Posted by Jer at 5:43 AM on
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
As I noted in the comments on slugboy's post below, I didn't get to see all of the Heroes finale last night due to a personal conflict (The Lovely Wife and I were attending our final childbirth class -- apparently we've passed and we'll be allowed to have the kid. Hooray!). I'm going to catch the re-run on Sci-Fi Friday night and I'll post something about it after that. Suffice to say, though, that slugboy and I have fairly different views on whether Heroes is a good series or not and, maybe, what makes good superhero television. Personally, I'm looking for a good soap opera with some decent fight scenes in my superhero TV. For me, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was my Platonic Ideal of superhero TV -- overwrought drama, witty banter, and well-choreographed fight scenes. A close second are the Xena/Hercules franchises, which don't have quite the level of overwrought drama, but make up for it by being campily weird, highly mythic, and having some awesome fight-scene choreography. Heroes comes in at a tier down from these two for me -- very enjoyable overall, and a great way to spend an hour of TV-time with The Lovely Wife (who I think sometimes enjoys it even more than I do) but the episodes always leave me picking at ways that they could have been better. In that way it's a lot more like X-Files or Star Trek: Deep Space Nine for me than anything else -- always so close to the target, but not quite there.
The main way that Heroes lets me down week after week is that the fight scenes are so damn bland and they rely to much on the "cut-away/cut-back" method of not showing the fight scene. Sure, it saves on the special effects budget, and used sparingly it can be really dramatic, but not if you use it for every single damn fight. And next season I want to see some more romance, dammit. You can't do good soap opera if you don't have love triangles and families in tension over their son/daughter dating someone they don't like. So in short -- more soap opera and better fight scenes would go a long way to improving the show overall.
However, thinking about the half hour of Heroes that I did get to see last night: I really think that as much as I like the movies, the Spider-man franchise would work much better as a serialized TV show than it does as a movie franchise. All of the annoyances that I talked about earlier are due to the restricted format of the big-budget action movie. Move the series to a 24 episode season and all of those soap opera elements can fall out naturally instead of feeling like they were forced in with the plot-shoehorn. You'd have to work at it to make sure it didn't turn out like Smallville, but Spider-man starts with a natural advantage over Superman in the soap opera department -- he was a soap opera character at his inception. Forcing Superman into a soap opera role feels wrong because his world is not a soap opera world. Spider-man's is, and a show that understands that and plays to that strength while throwing in crazy villains for him to fight week after week could be awesome.
Of course, the SFX could never be as good as the big budget action film FX, and to a large extent Spider-man needs those SFX more than, say, Superman does. You can fake super-strength pretty easily, and flying is apparently easy to do nowadays even on TV. But the webslingning that Spidey does in the movies is some fairly complicated CGI, and I'm not sure you could do Spider-man justice without having those large setpiece battles over Manhattan -- he can only fight in so many old warehouses and alleyways. But if that problem could be overcome, Spidey would be a great candidate to move to the TV.
The main way that Heroes lets me down week after week is that the fight scenes are so damn bland and they rely to much on the "cut-away/cut-back" method of not showing the fight scene. Sure, it saves on the special effects budget, and used sparingly it can be really dramatic, but not if you use it for every single damn fight. And next season I want to see some more romance, dammit. You can't do good soap opera if you don't have love triangles and families in tension over their son/daughter dating someone they don't like. So in short -- more soap opera and better fight scenes would go a long way to improving the show overall.
However, thinking about the half hour of Heroes that I did get to see last night: I really think that as much as I like the movies, the Spider-man franchise would work much better as a serialized TV show than it does as a movie franchise. All of the annoyances that I talked about earlier are due to the restricted format of the big-budget action movie. Move the series to a 24 episode season and all of those soap opera elements can fall out naturally instead of feeling like they were forced in with the plot-shoehorn. You'd have to work at it to make sure it didn't turn out like Smallville, but Spider-man starts with a natural advantage over Superman in the soap opera department -- he was a soap opera character at his inception. Forcing Superman into a soap opera role feels wrong because his world is not a soap opera world. Spider-man's is, and a show that understands that and plays to that strength while throwing in crazy villains for him to fight week after week could be awesome.
Of course, the SFX could never be as good as the big budget action film FX, and to a large extent Spider-man needs those SFX more than, say, Superman does. You can fake super-strength pretty easily, and flying is apparently easy to do nowadays even on TV. But the webslingning that Spidey does in the movies is some fairly complicated CGI, and I'm not sure you could do Spider-man justice without having those large setpiece battles over Manhattan -- he can only fight in so many old warehouses and alleyways. But if that problem could be overcome, Spidey would be a great candidate to move to the TV.
Labels: Heroes, spider-man, superheroes, television
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