TV: NBC's "Heroes"

NBC's "Heroes" is pretty much a comic book movie on TV, which....isn't horrible. If you pitch the idea of minimizing (budget-wise) the X-men trilogy and making it sort of a televised prequel (when they started realizing they had powers) most people wouldn't believe it could work. The lack of frequent CGI and special effects would diminish its cool factor. But it turned out that having interesting characters and getting viewers to invest their interests and emotions in the characters works too.

Oddly, my favorite character is Ali Larter (Final Destination). She has a really inexplicable super power, which if described sounds more like schizophrenia. She literally blacks out and kills people in a rage, and while she's conscious her reflection is an evil version of her. That just sounds ridiculously cool--mostly because she's killing evil people.

Then there's the character that Milo Ventimiglia ("Gilmore Girls") plays. He's this young kid who thinks he can fly, so he brilliantly jumps off a building to prove it to his politician brother.

Hayden Panettiere (Bring it on: All or Nothing) seems to have the most important role. She plays this popular cheerleader who's trying to find a way to die, because no matter how much danger she puts herself in (walking through fire, jumping off a bridge, putting her hand in a garbage disposal) she can't die. That's not the interesting part. There's this guy who's supposed to be the villain and by the end of the episode you find out he's her step dad (she was adopted).

The basic "Heroes" theory is that the human race is evolving and a professor is searching for the perfect human genome of the new mutation. Panettiere, being the invinicible one, is that perfect genome, and the evil guy has her. That's pretty wicked.

I have high hopes that this show does well. It's like "Lost" with the conspiracy theories + "Six Degrees" since all the heroes cross paths eventually. Let's cross our fingers that they don't start to lack originality.