I think the '24 hours to save the world' (or US) thing just requires the same sort of willing suspension of disbelief the viewer needs to afford the Die Hard or James Bond series.
I have the same problem with doing sequels to
Die Hard -- or
Home Alone, or any movie whose premise is built around a unique and coincidental event. It strains credibility to have the same circumstances repeat themselves for the same people.
But I don't have that problem with something like James Bond or Superman or
Star Trek, because those are stories about people whose job it is to tackle crisis situations on an ongoing basis. Sure, the frequency of crises is far greater than in the real world, but at least it isn't a coincidence that these crises always happen to befall the same guy without him seeking them out.
Doing something like
24 as an ongoing series would've made more sense as a sort of anthology approach: each season following a new, unrelated cast of characters dealing with a different kind of crisis told in real time. For instance, maybe after doing one season of Jack Bauer racing the clock to prevent a terrorist attack or whatever, they could've done a season about a police negotiator dealing with a 24-hour hostage crisis, and then maybe some kind of 24-hour real-time medical crisis like a hospital staff dealing with a disaster. If the premise of the show resides in its format -- a single day-long narrative told in real time over 24 hourlong episodes -- then it seems a "seasonal anthology" approach with changing characters and scenarios would be a natural fit. But American TV is too conservative, too resistant to the idea of limited series.
And the 24 hours usually changed from time-frame to time-frame, S1 was the only series set over the course of a single day.
Well, yes, of course the start and end points didn't correspond to a single calendar day, but it was still a single continuous 24-hour period, wasn't it? Therefore, a day defined as a unit of duration equal to 86,400 seconds, rather than as a page on the calendar.
I never thought of it like that before, but that makes a lot of sense all right. Of course, they could have made great subsequent seasons - S2 could should have been an X2/ Superman 2/ The Dark Knight, compared with season one's pilot/ origin story - but the writing just wasn't there.
See, that's where I disagree.
Heroes season 1 was designed to tell a complete story, and they finished it. These characters weren't designed to have open-ended arcs like the X-Men, Superman, or Batman have. They had specific stories that were told and brought to a conclusion. That's the difference between a story that's built around a specific, unique set of events and one that's built around a person or group of people whose job is to tackle crises on an ongoing basis. The former doesn't allow for sequels as plausibly as the latter.
Sure, some
Heroes characters could've worked on a continuing basis. Noah could've kept trying to control and/or help people with powers. Hiro and Ando could've gone on playing superhero. But there was no point in bringing Sylar back from the dead; Peter and Nathan should've died, and having them survive undermined the impact of the S1 climax; and in general there was no reason for all these characters to keep converging and continuing to share adventures, since they came together due to a specific event.
So the way to make further seasons of
Heroes work would've been to do what they originally intended: Only bring back some of the characters, those who could plausibly continue to have adventures, and have a mostly new cast dealing with a different kind of crisis (i.e.
not another vision of the impending end of the world). And yes, keeping good writers around (i.e. Bryan Fuller and not Jeph Loeb & Jesse Alexander) would've helped immensely as well.
As for SeaQuest, just about anything remotely original or clever was done away with when the show was massively retooled in (I think) the second season. And it got worse with each passing season.
The same could be said about Sliders.
I agree that both shows got worse after their first season, but I wouldn't say they got worse with each passing season. I wasn't a fan of
SeaQuest's third season, but it wasn't half as stupid as the second. As for
Sliders, it reached its absolute nadir in the back half of the third season, which is just about the worst thing I've ever seen in series television; its two final seasons on SciFi were an enormous improvement over S3, though not on a par with S1.
