Wednesday 3 December 2008

Heroes: How To Fix It

What an awful show ‘Heroes’ has become. It started two years ago, at a time when Lost had, ahem, lost the way and was floundering about with barely any scenes featuring Locke, Sayid or Desmond at all. As Lost was going nowhere quickly, people jumped on Heroes because it was fun, moved quickly, and answered the questions that were asked of it with an impressive regularity. No four-toed statues there!

But as time has gone on, Lost has become absolutely awesome and Heroes has experienced perhaps the fastest slide into awfulness that has ever been seen on television. The characters no longer make any sense, the ongoing plots are bizarre and only work because the writers say so – and oh yeah, the writers. They seem to have no idea about what continuity is and they thought Nathan Petrelli (arguably their best character, and played by Adrian Pasdar – who is easily the best actor on the show) should be turned into a Christian. They shot him at the start of this year, y’know, and then had him be healed by a character with healing powers. Oh, but then the healing guy turned out to only exist in Nathan’s head, and wasn’t actually around. So, uh… who healed Nathan? That’s just one example of the many, many continuity errors which the writers bathe in weekly.

It’s easy to criticise Heroes. In fact, I’ll do so once more if you don’t mind – why do they kill off the characters played by decent actors? Healing cheerleader Claire can’t seem to ever get killed off, but so far this season they kill off the guy who played ‘Sark’ on Alias AND Veronica Mars? That’s not entertainment! But here I go again, complaining about the show without offering any ideas of my own to help fix it.

Well, actually I can fix it. In five steps. Want to know how I’d do it? Of course you do! Here we go:

Step 1: Kill off all the overpowered heroes, such as Sylar and Arthur Petrelli, and Claire. There’s no suspense if half the cast are immortal. Kill them off!

Step 2: Bring in a new hero, played by Nathan Fillion. Nathan Fillion’s power on the show will be that he is awesome, and he’ll carry a gun around at all times.

Step 3: Fire the rest of the cast. They are getting in Nathan Fillion’s way and stealing valuable airtime that should be devoted to Nathan Fillion.

Step 4: This show has poor writers. You know who is a good writer? Joss Whedon! Hire him to be the new show-runner of the programme. If you have to bribe him with the promise that he can have a musical episode once every season, so be it.

Step 5: Give Nathan Fillion a spaceship to fly around in, and hire a new cast of brilliance character-actors who can live on the spaceship with Nathan Fillion. I suggest Alan Tudyk, Adam Baldwin, Gina Torres and Summer Glau to be among the new cast-members.

You see? In five simple steps, we have taken the show, reworked it significantly, and come out the other side with something fantastic and entertaining for all. Who wouldn’t want to watch this show, where Nathan Fillion has a gun and flies around on a spaceship with his friends?


NBC Executives: I know you probably feel bad about the concept of stealing ideas from your favourite blog, but seriously – just do it. I won’t even mind.

2 comments:

  1. I like your idea, though I'd like to go one further.

    I think we need to retool Heroes into a western. Something kinda like the Civil War of sorts...but in the future. )Think we can do this in space?)

    I don't know if people will like it, but if it works it'll attract people like flys to the fire. Hmm...I think I just came up with a title. What do you think of "Serenity"?

    ReplyDelete