'Heroes' Is Must-See TV

October 3rd, 2006 at 05:06am Michael Conniff 2

It's been over twenty years since I was a television critic in Boston--over 25 years to tell the truth--and I recently learned that my hypercriticial younger siblings decided decades ago that I don't know squat about television. Why? Because they used to squat in front of the television for ours and hours while I was out on some sandlot somewhere playing America's game.

Put it this way: to really know you're TV, you've got to have all those "I Love Lucy" shows under your belt.

So I start from a flawed position in the firmament and descend from there. But here goes anyway. On a whim Monday night, I did something I almost never do: I watched a new show. Given my sports diet and reading habits, I really don't have time for this, an hour-long hocus-pocus-type drama called "Heroes" on NBC.

On the other hand, I'm already hooked. The writing is out of this world, and my guess is much of the cast comes from independent films. But the story is pure "X-Men" meets "The Sixth Sense."

There's this professor doing a human genome experiment to identify a group of extraordary people with weirdo powers; the prof dies but his son carries on the work in the company of the babe down the hall, but that's only after a fake cable guy tries to bug the prof's apartment and then pulls a gun on him.

There's this women with a small child having hallucinations about killing her kinky boyfriend and the hallucinations seem to be true, but only after some bizarre alter-ego has cleaned up the mess in her garage and plopped the bloody corpse in a mysterious red car with a map that leads to a shovel that leads to some other kind of corpse in no man's land.

A heroin addict writes comic books that tell the future of the weirdo people with the strange powers, and one of them transports himself from Japan to New York only to be accused in the artist's death.

A rookie cop who can't make detective can hear the thoughts of others, including a little girl the police can find after her parents have been mutilated. The copy, too, gets arrested for the crime he detected.

A cheerleader with a nefarious stepfather plunges into a fire in uniform and saves a man who would otherwise have burned to death.

And on and on anon. This wild bunch is interconnected, for sure, thought we're not sure why or how or where we're going with this. But we're pretty sure on watching just the second episode that the future of the world is at stake.

I may be a crappy television critic, but I know a great show when I see it. Maybe we do need another "Heroes." 

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