Heroes

I’ve been spending more time than is healthy lately watching Heroes. Basically that show is a comic book on TV, which I find absurdly appropriate. Essentially both comic books and TV are amazing mixes of visual and literary arts. While I highly enjoy the storytelling styles of both TV and comics, I have to say, the comic book style is probably harder to get used to. A lot of comic book authors like to run multiple storylines at once, which is hard for a lot of TV audiences to adjust to I think, and is a technique I felt worked well with Heroes.

Another thing comic books tend to do, which I don’t think Heroes did particularly well, is show a scene, and then come back later to extend it to explain what happened or for whatever other reason. When Heroes did this, they tended to end an episode on a scene, and then begin the next episode on the same on, sometimes not bothering to make any changes or add anything. Perhaps that worked well when the series was coming on with a new episode each week, but watching over again, on Netflix or DVD it’s just annoying. All in all I liked the series, though I felt the Company was overdone a bit—this is perhaps the sentinels bit if you’re into X-Men comparisons. They also came to the Brotherhood of Mutants thing a little late, as they didn’t really explore that potential bit of the show until the fourth season, when interest in the show was starting to die down. That said, having watched them all again recently, I actually think season four had some of the most compelling storytelling the show managed, at least until it was cancelled and had to wrap things up quickly.

All things together, I would love to see this series continued in a comic book format, as Joss Whedon does with many of his projects. If they got a good artist and writer team, I bet they’d get a good following for it.