Dear Tim Kring,
People like to see unique characters behave in logical ways based on logical motivation. I enjoyed the Adam Monroe villain for precisely this reason.
People also like to see hot chicks dressed up in sexy outfits. To that end, may I suggest turning Claire into a villain in Volume 3 (aptly titled “Villains”) by giving her a growing interest in BDSM with a proclivity towards skin tight leather outfits? Make West her toadie.
Thanks much,
The Controvert
This is the heart of the issue. Is Heroes to be just a comic book or does it aspire to be something more?
I think it’s more than clear that a great many people wanted it to be something more, judging by the whopping drop in ratings this year and the enormous amount of criticism even from the faithful.
For it to be something more, it has to follow certain rules. Giving people impossible powers doesn’t allow the writers to say that anything goes. Just the opposite. The farther away from reality the changed premise is, the more realistic the behaviors and logic must be. (The old saying is that the audience will accept the impossible more easily than they will accept the improbable.) Good science fiction and fantasy rigorously extrapolate from the change inherent in the premise, and force characterization to develop organically from these changes. Wild coincidences, lapses in logic, showy stunts, weekly life-changing events, planets in peril all combine to increase the schlock value.
“Comic book” is a pejorative implying a lack of all the positive values of literature. There’s a good reason for it beyond the form itself. The writers have to grind out a new plot, issue after issue, 50 or more times each year for the most favorite heroes. That makes the writers resort to every possible twist just to keep it new. Over time, all the good twists get taken but the relentless press of the new continues. So you get issues in which random events in the past turn out to be caused by known villains and dead parents are turned into super heroes and spies and aliens and small events evolve into earth-shattering crises and every single character ever invented becomes intertwined in some way.
In comics this progression usually takes decades. Heroes crammed it in to a season-and-a-half.
There are lots of live action comic books in the world. Heroes promised something more, something better. A core audience for just the comic book may exist. A third or more of the first season audience has already decided that comic book wasn’t enough. More will follow.
I predicted at one point that Heroes would follow the trajectory of shows like Lost and Desperate Housewives, which also lost similarly large percentages of their audiences and critical acceptance after their first season. Those are still popular, much more so than Heroes, but they’re no longer “it” shows. Heroes started from a lower level and is now borderline.
Saying “lighten up, it’s just a comic book” misses the point. A large chunk, perhaps the majority of the audience, doesn’t want it to be just a comic book. It had the potential to be more than just a comic book. Having it turn out to be just a comic book is so insulting that not even the fans could take it. If Heroes doesn’t smarten up it will die. It may die even before it’s taken off the air, if that hasn’t happened already. You want to “fix” Heroes? Take the comic book out of it.
People, please stop indulging Otto. For every minor fanwankish fix the show could use, there’re at least three fanwankish explanations for why the fix isn’t necessary. It’s a dead end, and the show’s larger problems remain. As I see it, there are too many characters and their problems are showing the same inflationary tendency as their comic-book inspirations. If the first season’s crisis was saving New York and the second’s was saving Earth, I can only assume the third season (if there is one) will be about protecting the Universe.
Rather, the show should learn the positive lessons from the comics and not repeat their mistakes. A kryptonite equivalent, as I mentioned, will keep Peter from distorting the show with his already unstoppable abilities. So far, the only such element is the Haitian himself, but he was conspicuously absent in season two. Further, one of the reasons Spider-Man was an endearing character is that regardless of his abilities, he still had to deal with the mundane problems of Peter Parker. Is Claire getting good grades in high school? Is Micah? Does Matt have actual cases and paperwork to deal with or is it okay to fly on the 5:15 Congressman? Does Bob ever get people asking where his supply of gold spoons comes from, especially the ones with “stainless steel” engraved in them? Does the paper company fronting for them have tax problems? I know these are boring mundane details to us, but how does someone with superhuman abilities have the patience to deal with them? There’s a big source of character conflict and drama, rather than the tortured X-Files endless-conspiracy-to-nowhere plotline, with the shadowy evil guys pursuing plans that, if they thought about it for two seconds, they’d realize make no sense whatsoever.
And I agree that the cure for death is a very bad idea. While I understand the need to build a stable of a regular characters and keep them around week after week, if this show had any element of reality, the characters would be killing each other off, and fairly regularly, too. While Kring tries to introduce elements of Company menace, the Company is strangely reluctant to kill anyone (except the occasional gratuitous “normal” slaying), even those it considers especially dangerous (Adam, Sylar, Noah), and it turns out the only reason to keep these characters alive is so they can keep the story dragging along.
I’d suggest doing away with the cosmic season-long story arcs and have more one-shot stories featuring heroes alone or in pair or trios, dealing with something a bit more mundane, with character conflicts starting to arise between those with benign abilities (like Nathan) and those with abilities that naturally lend themselves to personal corruption (like Matt). Rather than the enemy being some shadowy conspiracy whose nature is so self-contradictory that it can never be resolved (as though one of the conspiracy’s bylaws was “create unbreakable rules for ourselves, then break them at will”) the enemy can be the person you once thought of as your friend, who fought beside you, but is now either too chicken to help save the world (as Matt might eventually see Nathan) or too power-mad to solve anything without making it worse (as Nathan might eventually see Matt). Eventually, this new generation of Heroes turns into their parents, into the factionalized, divisive, contentious, deceitful people in the photograph, and that’s the big lesson of life.
And that’s how I’d save Heroes. First episode Season 3 - Bob’s life story as it relates to Mama Petrelli and young Sulu. No more secret conspiracy crap, just people with unusual abilities not handling them especially well.
Anyone who thinks Lost is no longer an “it” show after last season’s finale obviously didn’t watch last season’s finale.
Um, excuse me? “Fanwanking” involves using material that is not on the screen to explain away continuity problems. It’s not fanwanking to point out to someone who apparently is not paying attention that the things he’s deriding as “coincidence” are actually explained repeatedly right in the material.
“Indulging” me. What the fuck ever.
You have the individual episode threads to deal with this piddly stuff. We’re talking about the show’s overall structure and…
…d’oh, I’m indulging you!
The overall structure is being criticised for having too many coincidences and for being too “US-centric.” I’m suggesting that these perceived flaws in the overall structure do not in fact exist as the complainer is formulating them.
Alongside such gems as “Then man up and tell your girlfriend not to watch the DVDs when you’re around” and “Quit watching.” You’re taking this too personally and this is the kind of indulgence I’m advising other posters to stop.
Of course, I’m heroically distracting you from the other posters, who I hope will continue their criticisms of Heroes as I absorb the Ottomatic fire.
I like this a lot. It could be a side effect of absorbing too many powers: he starts to have problems summoning them at will. Sure Peter is supposed to be Sylar’s opposite number, but the problem with him being the exact opposite is that it makes the rest of the heroes irrelevant when Sylar is the villain and even less so when Sylar isn’t. He’s an uber character and he needs to be less so.
Next, all views into the future need to stop. It was kind of nifty in the first season, but it kind of takes some of the suspense out of the plot. No more paintings, and lets befuddle Hiro and Peter a bit. Make somebody actually have to work to find out what the danger is.
The series could use a litte bit of grit and a tad more realism. It’s fun to see Peter going all jedi and fling guards around with his mind, but he ain’t Darth Vader. Let him get pegged by a bullet or two in the process. I know it’s tradition to have the evil empires cannon fodder be truly useless, but break from that a bit.
Somebody needs to get dark sided. There has to be a reason that the prior group of heroes had so many destroy the world wackos, yet none of our true blues has shown more than a hint of nasty. If Micah were older, he’d be perfect having just lost both of his parents. Since he isn’t, Parkman will have to do. He gets glimpses into the minds of the masses all of the time. Surely something has to rub off, right?
Speaking of the dark side, their numbers need to swell. We’ve had a couple of noble nightmare nutjobs who wanted to burn the village in order to save it, but Sylar is the only person who destroys simply for himself. There isn’t one complete and utter sociopath with powers. How about even a couple of right bastards?
Lastly, let the bad guys win a round. Wouldn’t it have been great if the plague had been unleashed because Peter and company spent too long yakking? next season, have the heroes struggling to dig themselves out of a hole rather than struggling to prevent it existing.
Yes, the overexaggerated hyperbole in that note was in no way any indication that it was meant to be a joke. Good job, sir, for avoiding that trap.
I did not say “lighten up, it’s just a comic book.” That is you reading something else into what I’ve said because you’ve convinced yourself that I’m being dismissive.
I am saying “they are not trying to write something more than just a comic book” they are, in fact, trying to write a comic book. On tv.
All of these genre tropes such as the wild coincidences and everything tying up together seem tired and unoriginal to people familiar with comic books. The idea was that Heroes was intended for people who didn’t read comics. The comicbook fans were going to be the “sure” audience, as it were, and the show would bring in non-comicbookians. Much like how Hollywood is strip-mining every property that DC and Marvel have – because to people outside the fandom, it is new stuff. The in-jokes (e.g., Mr. Nakamura’s license plate) are there for the comic book fans (and writers, I presume); the “novelty” is supposed to be what draws everyone else in.
It is not insulting the fans by being a comic book – it WANTS to be a comic book, told in a format that works on TV. What I am saying is that if you’re looking for a show that is not comic booky, then you are doomed to disappointment.
I think the problem with the show is what has already been stated: there are far too many characters with absolutely unstoppable abilities. In fact, most of the characters, if they sat down and thought for a while, would realize they are invincible. Hiro and Peter, because of their timestopping abilities, are gods. Sylar does not have this power. Hence, he dies, and they live. It is very hard to suspend disbelief when these two characters are running around and actually LOSING. Neither of them should ever lose. All Hiro needed to do was warp himself off to Australia for a month or so and practice, practice, practice, and then come back and clean house.
I think the writers kept trying to out-do themselves with new and greater powers, and before they knew it, it was out of control. And now they are using lame plot contrivances to scale things back.
What they need to do is make a clean sweep of things. Have a massive battle in which all of the most powerful characters are killed, and start over with more mundane powers. For instance, they could have a character who can vacuum an entire house in under a minute. But that’s it. Then they could have another character who can fill out complicated tax forms very quickly with almost no mistakes. Or maybe someone who can jump 15 feet into the air. Impressive, yes. But not out of control.
But seriously, when I first started watching, I thought Peter only had other people’s powers when he was in THE SAME ROOM as they were. That was the implication, but eventually it was revealed he could summon those powers at will. They should have just left it the other way. Then, he is still powerful, but only if he is in close proximity to other people with powers. Plus, it makes for interesting team battles.
I’m trying to figure this out but I’m not having much luck. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say that it’s pure comic book and at the same time say that it was designed to bring in people who didn’t read comics.
I’m saying that it was the other way round. It was designed to pull in people who weren’t comic book fans and little by little lost all of that to become nothing more than a comic book. I don’t think our views are reconcilable.
You’re plain wrong, IMO. Otto, on the other hand is threadshitting. At least by the standards of the Heroes threads he runs. What else can you call it when you come into a thread that asks “Can Heroes be fixed” without bothering to acknowledge the OP in any way? His passive-aggressive posturing saves him from having to acknowledge any flaws in his beloved show, and even from having to state directly whether he thinks Heroes is so wonderful that it doesn’t need any fixing at all.
Stop watching? No. Stop fanwanking. The one thing Heroes needs to do more than anything else to increase the audience past the hardcore fanbase is to get smart enough so that the fanwankers have nothing to explain away.
Again, like I said, I read comic books when I was little and the idea of some kind of live-action superhero show appeals to me a little bit. The first few episodes were good and so was the finale. I hear from the Dope that the second season was lacluster, and I’ve seen bits and piees from the second season that make me agree. Apparently, even the writer of the show has expressed some concern and will tighten it up. Praying to Og that I never have to watch another episode was a little bit of hyperbole, but if the show tightens up and gets “better”, then I may end up looking forward to watching the show.
Can’t they just pull a “Bobby Ewing” ret-con and un-fuck the mistakes?
Or next season, just do a blatant “Do Over”? Just apologize, re-set the plot-line and proceed.
Honestly, I don’t think anyone’s indulging Otto. He disgrees with me and that’s fine.
Then again, I don’t know **Otto’**s past with this show, but to deriding his stance as blatant fanwanking seems unfair.
One more time, then.
It was designed to bring in a wider audience. See interview here where Kring says, in part:
They are going for a broad audience. They are using comic book elements to do so. It worked; see article here where USAToday talks about (season 1) Heroes drawing in more causal viewers to make its viewership numbers. They acknowledge that the comic fans are an important part of their audience, but not the only audience they’re going for.
Tim Kring (as mentioned in those articles) has no real comic book background. Jeph Loeb, however, has scads and scads of comic background (see his wiki entry for examples). These interviews/articles and others mention again and again that the writers are referring back to comics in writing Heroes (cf. the “Tim, that’s Magneto” comment).
So, they are (1) aiming for a broader audience and (2) using comic books as their reference in so doing.
I am not saying it is “pure” comic book, I am saying it is never going to be without the comic book element.
I do agree that the show went astray – and Kring has acknowledged this. I do not agree that the show went astray in keeping to the comic book elements. It went astray in other elements (characterization and plotting, IMO).
The “fix” is not removing the comic-book elements – that is the part of the show that is still around. The “fix” would be in bringing back those other elements from Season 1 that seem to be lacking in Season 2. Which is what Kring was apparently working toward, before the writers’ strike.
Well, they are in a way, because even comic-book characters can entertain a reader with non-comic-book stuff, as in that case of Spider-Man, which I mentioned earlier. It was a character that couldn’t solve all his problems in a typical comic-book fashion (i.e. hitting the villain with a laundromat); he still had to dodge the landlady and it was hard keeping up his grades and he felt guilty about what happened to his Uncle, etc. Normal stuff that us non-supers have to deal with all the time, and the character was extremely popular as a result.
Heroes needs to decide if it wants to be Superman style (where laundromat throwing is the norm) or Spider-Man style. The former is a bit friendlier to mad scientists and secret agencies and the more ludicrous stuff, which the reader accepts, disbelief already suspended by the man who can juggle planets. The latter premise is just a touch more realistic. The “Company” doesn’t have to be some secret organization with murky motives - it can be simply criminal (i.e. like the Kingpin’s outfit) or just run by a jerk (i.e. J. Jonah Jameson). I don’t think the X-Files aspect helps with secret vaults under phony paper factories and junk. Who were the five inept guards? Didn’t they wonder why their workplace was under a paper factory instead of, say, in a secure warehouse with a ten-foot chainlink fence and cameras and guard dogs and other normal trappings of high corporate security? Wouldn’t one such guard talk too much in a bar sooner or later and blow the whole deal? If the high concept of Heroes is supers in a normal world, then make the damn world normal, already. If not, you may as well break out the costumes and aliens and just do another Smallville.
My point is that “pure” comic book covers a lot of ground from the halfway plausible to complete fantasy. Heroes is trying to do it all, to its detriment.
We’re saying the same thing in different ways, then.
I said exactly what you wrote there. What I didn’t say was remove the comic book elements. I said add back the good stuff [“other elements (characterization and plotting, IMO)”] to the comic book stuff instead of leaving it pure comic book.
Once again:
pure comic book - hardcore fans and fanwankers
comic book with characterization, logic, and care - wider audience
One thing that’s hard…is that superheroes have been around for bunches of ears, and all te good superpowers are used up. Magneto’s power would be ultra sweet to have on TV, but it would stick out like a sore thumb because Magneto is so familiar to us. Because of that, I think more mundane powers might be the key. However, less people should be coming out of the woodworks with these mundane powers.
And that’s exactly how they can separate themselves from other superhero-type movies and comic books. Make the powers more mundane. What if someone starts playing basketball who can jump over the rim? It makes the game obsolete. But it does not make mankind obsolete. Little things like that should start happening in the Hero universe. Just enough to make people at large to start asking questions. But not enough that we are talking about the end of the world. You start end of the world scenarios, and it is very hard to go back. As the writers are no doubt discovering.
You need people discovering they have this little power, and then thinking of ways to exploit it. That’s human nature. Not necessarily by hurting others. But by simply thinking of their own interests first. Like the afore-mentioned example of a basketball player. Or what if someone discovered they could do literally ANY math problem at the speed of a computer? They could make a lot of money doing that. But once again, this is not an ability that will cause a ripple in the space-time continuum. I thought the character who could hear things from miles away was just the right level of powers. Not enough to mess up the world. But it is enough that people might start asking questions. And that’s what Heroes needs to focus on. Then they are not branded as an X-men ripoff. And they have a cool little idea that is unique.