Letters to the Editor
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So we're not chickens, but retarded sheep now?
This much I know; Havrilesky has delivered the death blow to "Heroes." I don't care that she doesn't understand comic books; she hasn't cracked Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics," neither have a lot of people. (Then she hasn't figured out how doorknobs work, either.) It shouldn't matter. Fiction should stand on its own, no matter what genre.
The show has been moving at a snail's pace, not by comic book standards, but even by soap opera standards. We've seen the people with powers, who are mostly unappealing and not very bright. The Japanese time-warping guy was the most interesting out of the gate, but the Rose and Thorn imitation (the schitzophrenic murdering stripper) has been slowly growing in sympathy. But she won't get to do too much in the three weeks left to the series, before NBC drops the axe.
Because it's impossible to care for these people, more frightened of their new abilities instead of recognizing their incredible utility. And part of it is that there are so many of them. Large "ensemble" casts are really just a way of taking a bunch of characters and throwing them against the refrigerator door to see which ones will stick. There's little vision in these series, little passion or focus in the show's conception, so we get a dozen characters with differing personalities, in the hopes that one of them will become the Fonzie or the Urkel that will make the show popular.
This trope has been used on so many shows ("The Nine," "Six Degrees") that it's clear that no one knows what this year's audience likes, and the business has grown so conservative that everyone's terrified to guess.
Maybe that's the way Havrilesky is, either. We've gone from being chickens to sheep. She seems to be hunting around for the best insulting diminuitive with which to label her readers. I guess next week we'll be Congressional pages or Amish schoolgirls.