Heroes: More Than A Monday Night Well Spent
Heroes Season 2 premiered last night. Anyone who knows me at all knows I am seriously into Heroes. To say that I was excited about the new season is an understatement. Overall, I felt exactly as I felt when the first season premiered — not blown away by anything particular but interested in all the places the story could go. It was the same feeling last night, which makes me pretty excited about the coming season. That's the attraction of the show to me: the way it gets better over the course of the year.
Not only is Heroes a great TV show, but NBC did an incredible job last year of extending that story to the Web. Granted they don't have a clue with regard to how to handle video downloads online — see the recent iTunes fiasco — but otherwise, the Heroes 360 Experience, as they called it last year, was pretty sweet. (This year it looks like they're calling it Heroes Evolutions.)
Henry Jenkins argues that "what we are calling Web 2.0 is fandom without the stigma". I totally agree with that statement, even as I tire of the abuse of the term "Web 2.0." And Heroes certainly allows some fandom. Last year, not only did I watch every episode on TV, I got each from iTunes (not this year!), read the graphic novel every Tuesday, received SMS and email from Wireless (a character on the show), read her blog, applied for a job at Primatech Paper, and visited sites from other characters on the show.
Oh, and then there was that time we helped stop an early plan of Linderman's for getting Petrelli elected. :-)
So you're beginning to get the idea of how deeply I'm into this show, right?
It's not that you miss anything if you just watch the TV show, but the Web is a nice way to deliver additional content for those who want more. I hope the network continues with the online experience this year. The sites from last year are still around, and a new character is featured in a faux documentary. Heroes certainly seems to be off to a great start both online and off. And really, I think this kind of cross-platform story telling is just beginning to get interesting. There's so many more interesting things yet to be done. It's a great time to be a web developer with an interest in telling great stories.
Posted by deryck on September 25, 2007
