Should I bother finishing HEROES?

Escape while you can.

I just hope you didn't buy Season 1. Get away fast. Watch THe Wir or The Shield if you haven't already instead.

There is literally no reason to keep watching at all. None. Not one single moment of your life should be spent finishing up any of this "show."

It gets much, much worse. I bailed in Season 2, and only regretted not doing so earlier.

I say this as someone who has watched every season of Smallville.

Edit: wait, you haven't seen The Wire or The Shield?!? Damn. Get on that!

For genre programming, some of the best include Fringe, Angel and Farscape. Dexter also feels much like a comic-inspired story at times. Spartacus as well.

Basically, you could pick a show at random and be pretty sure it's better than Heroes...

I thought the first season was pretty good. It had plot holes and contrivances, but there were enough entertaining performances and moments to keep you engaged.

After that, the show lost me. Season 2 was awful (though to be fair, this was during the Writer's Strike) and I quickly lost interest by the start of Season 3. I haven't even had the urge to finish the show through Netflix Streaming.

I'll give Season 2 this - it introduced me to the great BPA/Iggy Pop collaboration, "He's Frank".

No. I believe the 2nd Peter/Sylar throwdown takes place in the future (when they have even more powers), and it all happens behind a closed door.

If you're jonesing for a superhero story, I'd suggest skipping to about season 8 of Smallville. At that point they had jettisoned the worst actors and writers and since then have actually produced a pretty good show.

But if you expand beyond superheroes you can find some truly excellent shows.

run. don't look back. I made it to the 3rd season and required almost a year (so far) of counselling.

Heroes become utterly unwatchable after season 1. It's seriously not worth your time.

The Wire however is a masterpiece. It will completely exceed whatever expectations you have. It's just about flawless.

Fringe is excellent. It tends to drag a bit in the middle of the season (most 22-episode shows would be much better at 13-16 eps), but it's well written and acted, and each season has been better than the last.

It depends on what you're looking for. If you're looking for an answer sheet to a quiz, it'll disappoint. It wasn't my favorite or least favorite season, but after wiping away the internet hyperbole, I think it stands as an imperfect but strong ending to an incredible show. If you enjoyed the first five seasons, it'd be a shame to not watch and decide for yourself.

I still can't believe I sat through all of it, it must have been my crush on Sylar.

The show went from "Okay, this is kind of fun." to "What the fuck?" real fast.

I ditched halfway through season two. I kind of enjoyed the first season, but hated the finale. And then it got worse.

Watch Deadwood.

Never has a show shown as much promise and then squandered it so very quickly as Heroes. God, I LOVED that show in the first season. The second season made it seem as though all of the writers had somehow suffered brain damage at the same time.

I seem to remember that they turned Nathan into Kenny from South Park.

Series four is shockingly good. Still not great, but it's much more character-based and it's got Robert Knepper, who raises the quality of bad TV shows simply by showing up. It's not worth the unending slog through series two and three to get there though.

Sylar's back story is amazing in that it just keeps. Fucking. Going. You'd think a guy could only do so much digging around, but no. He's got like six parental figures and they all suck.

Never more truth spoken. That show was so much fun. Remember when people were saying that it was better than Lost? Seriously that was actually a debate at one point. "Heroes actually gives you answers", people cried. Then the season finale hit and it was a bit of a let down. But we all cut them slack especially when I found out that they actually did plan and write a fairly large fight sequence but dind't have the money to pull it off.

Then the second season kicked off and it started with time travel. I hate time travel and most people can't do it well. Lost barely managed to make it work. But alright there was still just enough goodness to keep me watching wvwn though the ship was sinking. Suddenly the writers were spologizing promising they were going to do better.

At a certain point I lost track but I remember checking out somewhere after Peter got amnesia, travled through time, left his girlfriend there, didn't bother to go back for her and then use telekenesis to open a vault door when we know he has the power to walk right through it. Ohh and I also remember Kristen Bell and Sylar losing his powers and then trying to regain them and then becoming good for a second and then bad again and then..........I heard after I stopped watching he got trapped on someones head is that right? Did that great villain of the Heroes universe get trapped inside of a person's head? Things got bizarre fast. The only other show I can remember taking such weird turns is, and im not kidding here, family matters.

Seriously Heroes might be the greatest example of wasted potential ever on tv. And thats saying alot because I just watched Jonah Hex.

Three quarters into the first season I gave up. Watching this show felt like looking at a really cool building with foundations on only three of the four sides. It was standing up so far but you just knew that once they tried putting on an extra floor it would come crashing down.

On shows with similar stories I've heard some nice things about Misfits and I'm about to give it a go.

Jesus Christ, you haven't seen The Shield or The Wire and are considering wasting time on the rest of Heroes? Dude seriously, it's the worst thing ever. If you really want a genre show then watch Fringe or Supernatural.

Fuck Heroes.

The problem is that Heroes doesn't have character driven stories. It's has characters that are changed willy nilly on the whims of the Writers. Sylar's a good guy in one episode. Suddently he back to being a serial killer later. The characters change their personalities to give the writers their "big twist" at the end of each episode.

The Event shares the same failings on this regard.

This.

Also, there's plenty of short-term sci-fi stuff more worth watching, even if they only got 1 series, such as Firefly, Journeyman, and Day Break.

Pushing Daisies and The Middleman are fun shows as well.

Print this list, cut up all the names and put them in a hat, pull one at random and watch it. Time better spent, guaranteed.

But... Heroes is on that list!

Let's call that a mulligan?

*ahem*

But seriously, you can either a) run like you've been caught boning your neighbors wife or b) turn your brain off. Apparently b) is all the rage nowadays.

I think it's far too early to compare Heroes to Walking Dead. Let's see where the second season goes and then come back to this discussion.

The "but seriously" qualifier was there for that.

Should you bother finishing Heroes? Well, it's obvious the creators didn't.

As someone who has seen every. single. episode. of Heroes, you are much better off watching other shows mentioned in this thread. Heroes goes nowhere, it's like they were constantly throwing random shit at the wall and none of it ever stuck. The show never recovers from the terrible season 1 finale, and gets even worse.

Hell, I contend that the lower budgeted The 4400, that other show about a bunch of people with superpowers, is altogether better than Heroes. It never got a proper ending though :/

Go with

Fringe
Supernatural
Dexter
The Shield
THE WIRE
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Angel
^^^You really can't go wrong with any of the shows listed above over Heroes.
I also recommend True Blood though some might disagree. I find it an awesomely trashy genre show, though felt the third season kind of fizzled and didn't really go anywhere.


Right now I'm borrowing Alias from a friend (while lending her Angel)... pretty good show, I'm enjoying it and I'm in season 2.

Not to thread hijack, but what are people's feelings on that one? Worth watching all the way through?

Actually, if you'd already seen The Wire, you'd at least enjoy seeing one particular guest star in a later episode of Heroes. Without that, not much point (I think I made it one episode past Royo's). And you could see him in season 3 of Fringe, anyway.

Well, played sir.

Be patient, give Fringe at least half a season.

Keep with it. First season of Fringe is ok. 2nd season it gets good. 3rd season it gets GREAT.

It turns into one of the most interesting and inventive sci-fi shows around.

Fringe is the anti-Heroes. Starts with a whimper and only gets stronger. Although, Fringe's worst whimper is nothing compared to the tortured groan that Heroes became.

I'd rate Alias' seasons (in order): 8, 9, 5, 5, 7. Seasons 1 and 2 are pretty great. 3 and 4 are really uneven and a letdown. Season 5 isn't as well-crafted as the first two, but returns to being a lot of fun to watch, and provides a really good finale to wrap things up. Basically if you really enjoy seasons 1 & 2, I think it's worth watching it all (you won't be able to stop at the season 2 finale for damned sure), but the real payoff is season 5.

All 5 seasons are better than any season of Heroes.

It may take until the end of season 1 for Fringe, but you'll change your tune.

I would also add Friday Night Lights and Arrested Development to that list.

One of the (admittidly many) problems with Heroes was keeping its villain around for a long, long, loooong ass time. The show knew it struck gold with Sylar, and rather then finishing him off on a good note (or having it seem like he died only to come back further on down the road) they just kept having him hang around. Forever.

Here's a bit of advice: when you establish your villain right out of the gate as someone who eats brains (yeah yeah yeah I know he doesn't TECHNICALLY do that) to get people's powers, you simply CAN'T redeem that character. It would take writing talent beyond that which the Heroes writers posses. It'd be like asking us to believe that The Joker can be reformed into a hero.

On a side note, Alias sort of suffered the same problem. Sloan was a fantastic villain, but he either needed to die or go away for a while and come back. Having him stick around the whole time kind of made him less-so, if that makes any sense.

I hated the way Irina was treated in the series finale. What a waste of a great character. Lena Olin was practically the best thing in Alias.

Tim Kring sucks. Check out his resume.

From what I remember they spent the entire first season getting these characters together only to have them split up again. The show was stupid fun before but season 2 just had pointless storylines.

Series could have been great if brian Fuller was given conrtol of the series.

Mainly just bad writing. That being said:

- Plagarism. Season 1's main plot was essentially a rippoff of the Watchmen.

- Too many characters. They crammed way too many different people into the story, which limited the development you could do with any given person.

- Related to the previous point, they kept introducing more characters. There were already too many people and they thought introducing more was the right approach? The wonder twins from season two were the worst.

- Inconsistent characters. See the above posts about Sylar and his constant flip-flopping.

- Poorly thought out powers. They didn't really think out the ramificatins of the powers, particularly with Peter and Sylar. These guys were essentially gods, and the writers had to really stretch reason to keep them in check.

I'm sure there are plenty of other things, that's just off the top of my head.

Would you just take a little bit of heroin, ya know, just to see how fucked up it is?

Have you not read this thread? trainwrecks are atleast interesting to watch. Heroes is just plain bad.

you have said you havent watched The Shield or The Wire. GET ON IT.

It's almost like you want to be miserable.

Season 1 was fine for genre tv. Things fell apart in a major way Season 2. I don't even remember Season 3...

The chick contingent has chimed in: Watch the first season if you want to, be warned about the second, but dude, check the other awesome shit listed in this thread out first.