Saturday 13 June 2009

Heroes: still seeking redemption

Saturday 13 June 2009
How many chances can one show get? Every new volume of Heroes is accompanied by hype claiming the latest volume/season will be a return to the now-overrated glory of season 1.

Have you had enough yet? The lure for fans with season 4 is that writer-producer Bryan Fuller is back with more of a clean slate, after already delivering one of the best season 3 episodes with "Cold Snap". Will the former-Pushing Daisies creator get Heroes back on-track? Or is the show too hamstrung by a post-season 1 mythology it can't just ignore? Is the fundamental idea behind Heroes (regular people discovering they have super-powers) now exhausted creatively?

In a brief interview with io9, Bryan Fuller had this to say:

"[Every season so far] has been valid, and every one has been a slightly different style, which I think is interesting. I love how the show is continuing to grow. It is evolving, and I do think there is a lot of good stuff in 'Fugitives' and 'Redemption.' [In those volumes,] we saw the characters in situations we hadn't seen them in before and got to find out interesting things about those characters... So what I'm excited about with season four is getting everybody back to the basic principle of ordinary people in an extraordinary world and how these characters are relatable to us and what we would do if we were in their situations, and really grounding it in that conceit."

"[F]or every plot conceit that we have for a character, we have even more conceits for what's going on in their personal lives that makes their plot story so much more complicated, because their emotional, personal story is so intrinsically tied with what's happening with them. I like the balance of the personal lives that we're telling this season."

"We love the cast. That's the thing... We just sort of have to find better uses for them."

Heroes' fourth season ("Volume V: Redemption") returns to NBC in September. But will you be there to greet it?