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shadowkatLast night caught the season premiere of the new NBC television series Heroes.
First, I've got to take my hat off to NBC for delivering possibly the two most innovative dramas to hit the broadcast networks since Lost and Desperate Housewives, like them or hate them, you have to give Heroes and Studio 60 credit for being innovative and not complete rip-offs of someone else. Not to mention risky. The only risks NBC has taken in recent years have been with situation comedies - Scrubs, My Name is Earl and The Office come to mind. This year it is adding 30 Rock to its innovative sitcome line-up, proving that when it comes to comedy, NBC still is far ahead of the pack. (I'm limiting the pack to the broadcast networks, I'm well aware that Comedy Central and HBO/Showtime have done things which none of the broadcast networks can do - due to those nasty entities known as "network censors", not to mention inconsistent and somewhat hypocritical.) But drama wise? Up until this year, NBC has been lazy, resting on shows that go on and on forever, only occassionally changing their casts, but not much else. Paint by numbers television. We haven't seen an innovative drama sprout from the peacock network since well, ER, Law & Order, and The West Wing - which, wait, ER and Law & Order are STILL on? The shows that can't die. If you don't understand why they were innovative? Go rent the first seasons when both were still fresh. We can thank ABC and CBS for lighting a fire under NBC's butt, not to mention cable. Sure for a while the reality trend was working for the networks, cheap to make, yadda, yadda, yadda - but here's the thing - if people don't watch, no one cares. And after a while reality shows began to bore most viewers - the format became stale. ABC caught on first and developed not one but three dramas which were - get this not a reality show/documentary and not a criminal procedural. They finally realized the market had it hit its saturation point on both.
I more or less predicted this happening two or three years ago when everyone was worried reality shows would kill scripted television dramas and comedies. Told this to a friend of mine who feared that scripted/serial drama, which was not a criminal procedural, was for all intents and purposes dead. All we'd see were reality shows and endless copies of CSI and Law & Order. I told the friend not to worry, like all trends, sooner or later the reality show and the criminal procedural would wear out their welcome. People would get bored. Two- three years tops before market saturation, then we'd see a dramatic shift. The friend disagreed : "They are cheap to make and don't require many viewers." In short, they did not believe me. LOL! Clearly they'd never taken a marketing course or for that matter knew much about the biz of making TV.
Rule of thumb and repeat after me, when it comes to producing a TV show: Viewers matter. If people don't watch, they don't see the commericials, they don't buy the products, and your show bites the dust. If the people are paying for the show (ie. HBO and Showtime) and don't watch, they stop paying. So, bore your viewers and lose your show. Sure the cost/budget of a show matters but only to the extent people are watching and buying products. It's like selling your house - does not matter how much you spend on the baby, if no one buys it, you are out of luck. The trick is to get people to buy - and the better your presentation, the better it looks, the more it fits the needs of the buyer - the more likely they'll buy it. So you might want to modernize the kitchen if you want a better price, or change the roof. It won't guarantee you'll get a sale, but it will increase the odds of one. TV isn't all that different. Except in TV you are trying to attract a lot of buyers, a multitude of buyers who will look at and consider a multitude of products.
Another important thing to remember : In TV - it's not only a "numbers" game, it's also a "demographics" game - who the watcher is, what demo they fall under from the advertisers point of view. The demo has a heck of a lot to do with the level and type of advertiser you will attract - which also factors into the amount of money they'll spend to sponsor your show. The best, the one people want is 18-34, because these are the "impulse" buyers. People over 34 tend to be a bit more careful about money, they care about retirement and saving for the future. 18-34 just want to have fun. So, it is possible for a show like Veronica Mars to stay on for more than one season, even if its broad demo numbers are low (ie. does not appeal to over 34 crowd) because it hits that great 18-34 market. But, it also matters how many people watch it. If it falls below a certain amount, you can't attract the advertising dollars - and without those, no show. The show is there for those commericials you're flipping past with your Tivo or the product placements within the show that you despise. That's why it gets broadcast.
We can thank the reality format for two things - it taught network execs a lesson about their viewers. Viewers are smart. They like conflict. They don't want "nice". They are more than willing to watch nasty people, anti-heroes, and sniping - heck look at Survivor and the numbers Simon Cowell of American Ideal bring in. And they like puzzels and suspense. Also they don't mind it taking a while for the story to unfold or for the story to build on itself. It does not need to be resolved in one episode - if it is, cool, but that just means I don't have to watch next week. The other thing it taught the networks is while the budget of a series matters, the number of viewers and/or demographic of your viewers matters more to advertisers. As a result, say bye-bye to a docket full of cheap reality shows, and hello to the smart tv drama.
This may be the most interesting television season I've seen on air in ages. Certainly the first time I've had more than one show on literally every day of the week but Sat that I *really* wanted to make time to watch. Which means I'm going to have to invest in a DVR or Tivo soon. That said, Heroes is a seriously flawed drama. Oh, don't get me wrong, I adored it and will be watching it again next week. (*If you missed it - you can watch either on Friday at 7pm before Doctor Who on Sci-Fi or see it on NBC's site on the internet. Same place I saw the second episode of Studio 60.)
But, it took too long to get revved up and it has one too many characters and storylines to juggle. This is not something you can't manage on network TV - look at Lost, Desperate Houswives, Grey's Anatomy and The 4400, not to mention BattleStar Galatica all of which paved the way for the ensemble drama. Lost and 4400 proved that you can do a TV show with a huge cast of characters and storylines that at first do not appear to have much in common, yet upon reflection have a common thread - and still hold the audience's interest. The trick is to treat your audience with respect (ie. smart not stupid), hire charismatic actors, and come up with interesting backstories. Heroes appears to be doing that. The only problem with Heroes is we don't have a person to latch on to, a central focal point. It is too scattered. Both 4400 and Lost had a central character or characters to start with - in Lost it was Jack. In 4400 it's the two detectives. Same with BattleStar - Adama and his family. Heroes...I found myself hunting for one, was it the Indian guy, the Japanese guy, the cheerleader, the politician and his kidbrother, the painter, the mom with brilliant kid....hard to grasp. Instead we jump from one to the other, without much of a transistion. Now they do a good job of building suspense and jumping to another character just as they've done so is crafty but it is also annoying.
There is far too much "exposition" and that slowed down the pacing. To see how you can do exposition without slowing down the pace - check out BattleStar Galatica - the miniseries, or Studio 60. Or even Lost, in which we get it in quick flashes. And some of the exposition is a tad cliche - the mom running from the mob and doing porn videos, the smart professor hiding as a cab driver after his father was killed, the cheerleader who fears being a freak...the girl playing the cheerleader is a real find, by the way. She actually sold me on a role that I found sort of cheesy. What the show needs is balance and it also needs to find it's center, which characters to focus the most time on. Right now it feels a tad scattered and in the first half hour? I found it a little slow. It took off in the second hour, when the Japanese teleporter took center stage, along with the mom's odd and incredibly creepy skill.
Also, like I said before too many characters are introduced at once, I couldn't keep track of their names, assuming we got names? Did we get names? I feel funny calling them painter guy (sebastian?), flying brother, politician, indian guy, japanese geek, cheerleader, porno mom, brilliant kid, and evil guy with classes. Characters need NAMES that we can remember. Right now they just have stereotypical classifications and that is *not* good. Again this can be done well - see Lost, whose cast of 13 characters is introduced slowly over time. You know their names fairly early on. Same deal with BSG, and The 4400. I never refered to them by steretypical monikers. In a show that is driven by its characters, the audience must know their names up front, and remember them without having to re-watch or ask someone. We must have something to latch onto to give us a reason to care if this person lives or dies.
What works: The Japanese Teleporter (Is his name Hiro? I'd be willing to watch an entire series devoted to just this character, charming actor, not to mention wildly funny)and the cheerleader (the actress playing that part won me over, she gets across the creepiness of being invulnerable - there's a creepy sequence in which she puts her hand in a garbage unit to retrieve a ring then hides the healing maul behind her back, while talking to her mom. Also - her question to her mom regarding who her real parents are, and the reveal on who her daddy currently is..was enough in of itself to make me want to see next week's episode and skip whatever appears opposite.)
The other thing that works is the idea of inter-locking yet separate storylines, slowly being brought together through artwork - ie. a painter's art or a graphic novel. The idea of a meta-narrative, in which the show comments on becoming part of the pop culture around it - to the extent that it breaks the fourth wall. It is unfortunately a tough and risky style to pull off well. And to expect someone to pull it off brilliantly the first time out of the box? Not bloody likely. When watching a pilot, you have to give the art a little lee-way and keep in mind the pitfalls of writing for tv.
Developing a supernatural/sci-fantasy/superhero show for a broadcast network is not an easy task.
Number one - you have to contend with the fact that a good majority of your audience or rather the audience being tracked by that pesky group called Nielsen is not going to like anything that requires too broad a suspension of disbelief. They don't watch shows like Star-Gate, Star Trek, Farscape, Supernatural, Smallville, or even Buffy the Vampire Slayer. They see them as silly, campy, and not real - they can't identify with that genre. On the other hand - they do see shows such as Lost, BattleStar Galatica, X-Files, and the 4400 as wickedly cool. What's the difference? One group does not make an effort to take place in reality or the world that we know. The other does. One has prosthtetic monsters, one doesn't. One has people banding together to save the day, all for one, one for all, while the other is a tad less black and white and grittier. That's the perception at any rate. On cable or on a network like the CW - you can do the purer forms of sci-fantasy, less mainstream, more cult variety. But on a broadcast network - it is hard to grab a broad audience, unless that audience sees the show as being something they can identify with.
Lost and X-Files broke the barrier into mainstream. They are amongst the few to do so. BSG still hasn't accomplished it. And Buffy/Angel never did. Nor for that matter, did Star Trek - although it came close. Superhero shows have a different history, they have done well on broadcast networks, but only if the audience doesn't feel too silly watching them. Batman worked in the 60's and 70's for a while, not long, but a while because it was a campy send-up of the style. Superman also worked for a while back in the 1950s. Later we had the Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman - which worked in the same way Columbo, Monk, and The Dead Zone do - as sort of mystery/spy shows. They work, in short, if the audience can get into the character or enjoys the joke. In the 70's the superhero show was in - we had "The Greatest American Hero", "Wonder Woman" and "The Incredible Hulk" - all three worked because they focused on just one hero and were episodic in nature. But there are a few high concept superhero shows that were introduced in the 90s that did not work "Now and Again" comes to mind, along with "The Others" (at least I think that's what it was called - about a bunch of ghost-hunters). Both got a tad complicated and were hard to follow.
What Heroes appears to be attempting is to marry the superhero idea with the interlocking character study/meta-narrative format. That ain't easy. And they've made it even harder by introducing what appears to be 9 characters in the first 43 minutes. We are apparently getting four more next week. One of the main characters - the actor from Alias - a cop with telepathic abilities, isn't shown until the second episode. This is problematic for a new series. I think they would have made it easier for themselves and their audience if they'd taken a page from Lost and focused on just five in the pilot, then a couple of more, then a couple of more. The porno mom could have been pushed to another episode.
It's main plot thread, however, is fairly simplistic - almost disappointingly so. We are banding a bunch of people with evolving abilities together to save the world, while an evil scientist possibly working for the government plots to experiment on them and use them for his own reasons. (Hmmm...reminds me of the Pretender, Dark Angel, John Doe, and The 4400. The X-men to give it credit was about more than that.) On the other hand, its focus is not on the main plot thread or unifying factor - but rather about how does one deal with developing awesome physical and mental capabilities? How does it change you? How does it affect your relationships? Your fate? And how do you deal with destiny? The psychological side of the equation is what is fascinating the writers and the actors involved. Which is what makes Heroes more like The 4400 than say, Dark Angel. Also, there appears to be less interest in "governmental conspiracies" at the moment.
While the acting is admittedly uneven in places along with the direction, the show does have a couple of strong peformances and attributes that caught and kept my interest. Rare these days. The cheerleader and Japanese comic book geek fascinated me. Also the porno mom's creepy skill that I'm entirely sure about and has not been clarified. Plus - and this is a big plus, it is copying a trend started with Grey's Anatomy, Lost, and Veronic Mars - in presenting us with a multi-racial/lingual and ethnic cast. Instead of a bunch of people who all look alike - we get a diverse group, far more representative of our society as a whole and that will hopefully act to break down stereotypes. As an example, there is an entire sequence with cool subtitles that takes place entirely in Japan, with a Japanese pop band singing in stilted English. This looks like a show that is willing to take sizable risks. That wants to break the envelope and play a bit. I fear it won't get the chance, from the television reviews I saw in Entertainment Weekly and TV Guide, but I'm hoping it does. It's interesting. And I sort of like its chutzpah.
If you saw the pilot and had troubles with it, found that it drug a bit or didn't hold your interest?
I'd suggest giving it another chance. Watch at least four episodes before giving up. Granted there are a few shows that don't deserve that *cough*Jericho*cough* comes to mind. But I think this one does. It's different than most of the stuff on right now. Not an obvious rip-off or copy like Shark and Justic and Kidnapped and Vanished and Runaway are. It brings something new and if given a chance, I really think it could do change the television landscape for the better.
First, I've got to take my hat off to NBC for delivering possibly the two most innovative dramas to hit the broadcast networks since Lost and Desperate Housewives, like them or hate them, you have to give Heroes and Studio 60 credit for being innovative and not complete rip-offs of someone else. Not to mention risky. The only risks NBC has taken in recent years have been with situation comedies - Scrubs, My Name is Earl and The Office come to mind. This year it is adding 30 Rock to its innovative sitcome line-up, proving that when it comes to comedy, NBC still is far ahead of the pack. (I'm limiting the pack to the broadcast networks, I'm well aware that Comedy Central and HBO/Showtime have done things which none of the broadcast networks can do - due to those nasty entities known as "network censors", not to mention inconsistent and somewhat hypocritical.) But drama wise? Up until this year, NBC has been lazy, resting on shows that go on and on forever, only occassionally changing their casts, but not much else. Paint by numbers television. We haven't seen an innovative drama sprout from the peacock network since well, ER, Law & Order, and The West Wing - which, wait, ER and Law & Order are STILL on? The shows that can't die. If you don't understand why they were innovative? Go rent the first seasons when both were still fresh. We can thank ABC and CBS for lighting a fire under NBC's butt, not to mention cable. Sure for a while the reality trend was working for the networks, cheap to make, yadda, yadda, yadda - but here's the thing - if people don't watch, no one cares. And after a while reality shows began to bore most viewers - the format became stale. ABC caught on first and developed not one but three dramas which were - get this not a reality show/documentary and not a criminal procedural. They finally realized the market had it hit its saturation point on both.
I more or less predicted this happening two or three years ago when everyone was worried reality shows would kill scripted television dramas and comedies. Told this to a friend of mine who feared that scripted/serial drama, which was not a criminal procedural, was for all intents and purposes dead. All we'd see were reality shows and endless copies of CSI and Law & Order. I told the friend not to worry, like all trends, sooner or later the reality show and the criminal procedural would wear out their welcome. People would get bored. Two- three years tops before market saturation, then we'd see a dramatic shift. The friend disagreed : "They are cheap to make and don't require many viewers." In short, they did not believe me. LOL! Clearly they'd never taken a marketing course or for that matter knew much about the biz of making TV.
Rule of thumb and repeat after me, when it comes to producing a TV show: Viewers matter. If people don't watch, they don't see the commericials, they don't buy the products, and your show bites the dust. If the people are paying for the show (ie. HBO and Showtime) and don't watch, they stop paying. So, bore your viewers and lose your show. Sure the cost/budget of a show matters but only to the extent people are watching and buying products. It's like selling your house - does not matter how much you spend on the baby, if no one buys it, you are out of luck. The trick is to get people to buy - and the better your presentation, the better it looks, the more it fits the needs of the buyer - the more likely they'll buy it. So you might want to modernize the kitchen if you want a better price, or change the roof. It won't guarantee you'll get a sale, but it will increase the odds of one. TV isn't all that different. Except in TV you are trying to attract a lot of buyers, a multitude of buyers who will look at and consider a multitude of products.
Another important thing to remember : In TV - it's not only a "numbers" game, it's also a "demographics" game - who the watcher is, what demo they fall under from the advertisers point of view. The demo has a heck of a lot to do with the level and type of advertiser you will attract - which also factors into the amount of money they'll spend to sponsor your show. The best, the one people want is 18-34, because these are the "impulse" buyers. People over 34 tend to be a bit more careful about money, they care about retirement and saving for the future. 18-34 just want to have fun. So, it is possible for a show like Veronica Mars to stay on for more than one season, even if its broad demo numbers are low (ie. does not appeal to over 34 crowd) because it hits that great 18-34 market. But, it also matters how many people watch it. If it falls below a certain amount, you can't attract the advertising dollars - and without those, no show. The show is there for those commericials you're flipping past with your Tivo or the product placements within the show that you despise. That's why it gets broadcast.
We can thank the reality format for two things - it taught network execs a lesson about their viewers. Viewers are smart. They like conflict. They don't want "nice". They are more than willing to watch nasty people, anti-heroes, and sniping - heck look at Survivor and the numbers Simon Cowell of American Ideal bring in. And they like puzzels and suspense. Also they don't mind it taking a while for the story to unfold or for the story to build on itself. It does not need to be resolved in one episode - if it is, cool, but that just means I don't have to watch next week. The other thing it taught the networks is while the budget of a series matters, the number of viewers and/or demographic of your viewers matters more to advertisers. As a result, say bye-bye to a docket full of cheap reality shows, and hello to the smart tv drama.
This may be the most interesting television season I've seen on air in ages. Certainly the first time I've had more than one show on literally every day of the week but Sat that I *really* wanted to make time to watch. Which means I'm going to have to invest in a DVR or Tivo soon. That said, Heroes is a seriously flawed drama. Oh, don't get me wrong, I adored it and will be watching it again next week. (*If you missed it - you can watch either on Friday at 7pm before Doctor Who on Sci-Fi or see it on NBC's site on the internet. Same place I saw the second episode of Studio 60.)
But, it took too long to get revved up and it has one too many characters and storylines to juggle. This is not something you can't manage on network TV - look at Lost, Desperate Houswives, Grey's Anatomy and The 4400, not to mention BattleStar Galatica all of which paved the way for the ensemble drama. Lost and 4400 proved that you can do a TV show with a huge cast of characters and storylines that at first do not appear to have much in common, yet upon reflection have a common thread - and still hold the audience's interest. The trick is to treat your audience with respect (ie. smart not stupid), hire charismatic actors, and come up with interesting backstories. Heroes appears to be doing that. The only problem with Heroes is we don't have a person to latch on to, a central focal point. It is too scattered. Both 4400 and Lost had a central character or characters to start with - in Lost it was Jack. In 4400 it's the two detectives. Same with BattleStar - Adama and his family. Heroes...I found myself hunting for one, was it the Indian guy, the Japanese guy, the cheerleader, the politician and his kidbrother, the painter, the mom with brilliant kid....hard to grasp. Instead we jump from one to the other, without much of a transistion. Now they do a good job of building suspense and jumping to another character just as they've done so is crafty but it is also annoying.
There is far too much "exposition" and that slowed down the pacing. To see how you can do exposition without slowing down the pace - check out BattleStar Galatica - the miniseries, or Studio 60. Or even Lost, in which we get it in quick flashes. And some of the exposition is a tad cliche - the mom running from the mob and doing porn videos, the smart professor hiding as a cab driver after his father was killed, the cheerleader who fears being a freak...the girl playing the cheerleader is a real find, by the way. She actually sold me on a role that I found sort of cheesy. What the show needs is balance and it also needs to find it's center, which characters to focus the most time on. Right now it feels a tad scattered and in the first half hour? I found it a little slow. It took off in the second hour, when the Japanese teleporter took center stage, along with the mom's odd and incredibly creepy skill.
Also, like I said before too many characters are introduced at once, I couldn't keep track of their names, assuming we got names? Did we get names? I feel funny calling them painter guy (sebastian?), flying brother, politician, indian guy, japanese geek, cheerleader, porno mom, brilliant kid, and evil guy with classes. Characters need NAMES that we can remember. Right now they just have stereotypical classifications and that is *not* good. Again this can be done well - see Lost, whose cast of 13 characters is introduced slowly over time. You know their names fairly early on. Same deal with BSG, and The 4400. I never refered to them by steretypical monikers. In a show that is driven by its characters, the audience must know their names up front, and remember them without having to re-watch or ask someone. We must have something to latch onto to give us a reason to care if this person lives or dies.
What works: The Japanese Teleporter (Is his name Hiro? I'd be willing to watch an entire series devoted to just this character, charming actor, not to mention wildly funny)and the cheerleader (the actress playing that part won me over, she gets across the creepiness of being invulnerable - there's a creepy sequence in which she puts her hand in a garbage unit to retrieve a ring then hides the healing maul behind her back, while talking to her mom. Also - her question to her mom regarding who her real parents are, and the reveal on who her daddy currently is..was enough in of itself to make me want to see next week's episode and skip whatever appears opposite.)
The other thing that works is the idea of inter-locking yet separate storylines, slowly being brought together through artwork - ie. a painter's art or a graphic novel. The idea of a meta-narrative, in which the show comments on becoming part of the pop culture around it - to the extent that it breaks the fourth wall. It is unfortunately a tough and risky style to pull off well. And to expect someone to pull it off brilliantly the first time out of the box? Not bloody likely. When watching a pilot, you have to give the art a little lee-way and keep in mind the pitfalls of writing for tv.
Developing a supernatural/sci-fantasy/superhero show for a broadcast network is not an easy task.
Number one - you have to contend with the fact that a good majority of your audience or rather the audience being tracked by that pesky group called Nielsen is not going to like anything that requires too broad a suspension of disbelief. They don't watch shows like Star-Gate, Star Trek, Farscape, Supernatural, Smallville, or even Buffy the Vampire Slayer. They see them as silly, campy, and not real - they can't identify with that genre. On the other hand - they do see shows such as Lost, BattleStar Galatica, X-Files, and the 4400 as wickedly cool. What's the difference? One group does not make an effort to take place in reality or the world that we know. The other does. One has prosthtetic monsters, one doesn't. One has people banding together to save the day, all for one, one for all, while the other is a tad less black and white and grittier. That's the perception at any rate. On cable or on a network like the CW - you can do the purer forms of sci-fantasy, less mainstream, more cult variety. But on a broadcast network - it is hard to grab a broad audience, unless that audience sees the show as being something they can identify with.
Lost and X-Files broke the barrier into mainstream. They are amongst the few to do so. BSG still hasn't accomplished it. And Buffy/Angel never did. Nor for that matter, did Star Trek - although it came close. Superhero shows have a different history, they have done well on broadcast networks, but only if the audience doesn't feel too silly watching them. Batman worked in the 60's and 70's for a while, not long, but a while because it was a campy send-up of the style. Superman also worked for a while back in the 1950s. Later we had the Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman - which worked in the same way Columbo, Monk, and The Dead Zone do - as sort of mystery/spy shows. They work, in short, if the audience can get into the character or enjoys the joke. In the 70's the superhero show was in - we had "The Greatest American Hero", "Wonder Woman" and "The Incredible Hulk" - all three worked because they focused on just one hero and were episodic in nature. But there are a few high concept superhero shows that were introduced in the 90s that did not work "Now and Again" comes to mind, along with "The Others" (at least I think that's what it was called - about a bunch of ghost-hunters). Both got a tad complicated and were hard to follow.
What Heroes appears to be attempting is to marry the superhero idea with the interlocking character study/meta-narrative format. That ain't easy. And they've made it even harder by introducing what appears to be 9 characters in the first 43 minutes. We are apparently getting four more next week. One of the main characters - the actor from Alias - a cop with telepathic abilities, isn't shown until the second episode. This is problematic for a new series. I think they would have made it easier for themselves and their audience if they'd taken a page from Lost and focused on just five in the pilot, then a couple of more, then a couple of more. The porno mom could have been pushed to another episode.
It's main plot thread, however, is fairly simplistic - almost disappointingly so. We are banding a bunch of people with evolving abilities together to save the world, while an evil scientist possibly working for the government plots to experiment on them and use them for his own reasons. (Hmmm...reminds me of the Pretender, Dark Angel, John Doe, and The 4400. The X-men to give it credit was about more than that.) On the other hand, its focus is not on the main plot thread or unifying factor - but rather about how does one deal with developing awesome physical and mental capabilities? How does it change you? How does it affect your relationships? Your fate? And how do you deal with destiny? The psychological side of the equation is what is fascinating the writers and the actors involved. Which is what makes Heroes more like The 4400 than say, Dark Angel. Also, there appears to be less interest in "governmental conspiracies" at the moment.
While the acting is admittedly uneven in places along with the direction, the show does have a couple of strong peformances and attributes that caught and kept my interest. Rare these days. The cheerleader and Japanese comic book geek fascinated me. Also the porno mom's creepy skill that I'm entirely sure about and has not been clarified. Plus - and this is a big plus, it is copying a trend started with Grey's Anatomy, Lost, and Veronic Mars - in presenting us with a multi-racial/lingual and ethnic cast. Instead of a bunch of people who all look alike - we get a diverse group, far more representative of our society as a whole and that will hopefully act to break down stereotypes. As an example, there is an entire sequence with cool subtitles that takes place entirely in Japan, with a Japanese pop band singing in stilted English. This looks like a show that is willing to take sizable risks. That wants to break the envelope and play a bit. I fear it won't get the chance, from the television reviews I saw in Entertainment Weekly and TV Guide, but I'm hoping it does. It's interesting. And I sort of like its chutzpah.
If you saw the pilot and had troubles with it, found that it drug a bit or didn't hold your interest?
I'd suggest giving it another chance. Watch at least four episodes before giving up. Granted there are a few shows that don't deserve that *cough*Jericho*cough* comes to mind. But I think this one does. It's different than most of the stuff on right now. Not an obvious rip-off or copy like Shark and Justic and Kidnapped and Vanished and Runaway are. It brings something new and if given a chance, I really think it could do change the television landscape for the better.
