Unsurprisingly, we’ve been watching Heroes on NBC since it’s pilot aired originally last year. Surprisingly, we weren’t completely sold on the show at first. Why? The pilot, relative to what the rest of the first season, was by far the worst episode. Not even weakest–television shows, if they maintain a strong, religious following, and keep growing, can overcome a weak pilot sometimes. Of course, to everyone else I’ve spoken to, they’ve generally loved the Heroes pilot. For us, it was a case of being cynical old school comic book readers. Every single thing touched on pretty much in the pilot episode we’d seen before, multiple times. Not just that, but we’d seen it done exceptionally. Well. So-so. Poorly. We’ve been reading comic books for our entire lives.
Then something occurred to us. Comic book readers, especially people that actually study them somewhat, and actually read comic book scripts, and follow it as a form of art and literature, and not just a diversion, or hobby, or casual reading, are an extreme minority. We really are. We are, in relative terms, comic book snobs. We’ve read our Watchmen, and our Dark Knight Returns, and our Sandman, and our old large-volume reprints of classics like the original Bob Kane Batman stories, and our Amazing Fantasy #15. We gleefully pointed at the deconstruction of the form when it happened in Planetary. We’re elitist snobs (although I do love my Ultimate Spider-Man, still). We’d seen all this “crap” before. But 99% percent of the America–no, the world’s population–never had.
It was all new to them.
We came back next week, and the week after, and are now sixteen episodes into Heroes. Each week is fantastic. Each week shows growth for nearly all the characters involved, and their stories. Even better? Heroes, in many ways, is the antithesis of LOST. LOST goes out of it’s way to give you questions, but only the most (if at all) roundabout answers. LOST is like crack cocaine: a great high, but you feel rotten and dependent immediately. It’s Las Vegas; all flash and the illusion of substance like a mirage. I’ve heard that LOST is allegedly now “halfway done” and has a finite five year plan, so maybe that will be changing. But it is what it is. Heroes, on the other hand, is like the American heartland, or the ideal of it: all meat, all solid, whole-wheat, and pure story. Even better? Like I said, it’s all new to most people, but many of the themes to seasoned comic book readers will seem familiar since… oh, the 1960s or 1970s. That said, Heroes is one of the most amazing live-action interpretations of comic book superheroes (albeit without spandex) I’ve yet seen. In that, the show is on par with the Tobey McGuire Spider-Man films.
To my knowledge, very little has happened or come about yet in Heroes Season One that hasn’t either served the larger plot, a given character’s story, or been a set-up for one or the other. Watching Heroes is actually a lot like watching one of my favorite films, Ghostbusters. Go back and look at that film, and it’s best aspect, the brilliant script. Nothing happens in that movie, no action, no line of dialogue, no joke, that isn’t a setup for a plot point or something else. Everything builds into something else until the crescendo of the closing credits. That’s what the entire season of Heroes feels like (so far). The last episode, where we see one character suddenly flaunting a heaping host of abilities (at one point more than one at a time!) was just fantastic, and felt like the ending of act four of a five act story. The season so far, also rather interestingly, has more of the feel of a mini-series, than a regular week-by-week show, which has 18-20 stand alone episodes per season and then one larger series mythology aspect in the remaining episodes. All of Heroes is the mythology; every episode is a chapter of the larger story.
That’s what makes that show so fantastic: it’s all meat, with none of the vapor that other shows use to pad and fill out their allocation of episodes per season.
I just thought of something huge for my Heroes predictions, and revised my last post to add this.
I’ve been thinking alot about how Season #1 of 
