this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2024
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That first season was lucky beyond belief and still barely worked sometimes. Everything since then... kinda sucked.
The writer's strike takes the blame for a hot mess of bad ideas they were gonna do anyway.
Honestly, the lesson of this show was - do one good season. Tell a complete story in two dozen hour-long chunks. Don't dangle a satisfying conclusion for ten years.
Having things happen should not be novel. It should not be tied to endless dragging soap-opera formula, or edgelord anyone-can-die chaos. You can be melodramatic! You can kill off characters! But those should not be primary goals. No more than pleading "one more season!," which is guaranteed to fail eventually, having resolved approximately nothing.
Avoiding that shaggy-dog storytelling is what made Heroes a major event. It wasn't the first or most important show with its aspirations. The Sopranos was in full swing and Breaking Bad was not far-off. And until Twin Peaks lanced the whole genre, prime-time soap operas like Dallas had the budget and scope we'd later celebrate in those shows. People liked seeing characters with stakes that weren't guaranteed to orbit the status quo.
But the idiot suits only heard 'people like these characters, let's milk this fucker dry.' And then the writer's strike took the blame. That's the kindest thing that ever happened to this show's legacy. An irreverent outlier took off and its corporate masters drowned it in money. Do you understand how that always goes? You get some Soul Society garbage instead of whatever made things interesting. Heroes season two is when they went to Namek.