Heroes Reborn
NBC announced Saturday that Heroes, the 2006 show about ordinary people who discover they have superhuman abilities, would be getting a reboot. Much like Fox’s 24, Heroes will return as a miniseries, set to air in 2015.
A Heroes reboot has a lot of potential for success. In its first season, the show had such a captivatingly simple premise that, much like its protagonists’ powers, it seemed full of possibility. The show’s formula, hoisting people from all walks of life into positions of superhuman power, was a winning one. Its flexibility allowed for a variety of combinations of different powers and personalities.
But the strength of season one was in its grounded approach to the superpower genre. Avoiding the back and forth drama of later seasons, the first season featured characters with direction and plot. The logic was sound but the show included enough mystery to appeal to our curiosity. Not everything was completely clear in the beginning because there was an understanding that explanations would come in due time.
This sense of things to come fostered a building fascination for fans. Creator Tim Kring held back some of the tastiest morsels as bait to eagerly bid us on — and rightly so.
It was only after the first season that the Heroes-verse began unraveling.
The later seasons revealed the show’s lack of advance planning. Gaps in plausibility yawned open, and loss of focus and direction reigned supreme as the writers’ lack of forethought became apparent. Characters went from people with motives and goals to vehicles for moving the plot forward.
Heroes Reborn can make the series great again, but only if it anchors itself in the self-control and planning of the first season. Playing with superpowers can get out of hand very quickly. It takes restraint to chart a steady course for a show and stay tethered to reality. That’s one of the biggest takeaways from the show’s original four seasons.
Heroes was plagued by exciting foreshadowing that never panned out. For example, throughout the show’s four seasons, an ominous “f” symbol made cameos on everything from paintings to tattoos to swords, yet in the end, we were never given a real explanation as to what it meant. It was clear the symbol had some link to the characters’ abilities, but the writers began using it as nothing more than an Easter egg that popped up here and there without an actual explanation.
The eclipse that was supposedly the catalyst for the development of the characters’ abilities was also never explained. It’s doubtful even the writers could tell us why the eclipse made people develop or lose their abilities.
Further muddled plot points emerged from the lack of clarity in the character’s powers. Company associate The Haitian’s abilities were unclear once the writers began supplying him with random powers under the umbrella term “mental manipulation.”
Then there were characters like professor Mohinder Suresh and tagalong Ando Masahashi, who did not develop abilities naturally, but instead were given powers artificially later in the series. Not only were the powers bizarre and unclear, but the characters were not especially engaging to begin with. It would take more than a superpower makeover to generate interest in them.
And then some characters simply lost themselves altogether. Fourth season supervillain Sylar flip-flopped loyalties like a waffling politician, one moment wanting to slice open heads and steal powers and the next teaming up with former archenemy and Clark Kent wannabe Peter Petrelli.
Overall, Kring and company are going to need to step it up for the Heroes Reborn miniseries. The setup is there, but they’re going to need to think less in terms of grandeur and more in terms of working within their limits. The reboot will be constrained to 13 episodes, meaning everything must be neatly executed and with forethought in order to restore the excitement of Heroes’ first season.
