Bitterness, Thy Name is Heroes

I was at Half Priced Books last weekend and was browsing the used DVD section when I found the first season of Heroes on sell for less than twenty bucks. I'm not stupid. I know a deal when I see one. The problem is, it was only a few months ago that Heroes was canceled, and I'm still pretty bitter. I'm not delusional in thinking that there was much left to salvage of the show after its fourth season, but still. I've seen kinder treatment of worse shows upon their finales. If this was really going to be the last season of a once extremely popular show, a little respect was due. I thought maybe watching the first season again would increase my anger.

However, I did buy the DVDs. I had a long weekend at home and my dad & I spent it watching marathons. After staring at the Heroes box set for a few days, I finally asked my dad if he would be interested in watching them with me. He's never seen Heroes, and I thought of him as a test subject. He's a pretty good judge of good television, like myself. Was the first season of Heroes really as good as I remembered, as everyone always insisted, in awe of how crappy the show became? I was going to use my dad to find out.

Science went out the window as soon as the scene in the pilot where all of the characters look up into the same sky and see the eclipse from different angles all around the world as the song "Eyes" played. I got the same goosebumps that I did the first time I watched. Instead of worrying about what my dad thought about the show, I became recommitted to the plot as if I didn't already know how it all ended.

You can say a lot about Heroes. In the longrun I worry but accept that it will be remembered as gorgeous failure. If nothing else, it should be a lesson in two things: in being bold, and in knowing when to quit. As an American viewer I am trained to believe that a television show is supposed to be 22 episodes over fall and spring, season after season until the show is on for 12 years or is run into the ground, whichever happens first. There's a selfishness involved in television that insists on quantity over quality, everyone involved desperate to keep a show on as long as they can so they can make bank.

With Heroes, people often ask, "what the fuck happened?" The answer is pretty simple. Truth is, there wasn't any story leftover after the first season. Unlike most programs that need two or three years to show some boldness and feel comfortable with themselves enough to really impress us, Heroes did everything it needed to do its first time out. Now that I think about it, and all they achieved with their first season, I get a little angry thinking about all the shit the show got towards the end.

Heroes is the first piece of evidence I have in an argument about rethinking the way we do television in the States. There should be more experimenting with formats and length on networks. How positively would we talk about Heroes today if it had been a mini-series? How many shows on television right now  are hogging the airwaves, spitting out redundant episode after episode, scraping the bottom of the idea barrel just to keep themselves on the air longer?

Heroes did something only good television can do--it laid all its cards out on the table in one season. It knew who it was and carried the message that we are all special and all connected in one way or another. Heroes, in its first season, knew exactly who it was and what it wanted to put out into the world.  Tragically, the system demanded more from it and eventually wore it down into nothing. Not every book needs a sequel, not every album needs a followup.

When I took the DVD out, my dad mumbled, "Well, that was pretty good."

It is important to always give credit where it is due, and even if it earned all of the negative critiques, it also earned every word of praise it ever received. Heroes wasn't a fluke. Everything that made the first season good is still good. Choices were made, creativity was stretched thin, and when push came to shove it couldn't last. It died off and could not survive in Television's battle of the fittest, poetic for a show that at its core played with the concept of evolution. However, maybe, if we're lucky, there's a mutation waiting in the wings, ready to learn and be what Heroes could not.

Besides, there is nothing quite like seeing the Petrellis fly for the first time.