NBC plans to bring Heroes back for a fourth season

What's funny is that Greg Grunberg (whatever his name is) said at WonderCon that they were cancelled.

 

I don't think anyone cares enough anymore to be a "hater."

 

I think this show would have been cancelled if NBC wasn't in such dire straits right now. It's amost all they got.

 

The last Heroes episode I saw was 3.10, or rather first 5 minutes of it. Never bothered to finish ... It's not even hilarious-bad, it's just bad and boring ...

 

Or cares enough to be pissed off that people watch it.

 

Yeah, I don't really hate it.

I almost feel sorry for it.

It had good potential, even if it did feel like an X-Men ripoff.

 

My husband LOVES this show with a passion, and I did too---at first.

Now, frankly, I find the motivation of the characters simply baffling. Very few of their actions ring "true" anymore. I wouldn't say it's utter crap ( I used to watch "V", for ffs ), but it's simply mediocre---pedestrian. Aside from the plots involving super-powers, it's really nothing special or different, or even interesting. I'm completely ambivalent, whereas in season 1, I was a passionate fan.

I'll probably watch it, simply because my husband does, but I can't say I really care one way or the other about whether it continues or simply ends here and now.

There's the old saying, "If it ain't on the page, it ain't on the stage." Well, it's certainly not on the page anymore for "Heroes."

 

If I watch a show, by definition I don't hate it. That would be pretty warped. Or evidence of way too much time on one's hand. This show has the strongest premise of anything on TV, which is why I stuck with it past its sale date. If I find out next season after I stop watching that it made a turn around and was top shelf, I would gladly watch it later on DVD. But I can't see that happening.

 

The thing is, I'll actually defend some of the stuff in the second season. I liked the Hiro/Adam arc. I'm one of the few people who like Matt and thought his stuff with his dad was good. Learning about the company was cool. But Peter's arc was derivative of his first arc and made him look like a total tool. Whinny Claire and her obnoxious stalker boyfriend killed any good will I had for the character. Niki and Micah, again, had no reason to be there and added nothing. Her husband had potential but they got rid of him in the most unflattering of ways. Pretty much everyone but Hiro and Matt were stupid and toolish. And Sylar, yet again, goes on an incognito road trip with bad intentions(just like he's done yet again this season). Granted, they had to change some stuff because of the writers strike, I understand that. But even then their characterization was appaling.

But this season? Wow was it bad. I know it has its fans, but there's just so much random crap they're throwing at us without any sense of a story, it's impossible to get into. They're just hoping something will stick but without a narrative nothing is going to. Important plots and themes from previous seasons are dropped and completely undercut. Big reveals that made no sense. And the characters getting dumber by the minute. Ugh. I couldn't take it and quit after a few episodes. And from what I hear, it only got worse.

Personally I think they should have just written off or killed all the characters after the first season except for Hiro and Sylar. Half the fun of the first season was examining and learning about the characters. When there was nothing more to learn, and we knew everything about them, there was really no where to go but downhill. The writers are good at introducing characters, but they suck at evolving them. This is proven. Hiro's journey to be a great hero is still a compelling idea though, no matter how messed up it has become this season.

Sylar should have been used sparringly. The reason Magneto is popular is because his return is always an event. So you know shit is going to hit the fan when he shows up. Sylar got overexposed and people got bored with him.

If Heroes gets another season and Chuck doesn't, I'll be so pissed off I probably won't watch NBC for a while.

 

Yeah I figured. NBC is doing so horribly that comparatively speaking, Heroes isn't doing too shabby.

I'm glad Bryan Fuller will have a full season to get things back on track. It would suck if he came back, turned things around, and three episodes later the show gets canned.

But they wouldn't have bothered bringing Fuller back if they weren't planning for an S4. And Fuller wouldn't have agreed unless he were promised an S4. Another reason this comes as no surprise.

I still love the characters and the premise. That's enough to get me through the atrocious writing - for now.

Unlike BSG and Lost, which are stories that have a conclusion inherent in the premise, Heroes is one of the few premises that really could go on forever. It's like Star Trek - an unresolvable situation rather than a problem to be resolved. And if Fuller goes his job right, it might even deserve to go on forever.

 

It has been mentioned in other threads that the series creator's intention was to have a new cast each year. However, the popularity of the characters forced them to scrap that idea.

I agree that I am watching the rest of this season to see if anything changes. If it doesn't, forget it. The writers are really writing in circles at this point. None of the characters have changed at all or grown in forever. Things like the Matt/Daphne romance were so unbelievably forced that you didn't care when she was briefly presumed killed this season (but she somehow survived). Characters like Nathan can't make up their mind if they want to be evil or good, and seem to change from one to the other 5-6 times in ONE EPISODE.

Just this week we had another forced, albeit brief, romantic thing between Claire and Alex (the aquaboy). Almost immediately after that he disappeared, presumably for good as he is supposed to have gone to Albuquerque.

Then of course there are the dozens of characters who have disappeared but are not dead, including West (Claire's romantic interest in Season 2), Molly (the girl who can locate anyone), Micah (orphaned son of Niki Sanders), Maya, Zach (Claire's friend from Season 1 who was played by Thomas Dekker of Terminator: TSCC fame), Claude (the invisible man from Season 1), Monica (the fast-learning girl from Season 2), and of course the infamous Caitlin (in case you don't remember, she was Peter's love interest from Ireland in Season 2 who appears to be stuck in a possible future with no escape). That's a pretty hefty list. I am not including 'The Haitian' because he comes and goes a lot in this series.

 

Oh please. They will never never never have the guts to kill Peter (permanently). He's in the same category as Sylar, (sadly) Claire and (even more sadly) Hiro - too may fans would bail as a result and there's no way Heroes can lose a big chunk of their fans at this point.

Tho at this point, Hiro might be expendable...do people still like him?

I dunno, she mentioned international revenues as a factor in the renewal and that's something we hardly hear anything about - just how big a factor is it, anyway? Is Chuck doing well internationally?

 

I sure don't.

 

I never got the Hiro-love, myself. I can see ways to take most of the characters in interesting directions, but with Hiro and Claire, I draw a total blank.

Good writers could have done something much more interesting with most of those characters. Hiro and Claire are the only ones where I question whether they are salvageable. (And Nikki/Tracey, but I don't even know who that person is; kill them, find the third sister and start from scratch maybe.)

The chief problem is that nobody seems to have sat down and thought good and hard about What Is The Core of This Character? That's the first thing you need to know - what journey are they on? That will tell you what they're going to do in the story. Then let the characters tell you what the story is by imagining what they would do if they were real people with that core and that journey. That's how you keep them feeling "real" and authentic rather than just randomly written pawns going through motions in the service of a plot.

The complex thing is that you have half a dozen people (meaning the lead characters) all embarked on their stories and you need to arrange things so that they interact without it seeming too forced. That's the tough part. When you're letting your characters be themselves and have free will, their priorities will not necessarily be staying in the same room or even the same city. But they did that in S1 - why not again?

I still think people largely watch shows for the characters. Killing some characters, ok. All of them? Suicide.

Also, if you have an audience who watches for the characters, you can get away with shitty writing.

 

Claire is always on the verge of being salvageable...and then Noah shows up and she's back in "Dad? How could you?!" mode. For Claire to have any sort of growth, she needs to never ever see her father again.

 

The show sucks now, period. That's what I was afraid of during the brilliant first season. The first sign of trouble was when in the last episode of season one, Peter and Sylar had that boring crap "fight", something we waited nearly half a season to build up to. I was excited though to see them taking certain risks. But I lost interest when we had that chick in New Orleans "skipping" to show us her powers. The show went downhill from there.

 

Noah needs to die. Sorry folks, but that's the only way to shape Claire into a halfway worthwhile character. She needs to get a smack to the head when the daddy she always took for granted dies to protect her ingrateful ass.

I was watching Lost last night and was once again struck by the paradox that Lost continually manages to deliver kick-ass writing, with characters who never feel fake, and plotlines that generally feel genuine - confusing and insane, sure - but not artificially produced via gimmickry. Why is this so difficult for everyone else?

Sure, Lost falls back on some gimmickry, all that "fate/numbers" stuff, but it isn't nearly as obtuse as having "Rebel" lead characters around by the nose at convenient junctures or the hoary old prophetic-cartoon routine.

 

I found this on the IMDB FAQ section for 'Heroes' about Caitlin:

'Caitlin was left in the future, and they will never mention her again, according to Tim Kring. Due to the writers strike, they scrapped the idea of getting her back.'

Well, I guess that settles that...

 

I still love Hiro and Ando, even when they're stopping weddings in India Actually at this point my list of beliked characters is basically Hiro & Ando, Parkman & Daphne, Noah, and Mohinder (well not so much in the third season!). I also loved the African mystic seer so I was pretty pissed he was so unceremoniously killed off, but then we see him sometimes after he died so we'll see! I want to like Sylar but it's so horrifically artificial the way he gets these little side-stories when he should have been killed off two seasons ago.