Heroes

I'm a sucker for shows with high-concept premises and serialized storytelling and glitzy cinematography. I mean, yeah, I know everyone loves "Lost". But I was the guy for whom "Surface" was destination television. One of the things that intrigued me about "Surface" (and has, indeed, become a staple of television nowadays) is the concept of vaguely related plotlines that take forever to intersect.

"Heroes", NBC's new show about a bizarre collection of nascent superheroes, takes that show structure to a new, perhaps unmaintainable, level. I watched the premiere the other night. There were, essentially, six different plots to follow: the web-stripping single mom (spooky mirror image), the Texas cheerleader (regeneration), the nurse and his politician brother (flying), the junkie painter (precognition), the Japanese working stiff (teleportation and time travel) and, not-quite-tying them all together, the Indian researcher (who seems unmodified... so far!).

Some of the non-reveals felt particularly obtuse, and, unsurprisingly, the pace of the show is somewhat leisurely. But I found myself not annoyed by the dreamy-eyed nurse and his super-pragmatic brother. I rooted for the researcher in his quest to finish his father's work. And, as did every other reviewer, I loved the Japanese guy and his bouncy subtitles. The Japanese sequences felt really authentic, not like Americans spouting lines in a foreign language, but like actual Japanese people in a Japanese TV show. (The writers even had the stones to name him Hiro.)

The final act twists weren't all the big surprises they were supposed to be for me... but at least one (involving the cheerleader) did throw me for a loop.

As I understand from reading about the show, there are many more character to introduce. If the producers can keep this many balls in the air without sacrificing continuity of story or tone, this could be a great show. More likely it'll fizzle before a single season is complete, but I can hope it doesn't.

Comments

[David Gaw]

Two months later, and so far so good.

Putting a show like this together has got to be one of the tougher creative challenges in television these days. To keep an open-ended series built around mystery and suspense going, the writers have to walk a careful line, neither bleeding the show's energy by leaving too little mystery, nor frustrating the audience by revealing too little. One bad episode on a show like Law & Order could be easily forgotten, because each show stands more or less alone. Blow an episode on an arc show like this, on the other hand, and you can derail the series. So the writers have to continuously resolve threads while introducing new ones that are as engaging as those that opened the series. And having a great initial premise just sets the bar higher. Blow up your central premise, and you have to replace it with something at least as compelling. (Which is, as we've discussed, where Alias went off the rails.)

It will be interesting seeing how long Heroes can hold it together.