Heroes Reborn is Heroes recancelled

Tim Kring’s superhero series for NBC just can’t catch a break from people who watch NBC. Heroes Reborn, the miniseries that could have been renewed into a full on revival of the original series (just called Heroes) that aired from 2006-2010, will not be returning for another season according to Bob Greenblat, the chairman of NBC Entertainment. That means that the characters and world of Heroes will die once again.
Heroes’ big moment in the spotlight was the first half of the first season, where Peter Patrelli (Milo Ventimigila) and his brother Nathan (Adrian Pasadar) discovered their powers alongside mysterious villain Syler (Zachary Quinto) and invulnerable cheerleader Claire (Hayden Panitierre). Claire’s glasses-wearing father was up to something fishy with all the heroes and maybe with Peter’s mother Angela. The season provided a series of superhero origin stories while also laying the ground for a rich mythology to be mined in the future.

The first half-season of Heroes’ existence pondered what it meant to “Save the Cheerleader, Save the World,” and the critics thought the atmosphere of the series set it up to be that year’s Lost. In retrospect, that’s what made Hayden Panettiere “happen” for a brief moment and what introduced Zachary Quinto into the public consciousness. The second half of the season isn’t bad as much as it fails to fully capitalize on the promise of the first half of the season.
When Heroes was picked up for a second season by NBC, it was heralded as some of the best TV airing on network television. When the show returned, it had the season cut short by the WGA Writer’s Strike of 2007. What fans weren’t expecting was to be somewhat glad at the premature ending. Masa Okai’s character Hiro had time traveled and isolated his plot, other characters fared about the same and Heroes didn’t have the same spark it once did.

As far as viewership goes, Heroes had diminishing returns until it was finally cancelled when season 4 ended in February 2010. Tim Kring would go on to create a series for Fox called Touch that featured Kiefer Sutherland solving people’s problems with an autistic child (that would grow up to become the kid who plays Bruce Wayne in Fox’s Gotham). While he was out of superhero television, the blockbuster movies and TV shows on the CW kept drilling superhero narratives into the audiences for both movies and television. Shows like CW’s Arrow and The Flash spend as little time as possible on the origins of the heroes in question and March’s Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice will introduce a version of Batman that has already lived through most of his adventures. The origin story isn’t a big part of superhero narratives anymore, yet…
NBC and Tim Kring, observing the hero activity around them, devised a way to bring back NBC’s once beloved (for a season) show in miniseries form. They called it Heroes Reborn and passed it off as a thirteen episode “event,” even though everyone knew that if ratings were as high as the first two seasons of Heroes that Reborn would be renewed into series. The problem seems to be that Kring not only returned to hero origin stories (now called “Evos” because they are evolved humans), but also delved back into the time travel craziness.

Eleven episodes of Heroes Reborn have aired, and there will only be two more according to the news out of the Television Critics Association semi-annual press tour. At the event where America’s journalists get to look ahead at the TV landscape, The Hollywood Reporter got NBC Chairman Bob Greenblat to say that Heroes Reborn will not be renewed. Tim Kring has said that he has ideas about how to move forward with the series, but when asked about that by THR, Greenblat said, “He didn’t say that to me, so I haven’t heard that. As far as I know, there’s no more incarnations of Heroes coming.”
That one time we saved the cheerleader, we saved Heroes. Then we got it cancelled by not watching it, now we’ve gotten the quiet attempt at a revival cancelled by not watching it. If you’re a baseball metaphor person, the count is 1-2 on Heroes. It’s unlikely it will return in the future to earn a third strike.