It was the surprise hit of the new US TV season, and now its the biggest show the Sci-Fi Channel in the UK has landed. What did the critics - and you - make of Heroes?
"Holy creative inertia, Batman! Not more crypto-fascist fantasies of omnipotence disguised as mainstream entertainment and peddled by an increasingly decrepit and, frankly, comic book-obsessed popular culture! If anything, the much-hyped Heroes (Sci-Fi Channel) proved conclusively that, given the right flashy production values and cod-philosophical Weltschmertz, there are no subjects and no areas of modern life that cannot be infected by the inane juvenilia of comic-book lore.
Naturally, ever keen to reveal its own genetic heritage, Heroes repeatedly treated us to scenes of characters reading comic books, painting giant comic-book pictures, and discussing comic-book stories -- you just know you're in a Geek Tragedy when X-Men and Star Trek are referenced in the same line of dialogue. Which might, in theory, have been fine if Heroes had stayed within the kitschy world of fantastical narratives established by the likes of X-Men and The Fantastic Four. But, no, this show had bigger thematic fish to fry...Hence, before the first 20 minutes were up Heroes had invoked the political crisis in the Middle East, bus bombings in Israel and, of course, September 11. All of which were going to be solved, the show announced in its opening title crawl, by a handful of modern mutants with special abilities.
Now, personally, I find it both morally and artistically repugnant that the most urgent political crisis of our time, one that's currently claiming thousands of lives every month, can be denuded of all context and cheerily coopted by the wish-fulfilment fantasies of some insular adolescent jerks. It is, surely, a sign of growing American political apathy when the cultural response to the Iraq crisis is simply to send Magneto into Baghdad. What's next? Spider-Man for president? Wonder Woman at the UN? Or would that just be silly?
I'm told that the Metro gave it Five Stars. But what did you think? Update: Heroes gave Sci-Fi its biggest ever ratings last night - with 460,000 viewers watching episode one and 364,000 for the second installment, with some folk clearly deciding that 11pm on a midweek night was a bit much.
