"Heroes" Premiere

Old television was about situations - you're a detective, you're a married couple, you're working woman in Philadelphia, you're a doctor with overly dramatic patients. Old TV had scenes, but not very much atmosphere. The individual situations changed, but the Situation never did. Perry Mason never didn't go to court in an episode. There were exceptions, like "The Fugitive," the first TV show with a genuine beginning and an ending (even if it was mostly a go-nowhere middle.)

Most great new TV is less about situations than about settings, and about how different characters interact within that setting. There aren't any obvious links between "Battlestar Galactica," "Rome," "Deadwood," "Lost," or "Gossip Girl" in one single ongoing plotline, but, viewed as as portraits of contested environments, it becomes clear how similar the shows really are. In every show, there is a clearly defined political and social hierarchy which, as the series begins, has been destroyed or corrupted. As society seeks to rebuild that hierarchy, almost every character jockeys for control. On every show, leadership is hotly contested and often fleeting; Roslin loses an election to Baltar, Julius Caesar begats Octavian Caesar, Jenny replaces Blair in the popular clique, Al Swearengen fights to build and destroy Demoracy in the mining camp of Deadwood, and everyone on the island fights anyone else.

With all of these shows, there is no single basic plot through line. "Rome" is not about any particular set of characters, and the few who do survive the whole series are in drastically different places, both geographically and politically, than they were at the beginning. At the same time, part of what's fun about the shows is that no two episodes are alike. Each show pushes the boundaries of time and space - an episode of "Rome" could take place over the course of an evening, or years; "Lost" can flash back to someone's life before the island, or to their birth, or flash forward to their death. "BSG" uses the same free-floating perspective - it's a bit reminiscent of how Virginia Woolf's prose could adopt different characters' stream of consciousness from one paraph to the next - and does so far more subtly.

These are just examples - you could throw in "24" (which focalizes all of modern-day America into Los Angeles - without fail, the worst plotlines on that show are those which shift focus away from Southern California), or "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (where Sunnydale, a pleasant suburban town built over the mouth of Hell, became the farcical fantasy '90s answer to Grover's Corners), or even "Grey's Anatomy" (in the first three seasons, the hospital setting was energized by the ongoing contest of "Who Will be the New Chief"; the show has wandered ever since it abandoned that plotline.) The point is that, no matter how wacky serial TV is, it's always firmly rooted to one single setting.

So give this to "Heroes" - it's a show which breaks every rule. Whereas "BSG" and "Lost" are showlength active verbs ("We need to find earth," "We need to get off this island"), the concept for "Heroes" is essentially passive - "People have superpowers." Whereas other shows present a microcosm of humanity by bringing people from every race and culture and placing them in one claustrophobic arena, "Heroes" is humanity-as-macrocosm - in this season's premiere, we skipped around 4 separate continents. You could argue that the show's center is Manhattan, like LA in "24," but Manhattan, in season 1, was more of an ultimate destination than an overarching setting; after all, every character converged for the first time in Las Vegas, and the events in Odessa, Texas, are still the most compelling in the series.

Simply put, "Heroes" is a show which is purely about events. The events are not directly tied into an ongoing concept - it can be a detective show, an adventure series, a horror flick, a (probably mawkish) romance, a medical thriller, a buddy comedy, or a family melodrama. A show like "Lost" could lose momentum and still be incredibly interesting. You can draw comparisons between season 2 of that fantasy thriller and "Heroes." Both had a first season that was all about breakneck mystery - characters moved so quickly you could hardly breathe. Both had a second season that, by comparison, seems incredibly static. "Lost" settled down to typing numbers; "Heroes" spread its characters across space and time, and didn't bother to come up with any obvious convergence.

You could draw a through line from nearly every action taken by every character in "Heroes" season 1 down to the finale, but in season 2, Claire was testing her powers by cutting off toes, and Nathan Petrelli was a sad lonely drunk, and little Micah was living with his cousins in New Orleans. Some of this stuff was interesting, and, in the hands of someone like Matthew Weiner, who can make great drama out of John Slattery enjoying a stolen cigarette, it might have played well. But there was no center. In "Lost," there's always the island, carrying us through the series with its mystery. When "Heroes" stopped to take a breath, the whole thing seemed to come crashing down.

With that in mind, the 2-hour premiere this week was nothing short of genius - more things happened more interestingly in the first 15 minutes than happened all during season 2. It's unfortunate that the show felt the need for another future apocalypse, but there was an energy in this premiere that hasn't been seen since, well, season 1 of "Heroes." This show stuffs itself full of plotlines. Back when it first debuted, and "Lost" was in the middle of a slow season 3, the sheer quickness and pace of "Heroes" was enough to turn it into a legend.

The show did not have a big debut, not even close. It's got to be a huge failure for NBC; there was a moment, in the summer of 2007, when practically everything on the network seemed to revolve around "Heroes," when it was paired up with "Bionic Woman" and when there was word of a spin-off or three. Those plans failed; "Bionic" flopped, season 2 stunk, and the writers' strike ended the 2008 TV season. I'm guessing the show will be a hit with the Hulu-iTunes demographic, but can such an expensive broadcast show subside off of that? It may be that this is the beginning of the last season of "Heroes," which is not such a bad thing; a show this fast, this fueled, this dynamic deserves to die young.