Lost Heroes?
November 21st, 2008
Stu of Feeling Listless is thoroughly unimpressed by Heroes showrunner Tim Kring’s account of his plans for the show:
Kring said no final ending for ‘Heroes’ has been conceived, noting, “We didn’t have an island to get off of.” On top of that, Kring noted that “My original idea was more of an anthological vibe to it, where you regenerate the characters.”Veiled Lost reference there. Actually, you did have a goal, a very good one, but you pissed it away at the close of season one. A surprising number of shows don’t, but with a piece like Heroes you’d at least need to have a notion, simply because of all the characters involved. Audiences can smell when you don’t know what your end game is. Look at The X-Files which began to look stale by the sixth season because we’d all worked out that Chris Carter had less of an idea of what his mythology meant than we did.
I don’t see the X Files parallel, mostly because I don’t think Heroes did set itself up from the start as setting out to solve a big central mystery. We now know that there have been people with powers, possibly triggered in part by a solar eclipse, for centuries. The task of working out why this happens could be used as the big goal in the show’s final season, but it certainly isn’t inherent in the setup of the show that everyone is trying to figure out how and why they got their powers.1 In The X Files, by contrast, it was central to the motivation of one of the two main characters that he wanted to solve the mystery of UFOs/government cover-ups/what happened to his sister.
I don’t have as negative a view of Heroes as many online commenters. Season 1 was excellent, season 2 was wrecked by the impact of the writers’ strike, and season 3 has introduced a major new bad guy who could well be around for years and is doing OK: I think we should judge it when we get to the end of the season.
Where I think the show’s producers have a serious problem is that the economics and practicalities of running a TV series don’t lend themselves to the “anthological” approach Tim Kring set out to use. In comics about a superhero team, the writers can easily push a character into the background for a while to let others take the spotlight: Marvel’s writers haven’t given, say, Nightcrawler a lead role in any of the main titles in years; he’s been present in various teams, but usually in a background role at best.
If Marvel decided tomorrow that Nightcrawler was going to be the lead character in Matt Fraction’s next big Uncanny X-Men story arc then they could make it so without much bother. By contrast, if the producers of Heroes were to drop the character of Claire Bennet after season 3 and then decided to ask Hayden Panettiere to return to the role in season 7 because they had a storyline where her character would have a key role2 then they’d have to deal with the possibility that the actress might not be available, or might be a lot more expensive to hire if her stock had risen in the meantime.3 They either need to have a lot more Heroes, so that no one character is essential to the show or has a unique powerset, or they need fewer Heroes so they can commit to following the fortunes of those characters.
__________- Mohinder Suresh clearly is, and of course The Company and Pinehearst are carrying out powers-related research, but those efforts are more about controlling who has powers than why these people were granted powers. Most of the characters are working through the consequences of using, or not using, their powers, rather than searching for answers to the big question. ^
- The Trial of HRG? ^
- They could always recast the role, but if the character’s popularity turned out to be partly down to the audience’s reaction to the actress then that choice could backfire spectacularly. ^
November 23rd, 2008 at 00:39
@John
The point I was trying to make with The X-Files reference was simply that having created a set up and made the show somewhat serialised (though Heroes is more so) they weren’t sure what their end game was. They created this rich mythology but weren’t sure what to do with it in the end.
It’s inherent in Heroes as a serial that it too has a mythology, if not necessarily in terms of individual characters but in terms of the general story and I’d argue that in the first series a far larger tapestry with a goal was implied.
The problem is now that they’re back peddling and revealing boat loads of info in order to move onto the next thing, attempting to restructure the thing so that it’s more like a soap with a range of different stories rather than something which seems to be going in a single direction like ‘Lost’.
Which would be fine if it wasn’t being done so hamfistedly, the machinations of the plot getting in the way of logical characterisation, scenes full of convoluted exposition paradoxically making it difficult to keep an eye on what’s important.
But above all, the series is called Heroes, but the title is becoming increasingly ironic — people walk around talking about wanting to ’save the world’ but ‘the world’ seems a very abstract concept at this point.
November 24th, 2008 at 00:13
The crux of the matter is that I don’t agree that the writers did set ‘Heroes’ up with an obvious end point for the plot. What, exactly, do you think this goal was that the writers, having set it up in season 1, have been running away from ever since? Saving New York City? Discovering the reason they have powers? The former plot line couldn’t have been stretched out over several seasons without getting as silly as The X Files did by about season 3 or 4. Granted, the writers could have made the latter plot the focus of the show I don’t think that’s necessarily a very interesting story.
I prefer the notion that there have been people with powers for centuries and that every generation ends up having to figure out how they’ll live with these powers and what they’ll do with them. The X-Men comics have been playing the superhero soap opera game for years, and that’s the path I see Heroes going down. I don’t think that the writers not having an ‘end game’ in mind is necessarily a problem for Heroes, any more than it is for E.R. or Friends or Doctor Who.
As to the title becoming ‘ironic’, isn’t that part of what season 3 is about: some characters (most notably everyone with the surname Petrelli) are determined to save the world, and others are feeling compelled to act in a less than heroic manner to support or oppose this latest grand plan.
I wouldn’t disagree that some characters have been acting oddly this season. Would Mohinder really have shifted from not harming a fly to becoming The Fly? Why did Sylar accept that Angela Petrelli was his birth mother so readily? Does Claire ever show up at school? Is Peter really as stupid as he acts? These are all fixable issues, particularly if the recent behind the scenes changes result in new writers trying to address the problems over the second half of the season and in the next.