How 'Heroes' Lost Its Powers

NBC's Heroes, once one of the networks most promising new hits, is in serious trouble. Despite heavy promotion, ratings are way down this season, and yesterday the show tossed two of its key writer-producers.

Since early last season, we've been hearing about how Heroes creator Tim Kring knows there's a problem and is taking steps to fix it. But this season, the show has only gotten worse. It lurches from episode to episode -- from commercial break to commercial break, really -- with no sign of any guiding logic or coherent story arc. What gives?

Here's what: The problems that Kring identified -- too many characters, too much romance, not enough apocalyptic peril -- were never really the problems. The real problem is that Kring doesn't understand the basics of what makes a superhero story fun. These are two of his main misconceptions:

1. The Fallacy of Omnipotence, a.k.a. the Matrix Mistake: At last count, Heroes has three characters who are, or at least have been at times, all-powerful; three to five who are effectively immortal; and another one who has power over time and space. This is great because if a character with one superpower is neat, a character with 10 superpowers must be neater, right?

In fact, what makes superheroes interesting isn't their powers; it's their limitations. Remember how The Matrix cycle got terrible fast as soon as Neo realized his omnipotence? Batman is always going to be more fun than Superman, and Superman would be a complete snore if there weren't always some kryptonite around. Heroes is often compared to X-Men, but in that universe, each character has a discreet and usually very narrow ability. The fun comes from seeing how the characters will combine their powers in novel ways to defeat challenges. It's more MacGyver than Matrix.

What makes Kring's fall into the omnipotence trap especially odd is that he's given himself so many outs: Both Peter and Sylar have at times lost their powers, only to regain them almost immediately. In season three, Peter has once again lost his powers; a good sign of whether Kring has finally diagnosed his show's biggest problem will be how quickly -- or, rather, how slowly -- his protagonist gets them back.

2. The Fallacy of Explaining, a.k.a. the Phantom Menace Mistake: The origin of superpowers is best treated as a vague mystery or even, a la Spider-Man, as something of a joke. Why do people from Krypton become powerful in the presence of a yellow sun? It doesn't matter; they just are. The lack of exposition, by the way, is a big part of what made The Dark Knight so much better than other Batman movies. Heath Ledger just drops into the film as the Joker, fully formed, and your imagination does the rest.

Kring, however, seems to think we need to know the "how come" behind his heroes' abilities. So we get a lot of ridiculous pseudo-science about DNA and viruses and antidotes. Kring must be the only geek on earth who watched The Phantom Menace and thought not "How bitterly disappointing that The Force is just something that can be explained by microbiology" but "Gosh, what a relief that I don't have to worry about this terrible mystery that's been bothering me."