Heroes

Television again.

I don't watch a lot of television, but what I do watch, I make a point of seeing. Perhaps only a handful of shows make my list, and although I will often interview a new programme, they rarely get the job. Like 'Shark'.

So it's a funny time of year right now, as most of my programmes have finished their current run and I have months of desolate telly icecap to look forward to. No Lost, no C.S.I., no Top Gear - all gone. But there is a show that wormed its way onto my schedules without ever quite being any good. Heroes.

I think we all thought Heroes was going to be like a tv Xmen. All powers and awesome. But it's just turned out to be an endless parade of "should be a good one next week". And the good one never comes. A whole bunch of problems wind me up about this show, but I think the real stumbler is the writing.

It's nothing like as clever as it thinks it is. With only one more episode in this series still to show, I can be confident that I'm not going to get a surprise anywhere during that final hour. I can know this because if the writers were able to muster up surprises, they would have used them before now. The whole plot so far has just been soaked in water to make it all swell up and fall to bits.

Look at the cast:


They're a barrel of laughs. Now, I know they will have been asked for serious faces for this, but they look like they're about to cry, or blow off. Check out the bloke on the end, all long wistful hair.

Here he is:

Bless him. You can forgive him for looking all Bohemian and arty, because in the programme he is a Bohemian artist. And a bit of a knob. But does he have to have quite such an unenthusiastic expression on his mug? If even he isn't looking forward to what's going to happen during the series, it doesn't exactly bode well for us poor viewers either.

To be fair, he didn't have all that much to look enthusiastic about, as he was haunted by visions of the future in which his head was cut open by a super-powered serial killer and his brain taken away. Unfortunately for Mr Isaac, our lady-haired man, his visions had an uncomfortable degree of prescience to them. And he did meet his appointment with doom, pinned to the floor with paintbrushes through his joints (like, ow!) whilst super-killer cut the top of his head off.

In the interests of making a point, I cropped the main picture of the cast up there to eliminate an element that I figured might make the programme seem more exciting. You can see that element here. Enjoy.