Honestly, the lesson of this show was - do one good season. Tell a complete story in two dozen hour-long chunks. Don’t dangle a satisfying conclusion for ten years.
Having things happen should not be novel. It should not be tied to endless dragging soap-opera formula, or edgelord anyone-can-die chaos. You can be melodramatic! You can kill off characters! But those should not be primary goals. No more than pleading “one more season!,” which is guaranteed to fail eventually, having resolved approximately nothing.
Avoiding that shaggy-dog storytelling is what made Heroes a major event. It wasn’t the first or most important show with its aspirations. The Sopranos was in full swing and Breaking Bad was not far-off. And until Twin Peaks lanced the whole genre, prime-time soap operas like Dallas had the budget and scope we’d later celebrate in those shows. People liked seeing characters with stakes that weren’t guaranteed to orbit the status quo.
But the idiot suits only heard ‘people like these characters, let’s milk this fucker dry.’ And then the writer’s strike took the blame. That’s the kindest thing that ever happened to this show’s legacy. An irreverent outlier took off and its corporate masters drowned it in money. Do you understand how that always goes? You get some Soul Society garbage instead of whatever made things interesting. Heroes season two is when they went to Namek.
Oh I don’t disagree, just pointing out that it’s not impossible. I’m not even holding out hope for this second reboot, but I’d love to be proven wrong.
Plot suffered from characters becoming too powerful without limit, getting painted into corners, and rules of their own universe being broken for dumb plot points at the last second. If they don’t put much better constraints into place, it’ll just suck.
That’s what I remember, it was supposed to be an anthology season, each one new stories of people gaining powers and leaning to use them. Then “save the cheerleader save the world” was so damn popular the exec’s wouldn’t let the characters go
You’re thinking of Always Sunny. “And then he smells crime again, he’s out busting heads. Then he’s back to the lab for some more full penetration. Smells crime. Back to the lab, full penetration. Crime. Penetration. Crime. Full penetration. Crime. Penetration. And this goes on and on and back and forth for 90 or so minutes until the movie just sort of ends.”
I learned what "yata" in Japanese meant because of this show. Also, I remember NISSAN VERSA product placement, but everything else about this show got sucked out of my head like the Zachary Quinto character got to me.
Sylar was able to extract other's powers and use them himself. Most of his victims ended up dead, but later in the series we learn he can do it without killing.
I want to say he had to examine their brain and ‘how it worked’ because both he and his father were clock/watch repair men. That or I originally thought they implied that he had to eat the part of the brain to gain their power, though he does get strong enough later to not need to do any of that.
Hey, now. It wasn’t given a fair shake with the writers’ strike. Season one was phenomenal at the time. The writers’ strike saw all the good writers jump ship on their return to other projects, killing this show. If they brought it back, invest heavily in recreating season 1 well, then started fresh in the direction he wanted to go originally, and do all of that well? I’m down.
Yeah, and it was a generational plot too. Most of them had parents doing the same stuff 20 years ago. It wouldn’t be ridiculous to do it again 20 years later.
I think the worst part was cliffhangers, and modern streaming eliminates that. If they drop a season at a time, they don’t have to always have a giant plot point teasing next week’s episode.
It probably won’t be ground breaking TV again, but I’d watch it.
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