How to Save “Heroes”

Sigh. When will the big wigs learn?

Don’t get me wrong, Season 3 of the NBC hit Heroes is already a vast improvement on the stinker that was the show’s sophomore season. We’re only three episodes in and I can practically hear the sighs of relief up and down the street. Still, I’ve been burned before.

And quite frankly, Heroes was flashing a few big warning signs for me way back in the first season. I know, I know- how can I say that? How can I say that when the numbers, the fan base and the so-helpful NBC media machine assured me, multiple times I might add, that  what I was looking at? That, right there? That’s a HIT. A bona-fide hit series phenomenon.

Well, I stick by my story. As a writer and a general lover of good stories, I find fault with the whole Heroes set up. Here are a few ways to fix it, but good.

Not So Special Anymore, Ma

Issue: Here’s the thing- if the vast population of people in a show are “special”, they stop seeming, well, special. On Heroes, if things start to seem like they’re slowing down a bit, another character (lately it’s more like 3-5) with powers pops up. At this point, the only person who is sans ability is Mohinder and we all see what’s developing lately, with him going all Green Goblin on us. Quite frankly, the fact that Mohinder WAS powerless made him interesting. To rely on his mind, his intellect, while everyone around him can do fantastical things? We call that emotional conflict. Now that he can scale walls, that’s pretty much over. At this point, you have to wonder- is anyone but Claire’s adopted mother and brother without powers?

Solution: Scale back the newbies with powers. That way, when they pop up, it’s genuinely noteworthy and exciting.

The Ties That Bind

Issue: Where are the relationships? The show has such potential for interesting characters and yet, making everyone so insular keeps them from building or establishing relationships with each other. Here’s a news flash- we, the viewers, don’t have powers so we can’t really relate to Claire wondering if she’s alive anymore. On the other hand, we’ve all had issues with our mothers, our friends, our would-be boyfriends, that father-like relationship with a mentor. You see where I’m going with this?

Solution: I know fast-moving plot is important but taking the time to develop relationships is one of the reasons soap operas last on the big networks for 40+ years. I enjoyed the idea of Mohinder and Matt playing My Two Dads with Molly- what do they do in Season 3? Ship Molly off somewhere so Matt could stumble through the wilds of Africa with a cryptic guide. Awesome. It would be nice if Not-Nikki (aka The Ice Queen) instead of toying with a surface relationship with adorable Micah before dumping him for some action scenes, actually became something of a surrogate mother, in the process thawing out a bit and revealing a side to her other than a frosty look-alike. Which brings me to my next point.

Character

Issue: Nobody changes. Unless we’re talking about Absolute Good to Absolute Evil. This is the fastest way to kill a viewer’s interest in a character, before the show can kill them off the show. Which is a waste because no one will care anyway. Anyway, our flaws draw us together. Nobody’s perfect, everybody has issues getting in the way of them being the best they could be. Heroes aren’t born, they’re made.

Solution: Establish some pratfalls, make sure they screw up, pick themselves up and learn from their mistakes. There was the perfect opportunity with Sylar’s gruesome attack on Claire- he cut off the top of her head and toyed with her brain for God’s sake. And yeah, she survived but the show is barely tapping into her fears about being vulnerable to attack. She wants revenge but her fear would be so much more palpable. Just watch an episode of Law & Order: SVU to see how it’s done. When Sara Gilbert, a victim of a rape nearly six months before, answers the door to the sympathetic detective, she is a mess. Her apartment is in shambles, her hair is a mess, her eyes are haunted. She’s surviving but barely- she loves her ADHD son so much she gave him up for adoption rather than force him to live in her hell. She’s trying to heal and her small efforts are infinitely more compelling than Claire videotaping herself stepping in front of a speeding train. Real survival is ugly and takes time but it’s worth it.

Bring Them Home

Issue: Spiritual journeys in Africa, time traveling from a bar in Ireland to post-apocolyptic New York. We don’t care. The end.

Solution: Stay in home base. Once you start doing all of the stuff in the list above, there won’t be much time to send Matt to the desert for some story-time suckage. Thank God.

Read This

TV shows—such as The Sopranos—are more riveting than most of the overrated offerings found at the multiplex. Photo illustration by Jacques Del Conte.

Little Big Screen

Across the board–from The Sopranos and Weeds to Bones and the C.S.I. franchise—television is eating the movies’ lunch: Dialogue that’s fast, mordant, and elliptical. Data-rich, layered, complex stories. Now, if TV can keep from taking itself too seriously …

by James Wolcott October 2008

from Vanity Fair

In the 1960s (many of you weren’t around for that decade, but trust me—it was wild), one of the countercultural articles of faith was that you didn’t so much watch a movie as lean back and “let it wash over you.” It was still possible then to believe in the pore-cleansing powers of sensory overload and oceanic bliss, no matter how many Elvis Presley musicals gunked up the drive-ins. The movie screen was sacramental, the wide horizon on which Stanley Kubrick, Michelangelo Antonioni, and David Lean played God. Compared with the puny portal of the television box, the movie screen bespoke a cool blank inscrutable mystique—a billboard-size tabula rasa ready to burst into tapestry. So much expectation hinged on that tingling moment in the theater when the lights dimmed and the curtains parted, revealing the screen staring back at us, virgin with possibility. “Let us pray,” Pauline Kael would sometimes mutter, not in a religious spirit (she was not a religious person) but in the hope that something wonderful was about to unveil, something that would make up for the lousy film the day before.

Continue reading here.

Only a Few Hours to Go!

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia premieres tonight on FX!

The Post in Which I Reveal I Am Old

A letter regarding last night’s Video Music Awards and the MTV of my late ’20s-

Dear MTV,

First of all… I realize I sound cranky. I don’t want to be flippant about this whole thing because the truth is, I am a child of the ’80s and ’90s and, as such, you, as a network, were very important to me, developmentally speaking. As a result, this letter is harder to write than it seems. It’s kind of like going home for the holidays and seeing this teacher you used to have, this teacher who was a little rough around the edges and, now that you think about it as an adult, was probably a bad influence and therefore really cool when you were 14. And seeing him at the seedy bar on the corner, drunk out of his mind and his eyes are glassy and his hair is too long and he’s groping some twenty-year old girl and your eyes meet and you’re angry and upset but your heart is breaking a little bit too?

I think you might be too far gone to see what went wrong last night so I’m going to tell you. Putting the VMA’s in a venue that is slightly bigger than the TRL set made it seem, for lack of a better word, small. Filling said venue with industry people and rock stars made it feel more like some music convention than a concert. And not even something as hardcore as the Republican convention. They had cowboy hats and balloons. This was more like an office supplies sales convention. At a Radisson.

The problem with industry people is they don’t clap. They don’t laugh very much, unless someone just twittered something hilarious about Lil Wayne’s pants on their Blackberry. This is their job, to be here. You want to feel music at its most commercial? Stick a bunch of bored, slick hustlers in suits and pinky rings in the best seats of the house. Leave the fans outside in the cold to wonder if Pink is somewhere nearby. You wonder why Russell Brand was trying so hard? I didn’t envy his job one bit. I’ve played to disinterested crowds before- it’s impossible. When LL Cool J is the only one enjoying himself, there’s a problem.

And, I’m sorry, but this Disney spill-over into your universe makes me cringe. Yeah, Miley Cyrus makes a lot of money. So do the Jonas Brothers. But watching three pie-faced boys on a studio lot makes me think I’m hallucinating and I ended up in Orlando, Florida somehow. Is this the land of Beavis and Butthead or a commercial for Disney Radio? Cyrus, Jonas Brothers, the kids from High School Musical… Shia LaBeaouf presenting with Slash?

Even the performers seemed like pale versions of themselves. Rihanna and Kanye and Christina no longer earn the “special performances by” title- they’re music award show mainstays, old vets. Boring even. I love Christina Aguilera but even she looked tired and her poor lip-synching was a knife in my gullet. I’ll take her wailing to James Brown any day. Kanya closing the show with a song we’ve never heard before? Greeeaaat. Those new songs go over so well in concerts. Nothing like awkwardly swaying to a song you don’t know the words too. Really brings people together.

I know people are disappointed that Britney didn’t perform but to be honest, MTV? I do not blame her. I would’ve taken one look at that crowd and that lame little set and that sad crop of rarely seen videos and I would’ve just popped another Zoloft, instead of reaching for a microphone.

Those Paris Hilton commercials did not help, by the way. They also do not endear me to your VJ’s, who deem it fine to make fun of P-Hilt behind her back and in front of her too, before cutting to a commercial for her new reality show. You can’t have it both way, kiddo. You can’t screw the pooch and then give it a tiara. It’s just pathetic, for all us.

In closing, I want to offer you some sage advice. (This is the part of the evening when I haul you out of the gutter and help you to your car and try to remind you about that time you lent me your personal copy of “Franny and Zooey”, of who you once were and could be again.) Show videos. Cut your reality show programming to just The Hills, True Life and The Real World- tell those Sweet Sixteen year olds to take a hike. I’m sure Carson will take over TRL again, he doesn’t seem too busy. Start making cartoons again. In fact, Daria’s probably old enough to take over as head of programming. Be too cool for Miley Cyrus.

In short- trying seeing us instead of a buck.

Sincerely,

Me

Oops…

Some people think setting up a social networking site is easy. Sure, just throw up a couple of windows, let people register, easy peasy- get Google on the phone! I’m sure they’ll want to buy this now.

But really what is involved is a lot of…questions. Where does this go? Should we add this? Does this make sense? That doesn’t make sense. What about this? And this? Really, it’s endless.

You’ve also got to be very careful. One minute you’re trying to send out an email blast- the next you’ve been told that you accidentally deleted half of the back-end. Yeah, oops. Stupid FTP.

So in case you were wondering, it’s been one of those days.

100 Reviews!

And I’m celebrating. In commemoration of my 100th Culture Clique review, here are a few of my favorites from around the site as well as the big 1-0-0, a big splashy review of Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D List.

Michael Walsh wrote: GREY GARDENS

East Hampton, Long Island circa 1973 and time has stopped for Big & Little Edie Bouvier– relatives to Jackie O. Their dilapidated house is a visible eye-soar among the impeccably landscaped and mannered mansions, raccoons eating Webers white bread, left for them in the attic by Little Edie. “They’ll arrest you for wearing red shoes on Thursday in East Hampton”, Little Edie informs us on the DL. These women are lost in a world of their own and it’s a gorgeous, car-crash of a life they lead, one that pulls you in further and further. Big Edie sings in bed while drinking high balls mixed in mayonnaise glasses to an audience of mangy kitty cats pooing behind a giant oil panting of herself. “At least someone is doing something they want”, she remarks upon finding out. The two women bicker and lament the life they were supposed to have had– the one that never quite manifested. Mother never approved of the right man for Edie and one gets the sense she never wanted her taken away. And we’re talking big time suitors too– what, the name Getty isn’t swanky enough for a husband? Not to Big Edie– take an evening and get lost in this world you will not soon forget it. Fascinating and brilliant.

Craig Diamond wrote: J5750 All-in-One HP Printer

Forgive me but I’m sitting at my home computer trying to print and I can’t and it’s making me insane! I hate this thing. I bought it at Costco a year ago and I literally have never been able to just get it to print properly. It always misses a line, or smears, or need realignment, or says the brand new toner needs to be replaced.

It’s the most frustrating waste of money ever. I realize these companies need to make these super complicated all-in-one monsters but is it too much to ask that I be able to just print a damn email?

Ahhhh. I’m going to throw this out of the window. Fight your urge to buy one of these in Costco. It’s not worth it!

Barbara Palmer wrote: Someecards

This is seriously such a fun site, but not for the faint of heart. They have made ecards for every occassion and they are all very sarcastic, unPC and so dead on that you can spend a great deal of time just trolling the options. Pick a topic and plan to be offended – then figure out which of your family and friends will want to be offended too.

Mark Boergers wrote: NINA GARCIA

Nina garcia’s snark and opinions are actually valid- which makes them all the more delcious. Becoming fashion editor of Elle gives you a certain carte blanche to say what you want. i find her muted accent and lack of niceties to be exactly what I want out of a refreshing cup of fashion industry bitchiness. On one of the only reality TV shows that actually cares about some sense of authenticity, I find nina garcia to be the perfect choice if Anna Wintour couldn’t step out of her dark and twisted tower-de-vogue for the job. The only thing better than Nina’s direct criticism matched with Kors’ quirky yet deadly metaphors (its very dynasty beach party on my grandmother’s caftan)… is when dejected and bitter anne slowey makes a visit with her stone-clad hampton’s face and resentment towards nina (ASSISTANT fashion editor… ha ha). Come on people, these are real fashion professionals who have made it to a position of authority in an extremely vicious business… these designers have it coming. And I eat up every bit of it like a fat kid in front of Old Country Buffet. Keep it coming….

100th Review!

Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D List

How A List is this? I’ve chosen Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D List as my 100th Culture Clique review!

I adore Kathy Griffin. You should too. And I think once you’ve seen this show, you’ll agree that she rocks. Tell me, after watching her “Team Griffin”, consisting of her tour manager Tom and giggling assistants Tiffany and Jessica, completely humiliate her with a pantyliner story at The Learning Annex (Kathy forced them to teach a seminar about being Hollywood assistants),that you do not want to be a part of her entourage. Try to resist the urge to fly to LA and hand her your resume when Team Griffin surprises her with a pinata made out of her likeness and gives it to a bunch of Mexican children to play with and then just start punching it themselves, prompting her to refer to it as a “hate crime.”

Did I mention she was in Mexico to build a school para los ninos, ala her arch nemesis Oprah? And that she chose a school a few miles away from her resort vacation spot in Puerto Vallarta? And ends up making a ruckus in Costco? While dealing with a hellacious sunburn that frightens the children? Oh, yeah this show is great.

News in Comics Wonderland

My brother just called me with exciting news- the printer is shipping the finished first run of his first ever comic.

As you can imagine, I am very excited for him (was it really so many years ago when we read our first Archie comics together? Huddled on the floor of the room we shared?) and still faintly high on my Dark Knight buzz from the Sunday matinee. So when he ordered me to the Watchmen site, I went. I do as I’m told these days.

I have to say, the site is damn impressive in terms of studio-movie sites. And the trailer, for those of you who used to carry around Alan Moore’s epic under your arm (in my case, it was required reading in a Comics Appreciation class in college. Jealous?) is worth a look. Or several.

Check it out here.

The Weekender

7.22.08

Batman Returns…Again

The critics are unanimous in the praise for The Dark Knight,  Christopher Nolans’ second film in the recharded Batman series, but as usual those of us at Culture Clique headquarters could care less about what the hired guns think. We’re more interested in the people who actually sat in the theaters this weekend, trading the steamy streets of summer for air-conditioning, a bucket of popcorn, and gallons of diet soda. Review The Dark Knight.

Meet Mamma in Greece

If the dark alleys of Gotham City don’t exactly float your boat, you can’t get farther away than the newly released film version of hit Broadway musical Mamma Mia. Brimming with bouncy Abba tunes, set in sun-drenched Greece and spreading enough glitter and sparkles to make Rip Taylor blush, it’s guaranteed to draw som serious fans. Just for you, I’ll avoid the Abba song-title puns. Review Mamma Mia.

Neither of those ringing a bell? Prefer your flicks German and rich with allegory? Over the moon about Space Chimps? (Sorry) Review that too! We don’t really care what you decided to see as long as you share it with the rest of the class.

So go forth, tell Culture Clique exactly what you think, what you saw, heard, read, played with, slept through, Trc. The world, not to mention your frinds, will thank you.

Lyrics I Love

So it goes…someone denies you the object of your devotion so the only course of action is to become completely obsessed.

I have to admit that as much time as I spend online, if it isn’t on iTunes I find myself at a loss. Such is the state I’m in lately, relegating my sincere love of ’60s girl groups and their sugary pop confections to meager playlists on Finetune and Pandora.

One song, in particular, just kills me. And because I’m denied the pleasure of blasting it for the neighbors on loop, I’m forced to swoon here over a centered, italicized ode to the lyrics of Keep on Dancing by The Ronettes.

Little girl, you know that I’ve been watching you
Trying hard to catch my baby’s eye
Since the party started you’ve been after him
And I can see you wanna steal my guy
And this guy of mine knows what you’ll try

So keep on dancin’, little girl
Keep on dancin’, little girl
Around and around now, little girl
Aeep on dancin’, little girl
You’re only wastin’ time, he’s all mine
He loves me
Keep on dancin’
Little girl

If you’re gonna take his love away from me
Just because you dance the way you do
Don’t you see he hasn’t even looked your way
Though you can try until the night is through
But baby, he ain’t goin’ home with you

So keep on dancin’, little girl
Keep on dancin’, little girl
Around and around now, little girl
Keep on dancin’, little girl
You’re only wastin’ time, he’s all mine
He loves me
Keep on dancin’
Little girl

(Just keep on dancin’, c’mon)
ohhhh
(Just keep on dancin’, little girl)
oh oh ohhhh
(Just keep on dancin’, c’mon)
oh oh ohhh
(Just keep on dancin’, little girl)
oh oh ohhh…

I can’t believe I’ve been relegated to actually buying a CD. This is madness.