It’s 2006. The modern superhero scene is still in its infancy, and it’ll be two years before Iron Man and The Dark Knight release and signal the change of the genre into a global phenomenon. The last two Marvel movies were the middlingly received Fantastic Four and the widely hated X-Men: The Last Stand. Into this ecosystem, a new superhero show comes out from NBC, aptly named, Heroes. The show is not only good, it’s exceptional, so good that it might join the ranks of Lost in the early days of the “golden age of prestige TV”.

Flash forward to the present day, superhero media has become the dominant cultural juggernaut; while Marvel had once been lucky to get one movie a year, in 2022 they managed three – and that’s not even counting the numerous shows and specials. Heroes, however, is not remembered fondly, the show synonymous with high hopes and low returns, of an excellent series brought so low that fans were almost glad when it was eventually canceled. This fate begs two main questions: what happened to such a promising show to bring it so low? And more intriguingly, could that fate have been avoided had it been released in the modern superhero landscape?

RELATED: These Fan-Favorite Sci-Fi TV Shows Deserve a Reboot

'Heroes’ Spectacular Beginnings

heroes-cast-promotional-image
Image via NBC

To recognize where Heroes went wrong, one must first recognize where the show went right. While the show would eventually fall tremendously out of favor, almost none of these later problems are present in the show’s first season. The show commanded an incredible and well-used cast, including future heavyweights like Zachary Quinto as the show’s enigmatic villain. Like Lost (which the show was frequently favorably compared to) Heroes feels incredibly ahead of its time by utilizing long interconnected plotlines that converge in unexpected ways. The show was “binge-able” before that was a marketable word that anybody used, episodes couldn’t be plucked out from one another, it was a tightly-knit serialized tale, and the fact that this was achieved not on a paid subscription service like HBO but on network television is nothing short of incredible.

There’s a considerable sense of momentum to the first season of Heroes that feels absent from other projects of its time; even Lost, despite all it has going for it, feels almost languid in its plot compared to Heroes. Powers are constantly being revealed, big plot beats and exciting scenes are frequent enough to keep audiences engaged, and all the while the show slowly ramps up the tension. Our characters go through convincing and well-paced arcs of learning how to use their powers, eventually wielding them with godlike ability. There’s a palpable sense of excitement and growing stakes that the show would try and fail to recapture in the later seasons (more on that later). The show’s marketing was also quite impressive, working well off the back of the show’s mounting success. The show’s plot of keeping the invulnerable Claire Bennet (Hayden Panettiere) away from the power-stealing Sylar was elegantly “memefied” into the memorable tagline "Save the cheerleader, save the world."

The first season does a great job of juggling its immense cast with considerable ease, slowly building up to a bombastic finale that leaves the show feeling almost entirely self-contained. Good has triumphed, the villain and one of the heroes have been left dead, and the story seemingly comes to a close. Then came a second season, the beginning of the end of the show. Starting out strong, plot lines eventually began to unravel and repeat themselves. The show began a holding pattern, unable to properly match the characters’ now godlike abilities with actual threats and storylines that make sense. Why did this happen, how could a show so good go wrong so fast?

'Heroes' Was Too Precious With Its Cast

heroes-hayden-panettiere
Image via NBC

One of the biggest myths surrounding Heroes' downfall is linked to the second season’s proximity to the Writers Guild of America strike of 2007. The strike understandably left its mark on many a show (fun fact, Breaking Bad’s Hank Schrader (Dean Norris) was planned to be killed off in the first season before the strike cut the first season two episodes short), but it's often blamed wholeheartedly for the show’s shocking decline, a legend that may prove more fiction than fact. That’s not to say that the strike didn’t change the show at all; the show had only produced 11 out of 24 of the episodes of that season and the rest had to do without the writers and creators on the other side of the picket line. The second season, however, wasn’t magically “good” before the later episodes ruined it. What Heroes fell into was put in motion far before the strike occurred, it happened before the second season even began development.

To find the answer, one has to look back to the original plans that the creators had for the series. Unlike other shows like Lost and The Sopranos, which had constructed casts that were planned to persist throughout the seasons, Heroes’ cast was supposed to be one and done. It was originally planned that after the first season, the story of the characters we’d met would be over, and an entirely new cast would be brought in with different powers and a new plotline would begin. Rather than a fully serialized format, the show would instead adopt a seasonal anthology framework more in common with something like American Horror Story. However, this didn’t come about; audiences, the network, and even the creators fell too in love with the actors and characters to say goodbye to them after one season, and so the show was changed. However, this decision was made without changing anything about how the first season was written, it was still made with one story in mind. Forcing it to now have to carry multiple seasons of continued plot, something the original concept wasn't designed to do. Rather than start with a new cast, it instead needs to make up new reasons why its extremely powerful cast can’t just solve all the story’s problems.

Sylar, who originally died in the first season, is instead brought back in the second; Quinto had proved to be too marketable to excise from the show so the story was bent to accommodate that. The story has to continue to invest time and plot lines into giving reasons for Sylar to stick around despite the character’s arc feeling rudderless. This is one of the first decisions that leads to a huge problem with later Heroes, the cast is too precious to lose. One of the first season’s most tragic characters and storylines is that of Charlie Andrews (Jayma May) a waitress who falls in love with the show’s best character Hiro Nakamura (Masi Oka). Yet in a tragic twist of fate, she dies of a blood clot, and Hiro is unable to use his powers to save her, the gut-wrenching scene of realization is one of the first season’s most tragic moments. However, in Season 4, she’s brought back to life, undoing almost all the tragedy of her death. While the character eventually dies once again, the fact that they brought her back at all speaks to a deep insecurity the writers had when coming up with new storylines. Eventually, the show even makes the first season almost completely irrelevant by having Sylar take Claire’s powers anyway in a later episode. All that chanting of “save the cheerleader, save the world” amounted to nothing in the end. It wasn’t the writers strike that doomed Heroes. It was the decision to fundamentally change what the show was that doomed it.

Could 'Heroes' Have Been Saved If Made Today?

Heroes
Image via NBC

Today's media landscape is very different from what it was in 2006. Most people don’t consume TV shows by watching them week to week on a network anymore, but instead by bingeing them on a streaming service. It isn’t rare anymore for a TV series to have a long continuous narrative that fandoms can chart. It’s practically standard at this point. Network interference is still a problem, but not to the same extent. Lost ran into a similar issue that Heroes did when it wanted to end after four seasons with a complete narrative, but that wasn’t how TV worked back then; the way the network saw it, a TV series continued until nobody was watching it anymore. While Lost could somewhat roll with the punches and deliver some good TV despite having a mediocre eventual ending, Heroes couldn’t do that. Nowadays, many more shows have been able to have conclusive and satisfying endings, not to mention the success of tight, well-written miniseries like Chernobyl and The Haunting of Hill House. Had the show debuted in this era the idea of a story-based anthology series would’ve been more reasonable, and the show might’ve had a chance to end with the one season that everybody loved. If they decided to do another season, the original cast and plot would remain pristine and free of any missteps a bad sequel could accomplish.

Not to mention the explosion of successful superhero media that’s come along since 2006. Marvel and DC have been keeping audiences engaged with a big budget well-received TV series for a while now. However, the two have almost had a complete monopoly on the format, and those who want to engage in a self-contained superhero universe (that isn’t an intentional parody/inversion like The Boys, and even that’s starting to get spinoffs) are left without a port to call. If you want to sit down and watch a show like WandaVision or Loki, you have to watch a bunch of supplementary material to understand what’s going on, and people are starting to get lost or lose interest. It’s this untapped market that Heroes could have flourished in, delivering a complete and supplementary-free viewing experience for those who don’t have much interest in intense “cinematic universes”.

Had Heroes been allowed to just be one season with a self-contained story, maybe we would speak of it in the same breath as the new Watchmen series, but instead, it stuck around and is now forever cursed by subpar seasons that unraveled the show into a mess. Its failure is now a legend, a campfire story told by showrunners in hushed tones. It wasn’t destined to be this way, a few changes and it could’ve been perfect. Sometimes it’s good to be "ahead of the times," but sometimes that’s more of a curse than a blessing.