half that pairing and sent the other away without powers, but by then the damage had been done. Beyond that, the reliance yet again on someone travelling to the future to find something terrible’s coming and they have to stop it was irksome at best, but let’s call it for what it really was: Lazy, incompetent writing. This trend continued for the first half of season 3, as Sylar’s alleged redemption was laughable at best. They never for a moment pulled off the illusion that this character was going to become a Hero, it was transparent from the outset that he would revert to villain at some point in the season. His inevitable reversion at the end of the Villains volume was cool and really well done, but completely predictable.

Speaking of Villains, talk about a misnomer. The best bad guys they could come up with were a bunch of thugs with super powers and a mysteriously alive Arthur Petrelli with a plan to give the whole world super powers? WTF? And of course, we yet again had a visit from the future telling us about terrible things happening if X, Y and Z didn’t change. And like the time travel in season 2, it failed to live up to Season 1′s time travel story because it lacked the complexity and depth of that story. Not that Heroes has ever been the pinnacle of narrative or character depth, but at least Season 1 pulled off a competent story, a feat that the series has yet to do a second time.

And this brings us back to the the current Volume 4: Fugitives tale. It has some good moments. There’s a pretty good sense that this terrible and large thing has begun to happen in Nathan Petrelli’s plan to round up everyone with powers, and that has a genuine feeling of tension to it that’s at times palpable. Luckily nobody has travelled to or from the future to convey any messages, though I still think that the “paint the future” dynamic needs to go; it’s boring and it’s been done to freaking death on this show. Some elements, though, are already obvious. We’re already seeing Nathan begin to waffle on his plan. We’re already seeing Bennett looking out for some of the Heroes he knows and acting against his better judgment both as he works for the team trying to round them up while simultaneously betraying them ever so slightly. These are bone-stock behaviors for these characters, and we’ve seen them time and again. I can already see that Nathan will end up having a change of heart, come around to being a “good guy” again and turn against this “hunter” character.

So, what needs to happen for this show to get back to a place that makes some semblance of sense? First off, let’s clean house. Kill Claire or disappear her from the show. She’s boring, she’s useless, she’s annoying. Second, kill Nathan. Seriously, no reprieves for this guy, somebody blow his damn head off. Sylar, where are you when you’re needed (and why are you, the Villain, the most interesting character on a show called Heroes?) Nathan is a boring character who does nothing but flip and flop with the wind. It seems to work for real life politicians, but it doesn’t work at all for shows about good guys fighting bad guys. Third, decide what the hell you’re going to do with Peter. He’s an interesting character, second only to Hiro, but he flips and flops from being King Bad Ass to being mega-wuss. Either give him his powers back or don’t, but make a freaking choice and stick with it. Fourth, kill off or get rid of all these half-developed characters in the periphery. Mohinder should probably go back to India and stay there. Parkman needs to either become a badass mind control guy or get lost, because his whining is boring. His girlfriend got shot in the shoulder and apparently died, and all I could think was “thank god“. Last but absolutely not least, pick your core characters–maybe 4 or 5 of them–and develop them, stick with them, and play them together. It’s impossible for these characters to develop relationships with each other that we care about if they’re constantly traipsing off to all corners of the planet. There’s some level of evidence that this might be starting in Fugitives, but we’ll just have to wait and see how it pans out.

Heroes is a show I desperately want to like. I enjoyed the first season immensely and thought they’d finally cobbled together a good sci-fi/superpowers series, but every season since then has been a disappointment. Heroes, sadly, can’t hold a candle to such great shows as Firefly, Buffy the Vampire Slayer or even its much worshiped Star Trek. It’s a shame, really, because it really could be something special if they just handled it better.

Perhaps they should fire Tim Kring and hire Joss Whedon.