Superhero TV has had a massive resurgence over the past few decades, but the first season of one mid-2000s superhero show has become the marker of an incredible introduction to the genre. Throughout the early aughts, superhero TV made a comeback after lying dormant for a stretch, with shows premiering on network TV and rippling through to cable, as well. As trends shifted and changed, superhero TV became normalized again and began to dominate once streaming bubbled to the television surface, but the early shows that brought it back to life are still some of the best of the best.
Long before The CW’s dominant stretch of superhero TV or streaming leaning into shows like The Boys, and long before the Disney acquisition of Marvel that has turned it into a superhero juggernaut, NBC had one of the most intriguing superhero shows on the air. While the series didn’t wind up being the long-term hit that many felt it should’ve been, the first season is still something that rivals inaugural seasons of most superhero TV. Heroes, which ran for four seasons between 2006 and 2010, was an ambitious, high-concept series that pushed boundaries from the very beginning, making an impact.
While Heroes didn’t wind up becoming the network’s true answer to ABC’s Lost, the series was able to make an incredible splash, especially with its opening season. With Heroes heading to Netflix July 1, understanding how the show shifted the cultural landscape is an important precursor to watching the show.
Nothing Else In Superhero TV Can Touch Heroes Season 1
Heroes, which aired its first season beginning in the fall of 2006, was a show that quickly captivated viewers with its intense premise and seemingly unrelated storylines. Starring an ensemble that included Milo Ventimiglia as Peter Petrelli, Hayden Panettiere as Claire Bennet, and Masi Oka as Hiro Nakamura, Heroes followed a group of people who unsuspectingly began coming into their supernatural abilities, causing chaos all over the world. With the first season functioning as an origin story, viewers got the chance to see the beginnings of the story for each character, establishing a much-needed, solid foundation to move forward.
Each of the show’s characters had separate narratives that slowly began to converge as the story continued, and those narratives all felt like full, complete stories without having to intertwine. While the origin stories are a major part of the narrative throughout the first season, the season itself also feels like a fully complete story on its own, moving through a clear arc that consistently advances the central mystery at the show’s core. With multiple protagonists that all felt compelling and important, Heroes stood out and maintained a high quality while doing so. The convergence of each story felt natural.
Even by modern standards, Heroes season 1 is a remarkably ambitious achievement in storytelling. Working on a network TV budget in the mid-2000s and balancing a full story for each character, as well as a larger narrative, Heroes does more than many modern shows do within its wonderful first season.
Heroes Goes Downhill Pretty Fast After Its First Season
Although Heroes had a phenomenal first outing, the show went downhill fairly quickly after its inaugural season. The first season was tremendous, remarkable in its ability to maintain a story, but once the stories began to converge and the characters were less isolated in their own plots, they all began to collapse in on each other, creating a ripple effect throughout the rest of the series. Heroes’ decline was astounding, considering how well it did in its first year, but unfortunately the show had some major factors working against it after its first season wrapped.
The show’s momentum diminished quickly as the second season of Heroes was impacted by the writer’s strike of 2007, which halted production for months, causing the show to have to shorten some of its storylines and make adjustments that didn’t entirely serve the story. Complicating the show’s development during an important period, Heroes season 2 didn’t only have the writer’s strike to blame for its problems, but it didn’t help. On top of the strike, the structure of the show’s second season didn’t live up to the hype it built throughout the first, often feeling ineffective and poorly constructed.
Heroes season 2 and the seasons that followed each felt like a lesser version of the first, as the mythology seemed to fall apart from episode to episode. The narratives throughout the rest of Heroes were often convoluted, tough to follow, and ultimately didn’t recapture the intrigue of the show’s earlier seasons, making it easy for viewers to drop off.
Marvel & DC Still Haven’t Made A Better Season Of Superhero TV
Although Heroes managed to consistently diminish in quality after its first season, the opening of the show is still the cream of the crop when it comes to superhero TV. Knowing that Heroes isn’t a show that rested on a comic book foundation, but stemmed from its own mythology and managed to build such a compelling story in its earliest episodes is something to be recognized. Marvel and DC, who now create some of the best superhero TV on the air, still aren’t able to come close to the level of intensity that Heroes did within its first season.
The influence that Heroes had on modern TV is difficult to overstate, because long before there were interconnected narratives through film and TV, before cinematic universe became the mainstream norm for superhero entertainment, Heroes was able to weave its stories into one another with an ease and significance that felt like it should’ve taken years to develop. While the quality of the season itself, which feels cinematic and large-scale in a way that network TV didn’t often feel at the time, isn’t anything to balk at, the combination of that quality with the heightened sense of storytelling makes Heroes unparalleled.
With Heroes hitting Netflix on July 1, the show is likely to see a resurgence of viewership as it becomes more widely available to a larger audience, and knowing that the first season is remarkably great is imperative. While the rest of the show doesn’t recapture the same quality, seeing Heroes in its prime makes it clear why the show is a benchmark every superhero show still manages to chase.
- Release Date
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2006 – 2010-00-00
- Showrunner
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Tim Kring
- Directors
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Allan Arkush, Jeannot Szwarc, Adam Kane, Greg Yaitanes, Sergio Mimica-Gezzan, Roxann Dawson, Paul A. Edwards, John Badham, Donna Deitch, Kevin Dowling, Seith Mann, Ron Underwood, Paul Shapiro, Lesli Linka Glatter, S.J. Clarkson, Daniel Attias, David Straiton, Kevin Bray, David Semel, Holly Dale, Ed Bianchi, Nathaniel Goodman, Christopher Misiano, Ernest R. Dickerson
- Writers
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Tim Kring