Sci Fi TV Flashback: Looking back at notable sci fi and fantasy television entries from years past.
What Is It? Several people across the world start to develop special abilities such as telepathy, teleportation, regeneration, enhanced strength, and more. As they try to understand their new powers, they begin to learn that there are others like themselves across the world, some who are good, some who are evil, and some who have not figured out their purpose yet. They also learn of the mysterious organization known as “The Company” that tracks people with abilities and seeks to control and/or terminate those considered dangerous.
Aired: NBC, 2006-10, 2015-16 5 Seasons Totaling 90 Episodes (Including the Heroes Reborn Mini-Series)
Starring: Hayden Panettiere, Jack Coleman, Kristen Bell, Greg Grunberg, Ali Larter, Milo Ventimiglia, Zachary Quinto, Sendhil Ramamurthy
Created By: Tim Kring
Is It Must-Watch Sci Fi? The first season is definitely worth watching, but diminishing returns set in pretty quickly after that.
The Skinny: In the 2004-05 season, ABC’s Lost became a surprise hit and proved that sci fi shows could find an audience in Prime Time. The other broadcast networks quickly took note and started working on their own genre shows that would deliver serialized story-telling and plenty of mysteries to keep the audience tuning in each week. Heroes was NBC’s big swing and it proved to be a out of the gate. Arriving before the big superhero boom that the MCU movies helped kick off, this show drew inspiration from comic books, but delivered original characters and stories. It may have borrowed from sources like The X-Men, but it never tried to deliver a full on superhero show. It followed the people who developed abilities and how they dealt with these newfound powers, but never turned them into costume-wearing heroes.
The first season of the show was the best and really counts as an important piece of sci fi TV. It developed an over-arching mythology and delivered interesting characters who faced the moral quandaries of possessing superpowers. The show had a moody, atmospheric quality to it, and also delivered many mysteries that seemed to hold plenty of potential and promised to lead to an epic conclusion once they were all unveiled. But after a rather anti-climatic finale for the first season, the show seemed to lose its way, and it started to become apparent that the writers had not thought through the story and its mysteries very well (or they just took some wrong turns that they could not write themselves out of). Showrunner Bryan Fuller left after the first year, and Heroes never quite had the same energy after that. The mysteries just became murky and confusing and each season seemed to devolve into yet another desperate attempt to stave off the apocalypse.
The show’s strength was definitely its characters and the actors that portrayed them. When you consider the talent that this show had with names like Hayden Panettiere, Jack Coleman, Kristen Bell, Greg Grunberg, Ali Larter, Milo Ventimiglia, Zachary Quinto, and more, you can understand how it managed to grab the audience early on. But sadly, Heroes could never sustain the momentum of its first season. It managed to recapture some of its inspiration during parts of its third and fourth season, but that never lasted long and it continued to disappoint throughout the rest of its run, including the revival mini-series that aired in 2015. But the show did make its mark, and the early episodes are definitely worth a look.
Cancelled Too Soon? Yes, but that may have been an act of mercy. Heroes started out as top-rated show, but saw its numbers drop with each season as its story meandered and derailed. By its fourth year, the ratings had dropped to the point that NBC decided it was time to cut bait on this rather expensive series. The fact was that the quality of the show continued to decline, and viewers had just lost interest in it. It ended up getting cancelled on a cliffhanger, but nobody really seemed to care at that point. NBC would later revive the show with the Heroes Reborn mini-series, but that had many of the problems the show had manifested from its second through fourth seasons. That was billed as an “event series”, and it probably would have continued if the ratings had been strong enough. But viewers were just not interested in the property anymore and it ended on yet another cliffhanger.
Should It Be Rebooted? Probably not. It was already revived once with the Heroes Reborn mini-series and that didn’t go over so well. And with so many movies and television shows about superheroes or people with abilities these days, there’s just not a need for another one. The premise did have potential, though, so maybe it could be revisited in ten years or so.
Interesting Facts: Series creator Tim Kring originally envisioned the show following a season-long anthology format with different heroes taking the lead each year. But the first season characters proved very popular, particularly Syler, and the network pushed for him to keep them on as regulars, changing the original direction of the show.
Where Can You Watch It?: The entire series has been released on DVD and Blu-ray with a separate release for Heroes Reborn. It is available for streaming on NBC’s Peacock service.
Read More About the Show: Wikipedia | IMDb.com.
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