In case you missed it, NBC announced this weekend that it's digging up the corpse of Heroes for what "an event miniseries" called Heroes: Reborn. The 13 television episodes will air next year, along with a complementary digital series that will introduce the new characters and storylines.
In a statement released late on Friday, NBC Entertainment president Jennifer Salke said that "shows with that kind of resonance don't come around often, and we thought it was time for another installment." Tim Kring, who created the show in 2006, is going to be in charge of the revival, which will center around new characters—although Salke admitted "we won't rule out the possibility of some of the show's original cast members popping back in."
For some, this news was a sign of creative bankruptcy equivalent hiring Jay Leno to take over The Tonight Show for a third go-round. "By the time season four ended, audiences had grown tired of Tim Kring’s 'LOST with super-powers,'" wrote Forbes' Merrill Barr, while Twitter collectively launched the hashtag #NBCReboots to find some more potential revivals for the peacock network (Amongst the suggestions: "Just Shoot Me Again" and "The B Team").
What's been forgotten is how exciting Heroes was in that first year, and how ahead of its time the series was—especially if you consider the rash of superhero concepts currently being developed for the small screen in the wake of Marvel Studios' dominance at the box office. Reviving Heroes make a lot of sense for NBC beyond any nostalgia element, if only because it's a superhero franchise that mainstream audiences are familiar with that NBC already owns outright. Why not try to bring it back right now?
Admittedly, there's the fact that almost everything past that first season sucked. Heroes' evolution from "fast-paced pulpy fun with a clear resolution" in the first year to "I have no idea where this is going, and I don't think the writers do, either" almost immediately afterwards is almost legendary, and was borne of a couple of problems: the show's pace meant that it had exhausted itself of plausible reversals and reveals by the end of its first season, and the series had nowhere to go after saving the world the previous year. (Kring famously apologized to fans while the second season was still running, promising to fix the show in future, but those two core problems remained until the show was finally put out of its misery two years later.)
The good news is that the revival can easily sidestep those problems -- with all-new characters, Heroes loses almost all of its baggage, and gets stripped down to its core concept: Everyday people suddenly have superpowers and have to get used to using them. Where it goes from there is wide open -- and with only 13 episodes (and an additional digital series of currently unknown length), it can match the breakneck, melodramatic pace of that first season without burning through material so quickly that nothing's left by the end.
Done right, Heroes: Reborn could be everything that viewers loved about that first year of the original series, stripped of problems like Milo Ventimiglia's smirk. It could be something that redeems the series after its downward spiral, and gives NBC a third drama that's worth watching (along with The Blacklist and Parenthood).
All we ask is that no one try to revive the "Save the Cheerleader, Save the World" catchphrase. Don't worry, NBC—whether the show is good or bad, there'll plenty of hashtags to go around.
