Heroes Fatigue

[sdelmonte]

I think a lot of you won't agree with this, but Heroes is losing me. Last night's episode was a dud, excepting the twist ending and a few moments with the one character who finally gets something right. Increasingly, the series is morose, poorly paced, covering ground we've seen before, and relies on its characters being stupid time and time again. Even the good actors struggled last night. And it's not fun at all.

I'm not ready to drop it - I stuck with Smallville for far longer and through far worse before leaving it. But I am really wondering if this show will ever be as good as it could be. We saw glimmers of such possibilities from "Company Man" through the end of the first season. I'm not seeing those glimmers now.

Comments

[canadabear.livejournal.com]

I have to agree, though I'm not giving up yet either. I remember last season really didn't grab me until the second half, so I'm willing to stick it out. Hell, if I can hold on through S2 LOST, I can do anything.

...we shall say nothing of Smallville. >.>

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

Are you picking up the hardcover Heroes collection tomorrow?

[sdelmonte]

I will wait till it's in paperback, as I usually do. Though I am finally getting the season 1 DVD.

[adiva_calandia]

You ain't the only one. :\ I'm sticking in it for Nathan, of all people.

Plus, now every time I see it, I feel like there's this looming cloud labeled "SEASON FINALE IN A MONTH," so twist endings kind of piss me off. They had trouble wrapping up things in a timely fashion last year when they had the whole season; what are they going to do now?

[agoodshinkickin.livejournal.com]

I've had this same feeling for a while. Like...since the episode after "Five Years Gone."

I honestly think I'm still watching just so I can catch the good jokes.

[rushin-doll.livejournal.com]

I was actually fatigued by the end of the first season, and I liked the end of the first season (except for someone not actually dying, that still makes me angry).

Anyway, ironically I was actually discussing fatigue with a coworker the other day and Heroes was a central example. The problem with the show, or at least one of them, is that it's constructed around a pacing model which basically posits "all tension all the time". It's the same model I think Lost employed.

The problem, I think, comes in two parts: constant tension at two levels and tension without termination.

Heroes is cool in that it's really well arced. That is, there's a strong sense of story at the season level, which is something that a lot of shows don't do very well. The problem is that the season-level story is intentionally high-tension, and because the story is for an entire season there's no break, no rest. This is combined with the fact that at the episode level there is also no break (I can't think of an actually happy scene of any sort since "Six Months Ago" myself). The dual layered tension, without any break, makes the show emotionally exhausting to watch. It's sort of like reading a Dostoevsky novel: it's just plain hard to do.

Now, I think that people can actually handle this sort of tension in really large doses as long as they are convinced that it will be resolved in the end. This is where the second problem comes in: Heroes is still very much American television. This means that it's actually designed to be non-terminating if at all possible. That is, because networks build customer loyalty on top of show titles rather than writers/producers/actors/whatever else they have to keep the show going as long as possible in order to maximize their marketing investments and maintain as much carry-over audience as possible.

So those two things combine to create a show that you know is almost painfully tense by design that you aren't sure will actually resolve that tension. As long as the show goes on you know that they won't, maybe even can't, because of the narrative model being employed. And you aren't sure that they'll ever actually end the show instead of just cutting it.

And, yeah, I still regard "Company Man" as one of the best episodes they produced, and I should probably write a post on why at some point since it has to do with narratives and reinterpretation...

Enough babbling,
Ana