Heroes
This entry was posted on 2/9/2008 10:53 AM and is filed under TV.
I got Heroes on netflix and I'm totally loving it. I was told by people who share my taste for sci/fi/fantasy/comic books that I would and I do.
The first disc in the set sort of messed me up. In the "previously on..." part of the third episode, they showed scenes I never saw. And they referenced events that didn't happen. Either I missed an episode or some editor somewhere forgot what had been cut out. I got myself over the initial confusion (and irritation), kept watching and now it doesn't matter that I never saw Peter Petrelli fly out the window. He did it, it's done, move on.
When you get used to watching tv shows in the dvd, whole season format, it makes two hour movies seem kind of like commercials. Wow, the whole story? In two hours? Why bother? In the old days, and probably now too, being a tv star was like being the ugly younger sibling of the movie star. But when the premise is strong and the writing is good, a tv series can go so much deeper into a character, relationships, events and the ramifications of those events on those characters than a movie can that it makes it much more fun for the viewer. You can really get into the story in a way you just can't in a movie that's over in a few hours. When tv is good, tv is to movies as novels are to magazine articles. Maybe that's one of the reasons so many hit movies in the last few years have been serialized. We had Lord of the rings, which lasted as long as a season of tv, the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, Harry Potter...
The conventional wisdom is that Sesame Street and MTV ruined our attention spans, but I think the truth is as it always was; compelling stories and good writing will keep our attention as long as you can keep it up.
