[Cancelled] Heroes Season 4 (Volume 5 : Redemption)

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Grand Master

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With the finale next week we need some stuff on next season so with the first bit of news so a new thread is created! :D

NBC plans to cut the number of episodes of its superhero drama from 25 this season to 18 to 20 in its fourth season, Ad Age reports.

The reasons for the cutback are legion: Though the show's latest episodes have reinvigorated many fans, a series of complicated and wide-ranging storylines cost the show ratings in Season 2 and earlier this season.

Also, NBC will have five fewer prime-time hours to fill in 2009-10 season, thanks to Jay Leno's new hour-long program at 10 pm weeknights. And other networks are also experimenting with condensed seasons: ABC's Lost has kept to 16 or 17 episodes in recent seasons, and CBS's Harper's Island has a 13-episode format that could be repeated (with a new setting and cast) if the murder mystery succeeds with viewers.

Though Heroes debuted to strong ratings in 2006, since the 2007-08 writers strike its viewership has slipped to about 7.7 million viewers on average, four million fewer than it earned before the work stoppage, according to Nielsen.

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Grand Master

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I think a shorter season will favor the show. It helps the writers keep the focus on the story without adding in filler. Though in the case of Heroes, it probably should go back to its roots and have the story encompass the entire season and do away with the abbreviated stories. It started doing that in season two, and you can see how it has affected the quality of the show.

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Grand Master

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I think a shorter season will favor the show. It helps the writers keep the focus on the story without adding in filler. Though in the case of Heroes, it probably should go back to its roots and have the story encompass the entire season and do away with the abbreviated stories. It started doing that in season two, and you can see how it has affected the quality of the show.

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Rising Star

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This new volume sounds interesting and reminds me of the first season. I think it will be some kind of return to the origins. And from the last episodes of the third season I could clearly see that the show focused more on the characters. And from what I heard Claude will probably play a role in this season since he is suposed to appear in the last episode of the third season

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Grand Master

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Yea I know. Any info on Volume 5's airdate?

It will be the same time that Season 3 started, around September.

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Grand Master

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And from what I heard Claude will probably play a role in this season since he is suposed to appear in the last episode of the third season

The producers said he won't be in the finale.

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Grand Master

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I just hope they ungimp Peter finally, jeez. And this "we won't time travel anymore" crap has to stop also. Some of the better episodes of the series are time travels episodes (Five Years Gone for one?) and plus it will help ungimp Peter and Hiro as well :D

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Grand Master

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Haven't they got the original writer back on board? After he left, you could tell, the quality of the storyline went downhill.

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I just hope they ungimp Peter finally, jeez. And this "we won't time travel anymore" crap has to stop also. Some of the better episodes of the series are time travels episodes (Five Years Gone for one?) and plus it will help ungimp Peter and Hiro as well :D

I think that was one of the main complaints about the show was that certain characters became too powerful. And the time traveling ploy, although very well used a couple times is an easy escape for anything drastic that happens. Ando gets killed, Hiro can time travel back and save him. Thats the reason those characters got gimped... the producers even said that.

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Grand Master

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I think that was one of the main complaints about the show was that certain characters became too powerful. And the time traveling ploy, although very well used a couple times is an easy escape for anything drastic that happens. Ando gets killed, Hiro can time travel back and save him. Thats the reason those characters got gimped... the producers even said that.

Except for the fact that the show sucks with a gimped Peter and Hiro. Hiro wasn't super powerful, but I can understand the time travel thing. Fine, remove his ability to do that, but keep the ability to freeze time whatever. Peter absolutely sucked when he had no powers, and now he has this one power at a time crapfest, which imo sucks worse.

And then have the most powerful person on the show be a bad guy? Fine, but stop trying to make Sylar into a good guy every other episode also. Either way, as long as Hiro can freeze time and Peter can take on Sylar at the very least and not get ripped to shreds, I'd be happy. But alas, I don't see that happening anytime soon.

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Grand Master

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all peter needs to do is give Sylar a big hug and copy his powers :D

But if Peter can only currently hold one single power, he wouldn't get all of Sylar's powers. He'd probably get Sylar's base power, the ability to understand how things work. Needless to say, unless they ungimp Peter, he's never gonna be "Peter" from S1 again, or even S2 (sans his little amnesia-fest).

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Grand Master

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Volume 5 - Latest Details and Spoilers!!

The report from TV Guide has the following line at the end of their post:

The show's writers have already started planning for the show's fifth volume, which will involve a series of mysterious deaths. Or could they be murders?

Fuller Confirms What Changed and What's to Come!!

Its a good read

In the couple years that you were away from Heroes, did you still watch it?

"I had been watching it very regularly. I think that there were always interesting ideas at work in the show, but for me, it became too intricate. As an audience member who watched that show for the characters, it became so specified that all the things that made it great - ordinary people doing extraordinary things - kind of went out the window. Everything about the show became extraordinary - from the viruses, to the formulas, to the catalysts, to the villains - it felt like they were forced to take a shorthand with the characters just to have the real estate to tell convoluted plots. Does that make sense?"

Definitely towards the end of season two and for most of season three, it was quite complicated. How did your return to the show come about?

"They called me before Pushing Daisies was even cancelled. They were like 'Jesse [Alexander] and Jeph [Loeb] are no longer on the show and we really need your help in the writers' room. Would you mind coming by and helping out?' I was like 'Sure!' - I had the back nine [of Daisies] already broken out and ready to go, I was just waiting for the order. So I would literally go over to Heroes at lunches and sit in the writers' room.

"First they sent me the remaining episodes of the Villains arc that I hadn't seen yet so I could catch up. I was like 'oh I don't know if I can do this, I don't recognise the show any more'. It just felt like a completely different show - it didn't feel like a network television show, it felt like it should be on the Sci Fi channel. I didn't have a foothold in to care about my favourite characters. Everyone was so mad, pulling guns and yelling 'you ruined me'. Everyone was bitching a lot. For a second there I was like, 'I gotta get out of this'. I strongly believe that you should not write a show if you wouldn't watch it.

"Then I started reading the Fugitives arc. I thought 'this is interesting, they're back in their real lives', but then it took another tumble down the rabbit hole of getting really dense and characters being angry. The characters' anger at their situations was such a barrier to entry for me, because I don't relate to ****ed off people. I have to know there's something in that person that makes me want to root for them and care for them. I thought 'well, if people are angry, let's understand why they're angry so we can sympathise with them.'

"The good thing for me when I came back is that the pendulum was already swinging back the right way and everybody on the writing staff recognised the problems with the show and how far afield it had gotten from where it was. Often that writers' room is like alchemy - you have the person with the crazy ideas, the person with the funny ideas, the person who defends the characters at any cost. When I came back, it was a little bit like coming home from college and realising 'oh, mum and dad don't talk to each other any more, little sis is a cutter and little bro is hooked on meth'. The room was a completely different room. What was a cohesive group had become divided, so it was a matter of someone coming in and saying 'let's work together'."

Was episode 20 your first episode back?

"I came back for episode 19, so we started breaking that. When they were breaking that, Sylar's dad was going to be the ultimate evil, the devil essentially. I was like, 'didn't you guys just do that with Arthur Petrelli?' They agreed, so we took it in a different direction. It helped having fresh eyes in the room. For me, one of the reasons the Villains arc didn't work is because I had no investment in any of the characters as villains. Right from the off, they were twirling their moustaches and frying people at gas stations for no reason whatsoever."

Then in the next episode, you killed off two major characters. Was that your decision?

"Well, we killed one. Just Daphne. Tracy shatters and then you see her blink and the tear goes down the drain. We will see Tracy again. I'm such a sci-fi geek so the tear coming out was totally a shout-out to Zhora from Blade Runner. When I came in, they were planning to kill Tracy off. She was gonna get shot in the back of the head! I was like, 'couldn't we have her go out in a way that is more dynamic, fun and open?' I guess I was trying not to have Ali Larter basically die in the same way she did in the second season - 'I'm a hero!' Then she dies. It felt redundant to have her go out the same way, so I was like 'let's not kill her, let's see how these events change this character and stay with her on the journey as opposed to just cutting it off.'"

You had Swoosie [Kurtz] from Pushing Daisies in for a cameo. It seemed quite brief!

"It was painfully brief, but originally in the pitch for that episode, you didn't see Angela Petrelli at all after she got out of the taxi. One of our NBC execs said he wanted to see what happens to Angela afterwards, so we crafted this whole story about her regrets. Again, Angela had become such an arch cold character, saying things like 'I'm going to feed you my child!' She used to be this sad lady who would steal thoughts and was haunted, but when she's twirling her moustache I kind of had a hard time tracking the emotional arc of that character. So I was like 'let's go back and see a woman with regrets, who is realising she didn't always make the best decisions, and see her try to get her and her sons out of this mess'."

We're very close to the finale now - what sort of an ending is it?

"I'm very excited about the finale of this season. I think it's the best finale the show has had. We were sitting in the room, planning the last couple of episodes, saying we know the mistakes we've made, we don't want to make them again, so how do we tell an effective story given everything we've done in the Fugitives arc? I think we came up with a really good way to pay off the season."

And how does it set up things for next season?

"Last week we had a writers' retreat to talk about season four. It was pleasing that there was so much juice left in the berry, as it were! By the end of this season we've set up a fantastic arc for HRG, for the Petrellis, the Bennets. All of the main characters that are surviving the finale have great ways to propel them into new stories. We'll keep it grounded - now they've gone through the Fugitives arc, they can have their lives back but what do they then do with those lives?"

Given the ratings issues and storyline backlash, how confident are you over the show's longer term future?

"It's so hard to say with viewership patterns and all that Nielsen bull****. Heroes is not a cheap show but it's gotten fiscally more responsible in the episodes we've done recently. Big parts of the conversation for season four are how we do this more cost effectively because right now with networks, they're like 'you've got to pull it in on budget or you're not coming back'. For Heroes, the budgets in the second season and the start of the third season just ballooned and ballooned. It was like 'How much did that episode cost? Are you kidding me?!' On Pushing Daisies we had a locked budget we couldn't go over and it was significantly less than the Heroes budget. So when I heard the Heroes budget was getting cut down to X amount, I was like, 'That is still a lot more than some people have! That's plenty to do the show'. All of those parameters are helping us corral the next season into a much more character-oriented pace. Much like the first season, because that wasn't big and sprawling. It was a lot of characters having chance encounters without blowing the lid off it every week. It's exciting."

Source: The ODI

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Grand Master

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A shorter season is for the better. I have one question though, What happened to the Webisodes? Anything being done on them?

There's a new webisode series called nowhere man that started last week

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Grand Master

Crazysah

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There's a new webisode series called nowhere man that started last week

Yeah. What I was asking was is anything being done with them? Are any of the webisode charecters being developed into a main character? Any of the webisode stories being further developed? Or will they just stay as webisodes?

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Grand Master

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Yeah. What I was asking was is anything being done with them? Are any of the webisode charecters being developed into a main character? Any of the webisode stories being further developed? Or will they just stay as webisodes?

No because the webseries "nowhere man" is based around Eric Doyle (Puppetmaster) trying to lead a normal life away from his abilities.

@Martyn You and many others but there is a minority that think the series has kicked back into gear and one of them is me.

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