Sep 19 2008
An Open Letter to Tim Kring
Dear Mr Kring,
I have been very critical of your show, Heroes, over the past two years. Even when many were praising it during season 1 I found it to be slow moving and derivative. There was enough promise to keep me watching, though, so I stuck with it through a disappointing end of season 1 and an even more disappointing season 2 run. I say this so that you understand this is not the critique of a Heroes fanboy who’s looking for the show he loved to come back. It’s the critique of a genre lover who sees the resources you’ve been given being squandered on uninspired and pretentious storytelling who wants your show to live up to its potential. That’s the context.
Now the critique.
I’ve heard you say that you never read comic books and don’t know anything about the genre in which you’re writing. You say this as if it’s a good thing, a badge of honor. It’s not. Working in a genre with which you are not familiar does not give you a leg up on the competition, but almost guarantees that you will walk ground already well explored. When Alan Moore wrote Watchmen, one of the many works Heroes mirrors but fails to live up to, he was responding to a genre he knew well. It was a seminal work precisely because he had done his homework, and his understanding of the genre did not chain him to following conventions. In fact, it allowed him to brilliantly subvert them.
Heroes, meanwhile, is to me like someone playing the melody of a symphony without knowing the harmonies, counter-melodies and rhythms. You see the plot devices you’d expect from the genre, but they play out in entirely conventional ways. There are characters that fit into the mold of a superhero story, but without the development they’d need to be anything other than archetypes. There are the powers we’re familiar with, but no invention as to their use. It has never ceased to be a superficial retread of ideas better explored thirty years ago.
Take, as an example, your most persistent villain, Sylar. If you were more familiar with the genre, you might have seen a very similar villain in J. Michael Straczynski’s Rising Stars. The similarity isn’t the problem, but that Sylar reuses a plot idea that was more deeply explored in the previous work.
In Rising Stars we learn that whatever power is behind the supers of that world is finite, and that with every use the strength of all supers decreases. Yet, if one super dies, their power redistributes, boosting everyone else. The power-thief in Rising Stars goes into action out of fear of losing their own power, while Sylar simply does it out of egoism. One deals with an interesting and believable human motivation while the other gives us a one-dimensional villain. I’m sure that your writing staff is capable of a more nuanced and interesting villain that is still as evil as you’d like him to be, but so long as you try to hold yourself apart from your own genre you risk being a faded copy.
Another example, this one from the upcoming season. I hear you’ll be introducing a serum that grants people powers. I hope that you can find something interesting in that plot, as the already similar 4400 tackled this very idea a few years ago. 4400 was by no means a perfect show (and this idea is by no means original), but it explored the ideas behind its genre conventions in interesting ways. I’m concerned that you are not using this idea because you saw it and believe you can do it better, but because you simply did not know someone already went there. Not to say this is a new premise in the genre, but considering other similarities I admit to some concern.
I am also worried about your reuse of your own story hooks. I hear that we’ll be seeing a dark future again, which now makes three seasons out of three driven by the exact same device. A hero goes to the future, sees something bad, and has to try to stop it from occurring. I admit that the best part of season 1 was seeing that mushroom cloud in the first episode. The power of that came from its unexpectedness, and that power is gone after the first use.
Why not put a moratorium on time traveling for a season and find a new, surprising way to set the stakes of your season. I know you believe season 2′s weakness was waiting too long to show Peter the virus-decimated future, but I disagree. The problem was showing him that future at all. The Shanti virus could have been built up through your existing characters, instead of showing us an X-Men Days of Future Past style apocalypse. The stakes were certainly missing through much of season 2, but another bout of time travel was not the way to set them.
Finally, please stop predicating so many of your plots on the gullibility of your characters. Mohinder is tricked by Sylar for far too long in season 1, and Peter has the same problem with Adam in season 2. There is no narrative meat to seeing our heroes be so easily mislead for episodes at a time. Trickery is like mind control; it often plays as a lazy shortcut to getting your characters into conflict with each other. Giving them strong, developed motivations would be more satisfying and would let us continue to respect these characters in the morning.
In Heroes you have one of the best budgeted, best known superhero series ever. You have a certain amount of creative freedom and a national audience. I don’t need another Watchmen, but I’d like to be surprised by the show instead of frustrated by how often I can see what’s coming episodes away. I hope season 3 is the success I’ve been waiting for, but if it’s not I hope you have the time to right the ship before it’s too late.
Sincerely,
Eric Sipple
