Nothing left to hide

The new show Hero’s on NBC… is terrible. I am not happy about it, I don’t think alot of people who were excited about the idea of a comic super hero television show wanted it to be this.

I keep trying to like it, but don’t believe the ads they pump out every week during prime time about being a great number one hit TV show, it really is terrible. Now the idea for the show, great, but of course the execution is poor. In specific, the acting is just… bleh which is probably 50% the actors fault and the other half the writing. A great concept still needs some decent dialogue to keep people strung along between the special effects. I heard on some pod cast that it’s all about shock value, and really that’s all it is, just stringing the audience out for as long as possible, despite the many moments in-between that make you want to cringe.

How would you make this better? I think alot of it is effectively riding the line of being too realistic but trying to be in a world that super heroes can exist. The show wants you to believe in these people, so they try and make them real by giving them problems, jobs, genius kids, etc but these situations they put them in aren’t done effectively. So you have a show that is trying to be a normal drama, and basically failing at it, then trying to be a super hero show and only doing okay, which isn’t enough to save the whole boat. The real life parts of the heroes lives are laughable, and not good enough to be television on their own, but because they are the strings the keep us moving along towards the major plot points of cool super heroes, it makes the whole thing… uncomfortable. It seems to be a case of quantity over quality, cut down on so many super heroes, work more with the actors who are worth a damn and the heroes who have interesting stories and then make the drama of their stories more realistic. Don’t worry about selling them as super heroes, worry about selling them as people first. But don’t fuck with the flying kid or the Japanese guy, they are the only redeemable one’s on it.

And the not surprising loser, Friday Night Lights… haha. Really, I don’t know who thought it was going to be a good idea, and if this show does well, then we know why I’m not a Network Executive. If you didn’t watch the first episode then great, I have a better suggestion for you if you were at all interested in Football in the South, watch the MTV Show Two-a-days, they don’t pretend to live breath and eat football, they actually do. Which in a way, is what makes FNL fail, because their is a show out there that does the same thing, much much better. To be brief, it’s terrible because after seeing the real thing you realize that California is not the deep south, California is not Texas and real southern accidents to look so tan, so 23 and so Los Angeles. In terms of execution, the football game, the locker room stuff, all the good meat for your trailers, is really well done, like a good Mighty Ducks Hockey Game, watching them play is much better than real football… well I maybe not for some of you but.. it’s like watching a highlight reel, always cool looking always interesting, just que that foo fighters music. Where the show fails, is the people in it, the people they use to represent southern life, way too pretty way to SoCal, and mostly not enough real, the people who love football, that peak out in high-school and make their lives that sport, do not act like these people in the show. The plot points they’ve set up, which I won’t spoil, are clearly defined and easy to see through, but do you care enough to see them struggle through their football season a man down… did they make you care at all about their triumph, or maybe it lies in the perspective they are showing us. They are glorifying something the southern people who live this life… already glorify, but they are doing it by pushing California up its ass, maybe it they took a step back and showed the kind of people that lead that life and why it means the world to them, what society values High School Football beyond college and the years their after, maybe that would be a more interesting show, and it is… on MTV.