Heroes
Its been a while since I blogged. Mostly I've been busy with work, its hard to believe I've already been here for two months. It seems like I just started at the Boston Globe.
I've been watching several TV dramas lately, Smallville, Battlestar Galactica, Stargate SG-1, and Stargate Atlantis to name a few. Including NBC's new show, Heroes. There is a lot of hype flying around and a lot of people trumpeting the show's story.
I will be one of the people who, while content with the show, is not as enthused with it as others. Most of the characters are two-dimensional, save for Hiro Nakamura, Peter Petrelli, and Mohinder Suresh. Hiro, Peter, and Mohinder show archtypal qualities of heroe's described by Joseph Campbell in Hero with a Thousand Faces. Each is pursuing this path in a different way, Hiro for instance has a guide in the form of a comic book that he acquires. The others aside from those three seem to have no clear reason to be proceeding down the path they are going, though hopefully this will be remedied as the series goes on. It is already beginning to tie their fates together through the nemesis identified as Sylar.
The series is a lot like a more mainstream 4400, unlike The 4400 though which has an incredibly large cast yet focused groups of characters, Heroes' sotry is very diluted. So much so that nothing really happens in the course of an hour. Again maybe this is one of the elements that will fix itself as more and more of the characters come together. Like the 4400, the premise of Heroes is a catastrophe will occur and only those who represent the future of mankind can stop it.
Heroes however takes its premise for human evolution from a debunked myth that we only use 10% of our brain. Its a slight peeve of mine that the writers of Heroes presumably didn't research the ten-percent myth further, but one that I can easily get over. Its not just the lack of attention to simple things like the ten-percent myth that has me skeptical about the longevity of the show, but the writing while decent, is nothing to hoop and holler about. Their unexpected endings are hardly full of suspense and certainly not always unexpected, and while fading out on one of the characters might leave you thinking "wow, I didn't see that coming" the others that you have been following in the episode leave you with nothing, or at best a confirmation of what you suspected throughout the episode.
I by no mean to say that the writing on Smallville, or any of the other shows mentioned in the beginning are equivelent with Shakespeare, Chaucer, or any other literary great, however in my humble opinion they are better than Heroes. That being said, the show is worth watching to see what happens next, but in my opinion it falls short of something that draws you in and won't let go. The only reason you might not want to miss an episode is because if you do, you'll have no idea what is happening in the next one you finally do see.
I've been watching several TV dramas lately, Smallville, Battlestar Galactica, Stargate SG-1, and Stargate Atlantis to name a few. Including NBC's new show, Heroes. There is a lot of hype flying around and a lot of people trumpeting the show's story.
I will be one of the people who, while content with the show, is not as enthused with it as others. Most of the characters are two-dimensional, save for Hiro Nakamura, Peter Petrelli, and Mohinder Suresh. Hiro, Peter, and Mohinder show archtypal qualities of heroe's described by Joseph Campbell in Hero with a Thousand Faces. Each is pursuing this path in a different way, Hiro for instance has a guide in the form of a comic book that he acquires. The others aside from those three seem to have no clear reason to be proceeding down the path they are going, though hopefully this will be remedied as the series goes on. It is already beginning to tie their fates together through the nemesis identified as Sylar.
The series is a lot like a more mainstream 4400, unlike The 4400 though which has an incredibly large cast yet focused groups of characters, Heroes' sotry is very diluted. So much so that nothing really happens in the course of an hour. Again maybe this is one of the elements that will fix itself as more and more of the characters come together. Like the 4400, the premise of Heroes is a catastrophe will occur and only those who represent the future of mankind can stop it.
Heroes however takes its premise for human evolution from a debunked myth that we only use 10% of our brain. Its a slight peeve of mine that the writers of Heroes presumably didn't research the ten-percent myth further, but one that I can easily get over. Its not just the lack of attention to simple things like the ten-percent myth that has me skeptical about the longevity of the show, but the writing while decent, is nothing to hoop and holler about. Their unexpected endings are hardly full of suspense and certainly not always unexpected, and while fading out on one of the characters might leave you thinking "wow, I didn't see that coming" the others that you have been following in the episode leave you with nothing, or at best a confirmation of what you suspected throughout the episode.
I by no mean to say that the writing on Smallville, or any of the other shows mentioned in the beginning are equivelent with Shakespeare, Chaucer, or any other literary great, however in my humble opinion they are better than Heroes. That being said, the show is worth watching to see what happens next, but in my opinion it falls short of something that draws you in and won't let go. The only reason you might not want to miss an episode is because if you do, you'll have no idea what is happening in the next one you finally do see.