So Monday night I watched the premeire of Heroes. It was fun, and I’ll keep watching it in hopes that it will be good. Hardly anything new for SF, but that’s not why I watch tv.
Two things about the show struck me:
It’s about a group of people who discover they have special powers, like regeneration or teleportation or flying. There’s eight or so of them, and though they’re about half white and afaik straight, they’re a more diverse group than on most tv I’ve seen. So four are women and four are men, right? Half and half? No, of course not. Two are women. Both women are caucasian, and blonde. One is a high school cheerleader. The other earns a living by stripping for a web cam.
Yeah. That almost makes me not want to watch any more.
There’s another major female character, who is not white and whose dress leads me to think she might have a respectable job, but she doesn’t seem to be one of the people with special powers. She’s connected to the group through men: her boyfriend is one of the special people, and another (male) special person might be interested in her. Sigh.
The other thing, which is amusing rather than annoying, is NBC’s grass-roots style marketing and the growing fan stuff. As I pay basically no attention to television, I didn’t know they’d showed an early version of the pilot at ComicCon this summer, and made it available for download on iTunes. So some people had already seen it months before it aired. NBC even started the official fan site ages ago, apparently. One of the characters has a blog, and the show’s creator did a live blog after the pilot aired, and there’s an online graphic novel that covers an event left out of the pilot. It’s amazing what networks feel they have to do to get an audience with so much competition from elsewhere.
What really cracked me up was that people have already started making LJ icons and communities for shippers and even writing fan fiction about the show. I fail to see how anyone could write fan fiction about a show that’s only aired one episode. I guess I see two reasons for writing/reading fan fiction – either the show’s writers got something “wrong” and the fan wants to fix it, or the fan wants to explore something that the show skipped over or left unexplained. Starting all that before the pilot’s even aired seems a wee bit early to me. Feel free to tell me why I’m wrong…
(Clearly, however, I should take up writing fanfic and turn half the men into women, and the cheerleader into chess club president.)