Emma
09-25-2006, 07:32 PM
<img src="http://www.fanbolt.com/forums/images/avatars/heroes/01.jpg" width="85" height="85" vspace="5" hspace="5" align="right" border="0" alt="Heroes, NBC"> You can practically hear the Heroes cult forming.
Dense, dark, a little dreary and yet oddly intriguing, Heroes seems destined to attract an audience that is more loyal than large. A distinctive, dark-knight comic book brought to life, Heroes clearly isn't for everyone, but that's all right: Every show doesn't have to be for everyone. What matters is that Heroes is likely to please viewers who like genre series, even when those series take themselves a tad too seriously.
They will, however, have to get past a pilot that is so devoted to setting a tone that it ignores the need to establish its characters or move along its story. And the pretentious twang to that tone is set by the opening credits, with their Star Wars-type graphic crawl and the promise that we are entering Chapter One, Volume One of an "epic tale." It's hard enough to get people to take high-concept shows seriously; there's no need to actually invite derisive laughter.
The concept here is that a group of people scattered around the globe have evolved to a higher genetic level and developed superpowers. They don't all understand their powers and they may not all put them to heroic purposes. Over time, however, many of them will realize that it's their destiny to save the world.
Like Six Degrees, destiny seems to be a large part of the Heroes mythology, as the characters continually cross paths — no easy task considering how spread out they are at the start.
Mohinder (Sendhil Ramamurthy) is a genetics professor in India; Peter (Milo Ventimiglia, finally playing a likable character) is a nurse in New York; Hiro (Masi Oka) is an animé fan in Tokyo; Claire (Hayden Panettiere) is a cheerleader in Texas.
All of them speak English, except for Hiro, whose dialogue requires subtitles, yet another demand from a show that makes an awful lot of them.
<a href="http://www.usatoday.com/life/television/reviews/2006-09-24-review-heroes_x.htm" target="_blank">Click here for more!</a>
Dense, dark, a little dreary and yet oddly intriguing, Heroes seems destined to attract an audience that is more loyal than large. A distinctive, dark-knight comic book brought to life, Heroes clearly isn't for everyone, but that's all right: Every show doesn't have to be for everyone. What matters is that Heroes is likely to please viewers who like genre series, even when those series take themselves a tad too seriously.
They will, however, have to get past a pilot that is so devoted to setting a tone that it ignores the need to establish its characters or move along its story. And the pretentious twang to that tone is set by the opening credits, with their Star Wars-type graphic crawl and the promise that we are entering Chapter One, Volume One of an "epic tale." It's hard enough to get people to take high-concept shows seriously; there's no need to actually invite derisive laughter.
The concept here is that a group of people scattered around the globe have evolved to a higher genetic level and developed superpowers. They don't all understand their powers and they may not all put them to heroic purposes. Over time, however, many of them will realize that it's their destiny to save the world.
Like Six Degrees, destiny seems to be a large part of the Heroes mythology, as the characters continually cross paths — no easy task considering how spread out they are at the start.
Mohinder (Sendhil Ramamurthy) is a genetics professor in India; Peter (Milo Ventimiglia, finally playing a likable character) is a nurse in New York; Hiro (Masi Oka) is an animé fan in Tokyo; Claire (Hayden Panettiere) is a cheerleader in Texas.
All of them speak English, except for Hiro, whose dialogue requires subtitles, yet another demand from a show that makes an awful lot of them.
<a href="http://www.usatoday.com/life/television/reviews/2006-09-24-review-heroes_x.htm" target="_blank">Click here for more!</a>