NBC's Heroes debuts tonight at 9PM ET/PT. It's one of the "shows to watch" if you listen to the pre-buzz. The concept is simple and familiar... superheroes are real, and they live among us. You won't find any spandex outfits or capes in the pilot episode, but people do fly and perform amazing feats.
When one thinks about it, it's actually surprising that it has taken this long for a big network to develop a show like this. Since the first X-Men movie knocked comic book films out of the park and into the popular zeitgeist, audiences have been treated to a cinematic buffet of superheroes, with more to come. But television hasn't kept up with that, instead delivering one CSI knock-off after another... at least, until ABC's Lost came out of nowhere to become the broadcast phenomenon that it is.
And so now, this season we are finally getting the Lost knock-offs, with NBC's Heroes being perhaps the most prominent.
I love the idea of the show, but the execution is such that the show comes across trying much too hard to emulate the "mysteriousness" of Lost, right down to the opening title screen which looks and sounds like the one on Lost. Just look at the cast of characters and tell me if this doesn't sound a little familiar... young handsome medical professional from a prominent family, cute blond girl named "Claire," asian guy who speaks Japanese with English subtitles, young African-American boy with implied mysterious powers, whose estranged father hasn't seen him in years, intelligent "brown-skinned" man who speaks with "Sayid-accent," another blonde girl, etc... They even have Greg Grunberg, although supposedly he doesn't show up until the next episode. The original pilot was supposedly 2 hours, but NBC has apparently split it into 2 parts, with the first episode (or "Volume 1" as it is called in the Unbreakable-like opening title cards) being Grunberg-less.
The writing is fairly weak, with a LOT of expository dialog (a peeve of mine, which is becoming more and more the norm as networks must think that audiences are getting dumber and dumberer), where things are explained for us over and over. It's lazy writing, which frees up the director from having to actually SHOW us anything... why bother when they can just tell us? There are no subtleties here... something that abounds in Lost, Battlestar Galactica, and X-Files. These kinds of things add to the richness of those shows.
You also have the whole conceit of intertwined lives and flashbacks, again, straight out of the Lost playbook. Had this show premiered 3 years ago it might be the one everyone is talking about now. Instead, it will wind up being endlessly compared to Lost and be found wanting.
There is also this whole idea of an eclipse, which appears in the logo for the show, and is constantly mentioned by the various characters, and the audience is led to think that perhaps the coming of the eclipse, like the ancient harbinger of doom that it used to be considered, portends the coming of some event, such as the awakening of various powers in people, or some disastrous world-wide cataclysm... but the eclipse comes and goes without so much as a "by your leave." They should have left out the eclipse, for all the good it did the story, and given us Grunberg in the first episode!
AND YET....
There ARE things to like. And again, I should say I WANTED to like this show. For example, how can you not love a cute little high school cheerleader who suddenly discovers she is indestructible and has a super-healing, and then decides to test it out by jumping off of buildings, sticking her hand down the garbage disposal, running into burning buildings, and stabbing herself in the heart, all while wearing her cute little cheerleading outfit? Look for Hayden Pannettiere as Claire to be a fan favorite. And I got a kick out of Masi Oka, who plays Hiro (get it?) who longs to be a superhero and even offers up X-Men #143 as evidence for the possiblity of time travel and teleportation. His rapid-fire dialog and raw enthusiasm is a hoot. He also gets one of the cooler "power" sequences in the first episode. Also expect Ali Larter's character Niki to be a favorite, since she strips on the internet via a web-cam, but also has a brutal "berzerker" alter-ego that comes out and kills people with using its bare hands. It wasn't clear the way they portrayed this whether the alter-ego is actually a separate being that manifests itself when Niki feels threatened, or whether this is just Niki suffering from some multiple personality disorder.
We'll have to keep our eyes on this one for a few episodes. There is potential there, to be sure, but the pilot doesn't knock it out of the park like Lost, or even Alias, did. Maybe Greg Grunberg will show up in "Volume 2" and save the day. And hopefully they'll spend a little more money on the flying effect...
...which looks basically like a guy being suspended by a wire...
...which it is.
