This year, like many in recent memory, the broadcast networks are relying on the perceived power of intellectual property to drive attention to their crop of new fall shows. ABC thinks that you’re still into The Muppets; Fox desperately hopes you enjoyed parts of Minority Report that weren’t Tom Cruise, Steven Spielberg, good cinematography, or functional storytelling; and CBS believes that both Supergirl and Limitless could bring in some of those cord-cutting youths. Of course, there's also NBC, the once-proud standard bearer of good TV in America that seeks to counter all these other franchise projects with a blockbuster of its own in Heroes Reborn.
Setting aside how bad it is that every network’s go-to move is to try to leech off of some pre-existing property, I can see a world where The Muppets, Minority Report, Supergirl, and Limitless are competent shows come the end of the year (of the four, Minority Report offers the weakest pilot, but there’s still a load of potential there). With Heroes Reborn, there’s no chance at competency and very little potential. Even though I’ve seen the first two episodes of what NBC is calling an "event miniseries" (that’s the two-hour premiere and the following episode) to back up that claim, I already knew all that before I watched a single second of Reborn.
Only NBC would invest significant resources into a rebooted continuation of a show that only concluded its initial run five years ago, and, by the time it was completed, involved a circus and less than five million live viewers each week. Making matters worse is the return of creator Tim Kring, a much-maligned figure on the Internet for producing bad television and for claiming he doesn’t read comic books—despite the fact that his show mostly just regurgitates comic book plotlines—and the absence of all of the original’s major stars (Hayden Panettiere, Milo Ventimiglia, Ali Larter, Zachary Quinto, etc.). What a promotional pitch from Kring that must have been: "It’s the same bad show, with none of those people that Americans know and love!"
And don’t get it twisted, Heroes might be reborn, but this is the same bad show that started with some promise in 2006, took the world by storm thanks to a punchy promotional campaign and a growing frustration with other, better serialized shows like Lost, and spent its final three years on the air searching for stable ground. In fact, while the addition of Reborn to the title accomplishes the Hollywood mandate that reboots, reimaginings, and revivals must include a limp signal that tells audiences “Yes, This Again” in fewer words, it ignores that Heroes already rebooted itself a handful of times during its four year run to the bottom.
With some of bigger names out of the picture, Reborn relies quite a bit on Jack Coleman’s Noah Bennet, who was admittedly one of the best parts of the original run. The opening sequence reintroduces us to Bennet and a slightly different world where the existence of superpowered individuals, or Evos, is commonly understood, but generally feared. When a tragic incident occurs at a planned peace summit between normies and Evos in Odessa, Texas, the world’s paranoia goes into overdrive, and powered people are forced to go into hiding. A year later Noah has a new name, a new life, and not much memory of the terrible event in Odessa—that is until a conspiracy theorist (Henry Zebrowski), or in the show’s very #relevant vernacular, a truther, tracks him down searching for answers.
Noah’s a fine character to build a new story around, given that his character, who at least originally worked as a Men in Black-type figure that bagged and tagged those with powers, came into contact with everyone else in the show’s universe. Predictably, however, Reborn’s initial premise involves two or three extra levels of unnecessary complication, essentially to build a mystery around a dude who doesn’t remember what happened on a particular day. That the show begins with one version of contemporary society that’s different than what we last saw in its universe, only then to blow that all up, literally, to tell more stories about The Powers That Be trying to suppress gifted people, is exactly what I expected from Kring.
Meanwhile, amid the focus on Coleman’s Noah (and a few other returning characters that I won’t mention here for you spoiler truthers out there), Reborn does introduce a slew of new characters—just in ways that immediately serve to make you remember how they’re very similar to those you remember from the waning days of the Bush administration.
Reborn crisscrosses the globe to display the troubled lives of a half-dozen new Evos, including an awkward teen in Illinois (Robbie Clark), a female ninja with likely links to the show’s past in Japan (Kiki Sukezane), and a vigilante in a luchador mask in Los Angeles. The best of Reborn’s new characters are those that aren’t powerful at all, including a grieving married couple played by Zachary Levi and Judi Shekoni, but they’re so quickly tossed into the middle of a larger conspiracy that there’s barely time to appreciate why they’re acting a certain way or whether or not those actions make a lick of sense. Oh, and Boy Next Door beefcake Ryan Guzman is here too! He’s OK.
If the original Heroes was obsessed with pulling from the greatest hits of the comic book canon and failing to do them justice, then take some solace in the fact that Reborn has found a new infatuation of sorts: Heroes. If you’re the type of viewer or fan who enjoys needling people on the couch or on Twitter about how the 9th Wonders! comic book makes a return appearance, or really, really enjoys that Noah was once exclusively defined by wearing glasses, Heroes Reborn is definitely here to satiate your Easter egg-hunting needs. Wait, what do you call an Easter egg that’s purposefully lingered upon in a shot? A big, hulking anvil? Let’s go with that.
NBC probably hopes that for old fans of Heroes, absence made the heart grow fonder, and that the current infatuation with superhero franchises across pop culture will pull in some new viewers. The problem is that for the former group, Reborn doesn’t offer much indication that it’ll be any different than the frustrating experience it was before, and for the latter, the early episodes are just focused enough on the past to be too alienating. This, of course, has been a problem with countless revivals and reboots over the last decade, but it doesn’t make Heroes Reborn any more enjoyable to watch. Hey, maybe third time’s the charm though! I’m already looking forward to Heroes Forever in 2022!
