*Jump, thud* - That right there, that was the sound of me jumping on the Heroes Haters band wagon. God that was a painful jump. But after one bad season finale and two bad Volumes of defending it, fooling my self it will get back to old form; it is time to vent the anger!
Kudos at least to producers for making one of the most compulsive shows on TV. That people seam to be masochistically sticking with it, in the vain hope it will return to form, rather than just giving up says something about it’s originally quality. After all it's just a TV show, right? Why the dedication? Like no other show I can think of it seems to have a seriously addictive quality and just like any hard drug addiction it will leave you confused, angry and wondering what the hell you are doing wit your life! If all the people who seemed to hate it, yet still watch it, gave up then the already plummeting ratings would half. It is the only shows I have ever seen get a cover story on ways to 'fix’ it (EW apparently told them it was a promotional story- sneaky but I like it!). Is it the whole wish fulfilment thing? We so wanted to be those people with cool powers we can’t let them go easily. But is it worth the effort and faith it is given or has actually morphed into a ‘love to hate it’ show- Heroes, in the words of Dylan Moran "I hate you so much it gives me energy."
Somewhere between the first and second season something seriously weird happened. Ok the season finale wasn’t good, but at least it felt like the same show! Slowly (very slowly in Volume Two’s case)
the show started to descend into a super hero soap opera, completely ignoring original premise of ordinary people in their home towns, with extraordinary destinies- and don't get me wrong that needed to develop, but in the opposite way to the one they chose- characters needed to come together, if anything, not be flung around the time-space continuum like superhuman trash in a trippy episode of Dynasty.So my theories on what possibly went wrong (well this is the internet-everyone needs theories):
1) I remember seeing an interview with Milo Ventimiglia on Regis and Kelly where Regis told him that his daughter had been brought on as a writer in Vol. 2 - It's all Regis’s fault! Well may be not only Regis's daughter, but there was a change in writing staff. Writers from The OC, amongst others were brought in to write Clair’s arc. How anyone thought this was a good idea I don't know, half the writing staff are from Smallville already , which is hardly appropriate given Heroes was supposed to be the grown-up, realistic (well ish) side to superheroes - that was the point! The only other writers are Kirng alums from Crossing Jordan etc-i.e. no genre experience, no grasp of the average fangirl/boy’s memory for detail. Only one name really stands out on the writers list as having real calibre, which brings me to point 2...
2) Brian Fuller left. The exist of an exec producer who only wrote one episode would hardly be a big deal. However, that one episode just happened to be the fan and critic favourite of the whole show by a mile- a bench mark of what the show could and should be if it reached its potential. I.e. the reason so many people keep watching... "Remember how good Company Man was- it could be that good again". Also Fuller has proven himself an extremely talented show runner with Wonderfalls, Dead Like Me and Pushing Daisies all critically acclaimed shows that he created. Whereas Tim Kring has two generic dramas and no experience in the genre on his CV (fuller worked on Star track previous to his own shows). Perhaps without him to oversee things and rein in the pure insanity and quash the “hay it’s Sci-Fi, we can do ANYTHING”s it all went down hill. Having said that, thanks to the fact that Pushing Daises is now…well...pushing daises, Fuller is back on board from episode 20 Vol 4. Disturbingly however (SPOILER ALERT) Fuller has said that season 4 will concentrate on Clair and the Petrellis....o good.
3) A lot of the complaints about the show seem to smack of poor management. In general Kring is to TV what Gorge Bush is to politics. If he is not calling his live TV viewers Dip S***s, he is blaming the serialised format for loss of viewers (yea coz 24, LOST, Desperate Housewives are all really unpopular) and my personal favourite, talking up the way the Heroes writers write it as they go along! He frankly deserves the flack he gets after making comments about Lost only having one good season...ha! There seem to be bizarre decisions coming from every department. Writing inconsistencies everywhere and writers complaining that it is because directors cut crucial lines of dialogue, the 4 million budget per episode is blown and no surprise when you see expensive sets like the Japanese strip joint set in Vol. 4 used for about five minuets. One thing they could learn from Smallville is how to use a budget.
Most bizarre though is the decision to give Hayden a distractingly terrible wig that literally looks like it is from a Barbie after she 
cut her hair a few inches. They even had a several week long time gap between Volumes- would it not have been easier to say Clair got a new hair cut? They constantly want her to grow up -so why not her hair too? It works for Future Clair. I mean do a few inches really make a difference? (dirty!) Seriously are they spending some of the 4 mil budget on crack!? Who came up with that idea? Peter was aloud a hair cut! (although ratings started to drop when the emo hair was cut- maybe that’s why they are worried?)
Surely there should be some people to oversee that lines of communication are open and decisions are thought through ...o weight there are! In know that producing a massive show is hard but it worked first season- what happened since? Well Jeb Lobe and Jesse Alexander got caught in the cross fire from an unhappy NBC. In Lobes case it may have been his time- comic book legend though he is, clearly his recent work has suffered from massive continuity errors and I doubt that it is a coincidence that Heroes does too. However the buck should stop at Kring. Some new writers don't seam to know what happened in previous seasons and the show no longer sticks to its own rules and ultimately it is Kring’s responsibility to remember all the little and not so little details and see that the rest of the crew do too- because the fans sure as hell will.
When Heroes started critics raved about how it actually answered questions, unlike Lost, but now there are just more questions than answers, not only about the show but about its production: Why are all the women blond? who the hell came up with the whole eclipses take away and give powers thing, (because I seem to remember a lot of powers going on before the last eclipse) and how have they not been fired? Who taught the heroes writers the theory of relativity? They did a bead job. What the F**K was with the hunger, since when was it a power based thing? Talk about pissing all over a character. Sylar the empath? WTF? Has that been all forgotten for Vol. 4? Is Clair's wig made of Golden Labrador fur? Is the whole show a secret promotional campaign for Italian supremacy? Why do the writers make thing so difficult for themselves (Clair's Jesus blood, Peter absorbing everything from
P.S. For anyone who is sick of the Lost vs. Heroes debate and wishes both would just get along...well it may look something like this...
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