The Unexpected 'Heroes'

'Heroes' is an hour long NBC show about a bunch of "ordinary" people who find out they have "extraordinary" powers and eventually must save the world. Before I started watching this show, I thought to myself, "Wow... how original. How is this not like X-Men?"

There a bunch of shows on television that follow the format of season-long, individually written episodes that are kind of written on the fly... but are immensily complex and usually well written and full of cliffhangers. I don't watch a show unless I hear a good recommendation from at least two or more people I know personally, and/or read it about it online with several good reviews. This is one of those shows.

I was extremely skeptical at first and it took a lot of effort for me to finally say, "Ok... let's give this a try." Because honestly, the premise of the show does not sound original or even exciting at all. I mean, how many superhero plotlines have we heard already?

Well, let me tell you. After the first episode, I was hooked. This is usually how it works out for most shows I watch anyway. I have to "acquire a taste" so-to-speak. I went through the first episode thinking "Alright... superhero... I get it... when does the real fun begin? What is going on?" but once the plot started churning... it started getting reeeaal good.

Thanks to the wonderful world of internet and broadband, I'm able to watch 'Heroes' online through NBC's website. After watching the first episode, I watched maybe 4-5 of the next episodes non-stop. It was damn interesting and fun to watch. Some of the acting is kind of sup-par, but the plot itself seems to make up for it. There are a lot of twists and turns and "Woah! Cool!" moments. I measure the quality of TV shows and movies purely on how well it entertains me. Heroes gets the jump done. Therefore, I approve of it and recommend it to other viewers.

But, there are still some cons. As I said before, the acting isn't that great at times. Some may argue that I'm full of doo-doo and can't appreciate the performance some of the characters bring, but I am honestly not convinced in certain scenes. Most of the time it is pretty good, but there are moments when I just want to say to the screen "Ok... I get it... but try better next time" and wait for another twist or turn to keep my boredom pinned down.

Now, this is going to sound ridiculous, considering it's a show about people with superpowers... but there's a lot of stuff that's very unrealistic. I can't really cite specific examples without giving away a lot of the plot, but there are a few scenes where it looks like the writers wanted to just get from scene A to Scene C without really developing Scene B. Luckily, I'm not too skeptical and can deal with it, considering many other shows do the same thing... but it's nice if they put effort of some sort into a lot of the scenes. It's like the characters are going through classic dilemmas that have already been portrayed in past movies ("I have to save the world, but it's a huge responsibilty" or "Sacrifice few for many?"), so they don't really bother to show the character going through the dilemma. They just kind of act out the dilemma for a moment, give a few minutes of thought, then jump to the next scene to get the plot going. I'm left thinking to myself, "Uhh... ok? I guess I'll just... accept that and wait to ... see what happens next!" which is what the show seems to do well, so I'll bite that bullet for now.

All together, it's a fun show to watch. Keeps me interested and entertainmed, most of the time. Lately, the episodes have been getting kind of dry for me, even though they're moving towards a massive conclusion. Unless they throw in one of those massive plot curves that make you fly off your seat and go "Ah..yuh...whaa?? Woa!!!" - my boredom meter is going to start rising and expect something I do not expect. But I'm pretty confident they'll live up to that not-so-expected expectation to keep me glued to the monitor.