I've never seen an episode of the NBC series, Heroes, but Alessandra Stanley's television review in this morning's New York Times has piqued my interest. I might actually tune in to the season premiere.
Television reviews are a strange sub-category of criticism. Music crits plumb the deep wells of music history, the music journalism of their predecessors, and harvest the fruits of countless hours of crate-digg...er, web-surfing. Would-be film critics spend their sexless adult lives watching film after film, compiling a body of film references so obscure that it eventually ossifies into a specialized language by which one can make the boldest and most ostentatious comparisons between the portrayal of women in the films of G.W. Pabst and R.W. Fassbinder. Televison critics? Well ANYBODY can watch television, right? Even meth-fiends in Wasilla, Alaska probably plunk down in front of the tube now and then between "disassembling doorknobs and putting them back together again" and smoking some sweet, sweet crystals. Even inmates in the state penn get t.v. privileges. And everybody has an opinion (me included). So what's so special about television reviewers? Well, they seem to display a special acumen for situating the shows we watch within the context of the pop culture zeitgeist in a way that reveals certain prevalent characteristics in our American identity at a given point in time (to put it more accurately, each season). Heather Havrilesky's I Like To Watch column on Salon.com is usually an entertaining and insightful read. The New York Times occasionally runs some good ones.
The New York Times
Television Review
By Alessandra Stanley
September 21, 2008
Supernatural Powers, Yes. Gen-Y Problems, Also Yes.
“Save the cheerleader, save the world.”
On second thought, maybe just save Social Security. “Heroes” returns on NBC Monday night for a third season at an apt time — in the midst of an economic crisis that confirms the worst fears of Generation Y members, namely that their baby boomer parents are leaving them a world convulsed by war, drowning in debt and melting down under global warming.
The heroes in this science-fiction drama are a group of young people with special supernatural abilities who seek to save the world from a dark, high-level conspiracy, spawned by the Me Generation that is hellbent on annihilating humanity.
“Heroes” is of course a comic book, a sleek cartoonish battle between good and evil. But the saga also serves as an allegory of generational malaise, a venting of the indignation and self-pity of 20- and 30-somethings reduced by the sins of their fathers to ever-diminishing expectations. Read more...
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