The Lost Legacy of Tim Kring’s ‘Heroes’
The superheroes show should have been the next big thing in TV, but it wasn’t. Why not?
When I swear, I more often use ‘Frak’ than any of the myriad alternatives. When somebody announces they are suffering from an as-yet undiagnosed illness, I suggest lupus. When I need to convince somebody that what I’m doing is right, I growl, ‘You’ve gotta trust me.’
Battlestar Galactica was a cult hit in the world of sci-fi. Its run finished in 2009 but people still talk about it. House ran for eight seasons, some of them great, all of them watchable. You could say that 24 nuked the fridge long before its eventual coup de grace (some argue the second season did this), but I enjoyed every one of the eight years of the show.
These are the shows that I watched on their original broadcasting, and have now re-watched with my wife. I’m thinking of showing her Lost, but I haven’t washed out the bad taste left by the last season; I never saw The Sopranos or The Wire; and The Rockford Files and the Mission Impossible of Peter Graves would be going too far back. I also thought of showing her Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, and its spin-off, Angel, which both finished strongly, but we each work full-time and it’d be nicer now to catch a movie from time to time.
One show that I was not thinking of sharing with her is Heroes. I devoured the first season, binge-watching it over a weekend with the friend who had originally recommended it. But as the years rolled by, the enjoyment I took from it lessened until it became like a habit; I had to clip my toenails and I had to watch Heroes.
The show followed a pattern like the inverse of the old Star Trek film rule: the odd-numbered seasons were good. The first was captivating, and I wasn’t the only one to think so. Here’s what the Boston Globe’s Matthew Gilbert had to say about it early on:
“Like Lost, it has the potential to grow into a cross-genre drama that reaches beyond cultiness to all kinds of TV viewers, not least of all those who suffer from spandex-phobia.”
Heroes, for those of you who didn't see it or have suffered some form of 24-esque temporary amnesia, was a superheroes show without the superheroes. It told the stories of ordinary people who, for whatever reason (logical origins not being the show’s strong point), discovered they had supernatural abilities. One could fly; another could read people’s minds; some could heal themselves; and several could absorb the powers of the others, adding them to their own like something out of the game BioShock.
In the first season the characters slowly grow accustomed to their new powers. There is the cheerleader who cannot die, and whose story is the most absorbing because it contains much that is unexpected: the show’s writers could have been lazy and copy-pasted Buffy here, or any of a million teen movies, but instead they crafted a character who could be at once indestructible and vulnerable.
She is being tracked by the evil Sylar, played with menace and cunning by Zachary Quinto — more about him later. His character is wisely kept in the wings for the first half a dozen episodes; we instead see the results of his carnage through the eyes of the supporting cast.
The refrain ‘Save the cheerleader, save the world’ becomes the motto for the show, and it’s ambiguous enough in its various interpretations — there’s no linking word to define the relationship between the clauses — that it helps to drive the story forward.
However, the final episode climaxes in a way that has always been typical of TV shows. The vast array of characters, whose stories have intertwined at various moments in the series, find themselves brought together for a battle against Sylar. Sylar is seemingly vanquished, but then the teaser at the end spoils the party with the suggestion that he’s not dead, and will return for the next season. For a show that had worked so hard to subvert expectation, to keep its characters and storylines from becoming overly predictable, this came as a true disappointment.
This was the beginning of the end.
Heroes should never have had a second season in the traditional sense. The story of the first season was self-contained and suitably resolved, much like that of the decade’s other wild disappointment: Prison Break.
The first episode of Season Two was written by Tim Kring and was watched by nearly seventeen million people. It introduced some particularly unwelcome plot threads. Here they are in reverse order of imbecility: Hiro teleports himself back in time to feudal Japan for no reason, where he meets an immortal Englishman; two Mexican characters are introduced with a rushed back story; and one of the principle characters, Peter Petrelli, finds himself in Ireland with, wait for it, amnesia.
Yes, amnesia.
Is it any surprise that when Heroes returned for the next episode, a week later, five million people had stopped watching? The numbers never recovered; the show did, but not until the third season.
I could write more about the failures of the show’s second season, but fortunately I don’t have to: Tim Kring already has. In one respect, the Writer’s Guild strike of that year saved the show; the finale was brought forward, and then Heroes disappeared from the screen for nine months, just long enough for us to forget the inept special effects (two characters are seen walking on a treadmill in front of a canvas picture of the Kremlin in one scene; in another, a character discovers he can fly, but his flights are rendered so poorly you can practically see the cursor being dragged across the screen with him), and the unresolved subplots (such as when Peter Petrelli’s love interest is imprisoned in the future, only to be forgotten about the next moment and never mentioned again).
When it returned, it was better: the pace was faster, there was more to see and enjoy, and the stories were good; in short, the characters made no mention of the events of the season before, acting as if it had all been a dream they had forgotten on waking.
Then it got worse again: the lumbering fourth season returned the show to the pit it had scrambled from after season two. Where before we had Peter’s amnesia, we now had Hiro’s suspected brain tumour. Have we not had enough of these storylines by now?
It’s somewhat ironic that, just as one character should develop the same illness that led to the martyr’s death of Prison Break’s lead, another actor from Prison Break, Robert Knepper, should be drafted in as the main antagonist, the boring as hell carnival troupe leader. When the show was inevitably cancelled, the only reason I continued to watch through to its conclusion was a perverse curiosity to see just how bad it could get.
Heroes was not the first sci-fi show to get cancelled, but it was one of the first I can remember where there seemed to be a collective sigh of relief when the moment came. Nobody would dare say the same of, for instance, Firefly.
But why do people not talk as much about Heroes as other shows that ended like a damp squib? Lost, as I mentioned before, finished almost catastrophically with a convoluted story that reads like something made up on the spot by writers unfamiliar with the previous seasons. And yet mention the Dharma Initiative and you’re still likely to cause goose bumps.
Where is the legacy?
I think one of the reasons that nobody much thinks about Heroes anymore is that the show, as well as suffering an inconsistent run on television, has been harmed by too much brand expansion. Take a look at its Wikipedia page. Heroes the TV show was accompanied by Heroes webisodes, and there are comics for the show, making-of documentaries, recorded interviews, plans for future reboots and extensions; so much, in fact, that one wonders what the producers were thinking. This is a clear example of a Napoleonic thin-spreading: just as the French emperor should never have taken Moscow — I mean, really, what was the point? — Heroes should only ever have been a really good TV show, not a multimedia brand with pretensions to media dominance.
Another aspect to the lost legacy of the show can be seen in the way the actors themselves have fared post-Heroes. Zachary Quinto is the only one who has done anything after Heroes, and this by taking on a role that will typecast him: do you ever think of Nimoy as being anyone other than Spock?
Look at what happened to the actors when the show ended. Two, Sendhil Ramamurthy and Jack Coleman, had romantic cameos on The Office; Coleman then returned to what he’d been doing before Heroes, which was appearing on a number of other TV shows of no importance, like Burn Notice, Castle, and The Vampire Diaries.
Masi Oka, who played Hiro, now has a minor role in the rebooted Hawaii Five-0 TV show, and was also the comic relief character — you read that correctly — in the lamentable Get Smart.
Hayden Panettiere, the cheerleader, did nothing for a number of years and now stars in the TV show Nashville, which drew an average of around five and a half million viewers per episode in its first season. This sounds like something of a comedown for Panettiere, who, at the height of Heroes fever, looked destined for much bigger things.
It gets more interesting though. Some of the bigger stars of the show seem almost to have been punished for working with Kring. Poor Ali Larter, who ended up playing three versions of the same character in Heroes; she has now been in two Resident Evil movies. I don’t know if that’s something a person’s career can recover from. And then there’s Milo Ventimiglia, whose subsequent credits include ‘Rick Rape’ in the Gerard Butler vehicle Gamer in 2009, and more recently ‘Frat Boy Mike’ in Grown Ups 2.
We like to think that when a good show comes to an end, the people in it are rewarded with career advancement; consider the generous sentiments forever directed towards Nathan Fillion of Firefly fame. We also like to think that the creators of these shows were not just enjoying a one-off spurt of creativity. Look how critically every Aaron Sorkin production is now considered: it’s placed in what you might even call the Sorkin Canon. But what of Tim Kring? His new show, Touch, has already been cancelled. I never saw it, but reading the series overview on the IMDB (“A widower struggling to raise his emotionally challenged son discovers that he can predict events before they happen.”) gave me enough of a headache that I decided it was something I could safely skip — even though it starred Kiefer Sutherland, a man whose own legacy, through Jack Bauer, is safely assured.
Heroes came, it was good for a while, and then it left after being too bad for too long, but it does deserve some credit at least. There have been other shows that never even tried to be as inventive, shows that my mother might watch, procedurals like NCIS and CSI. And then there are shows like The Walking Dead, also wildly inconsistent, and yet so often spoken of in reverential terms.
It seems unfair that Heroes has disappeared from our common consciousness so easily and so quickly. Perhaps one day some bright spark will do what Topher Grace has done with the Star Wars prequels, and stitch together the best parts of the show into a cohesive whole, thereby securing for it something of a lasting legacy.
