TV Meme: Day 11 - Disappointing Show

It's the eleventh day of the TV meme, and the topic is: most disappointing show. Took me a sec to think of a answer, but then surfing through recent TV news enlightened me as to my topic show. I plan on writing a more appropriate editorial about the program after the Season 4 DVD gets released in August, so I'll just add a few thoughts and not get real in-depth on what I want to say about it.

The TV show in question is Heroes, developed by Tim Kring and aired for four seasons on NBC. In the midst of finding a sustainable serialized program akin to Lost, NBC quickly picked up Heroes for a full 23-episode freshman season. I doubt NBC really gave a damn about the superhero aspect, and just saw the potential to beat ABC at their own game. "Genesis", the pilot, premiered September 2006, and was met with wild enthusiasm by critics and public alike. In fact, the first season was highly universally acclaimed. The storyline, the diverse characters [especially Hiro Nakamura and Gabriel Gray/Sylar], the music, and the pretty visual effects - Heroes was at the top of the world.

Except I think it's rather rubbish. They took a great concept and the opportunity to increase viewership/readership of superhero stories to the general public and squashed it. Poor characters, poor performances, poor writing, annoying score, poor ideas, poor ability to make anything original and exciting. By the middle of season 3, the show became a parody of itself.

Just a quick instance: I think the whole overuse of time travel in the show was misguided and incorrectly applied; the character of Sylar should have died at the end of "Genesis" and never to be seen again; the whole idea of the stupidly and lazily named The Company is sensible, but its execution and use was ridiculous and sad; Hiro Nakamura was criminally written from the get-go; the characters became far too paper thin and not remotely interesting anymore; why are the characters (especially Peter) so damn stupid?; and that the whole purpose of the series is the explore the excitement and ramifications of having super-powers, something that Kring didn't see particularly interested in past a mention or to.

Of course, a rewatch of the entire series is definitely on my High Priority To-Do List so I can make a more thorough and sound judgment, but I just honestly believe Tim Kring and company really dropped the ball on this one. Thus, I'm extremely hopeful that this deal with the FX Channel in regards to Brian Michael Bendis' Powers follows through and the television world is presented with the proper way of doing a superhero show.

(Image courtesy of HeroSite.net)