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NBC’s Canceled Sci-Fi Series with The Greatest First Season is Finally Returning to Streaming
While there are a lot of television series that start off strong only to have diminishing returns in subsequent seasons, there are a few that are particularly notorious for their decline. Shows like Prison Break, Revolution, and Wayward Pines all had promising first seasons, but seasons two and beyond didn’t live up to the quality or interest their kickoffs inspired. But even among the first season wonders, there is one series that stands out as possibly having the most disappointing fall of all and now, the series is making its way to free streaming.
Well before the Marvel Cinematic Universe took superheroes from the pages of comics and made them household names, NBC’s Heroes was very everything. The series, which debuted in 2006, was a massive cultural moment, incorporating comic book element with high action and mystery in a story about a group of disparate people from around the world who discover they have superpowers. The first season in particular offered up some truly intense storytelling with the tagline “Save the cheerleader, save the world” at the center of a race against time and total destruction. The series ultimately ran for four seasons before its cancellation in 2010 and now, months after leaving Prime Video, it will be available for free on Tubi as of June 1st.
Heroes Had Incredible Potential But Fell Apart After Season 1 (Though It’s Not Entirely The Show’s Fault)
While Heroes remained an interesting series through to its end, nothing would ever compare to its first season—but even the second season of Heroes didn’t get off to a bad start. Instead, Heroes’ sophomore season ended up being a victim of circumstances beyond its control that, in turn, would ultimately derail the whole series. The second season of Heroes ended up being hit by the 2007 writers’ strike, which meant the season was severely shortened from 23 episodes in Season 1 to merely 11 in Season 2. The abridged season meant that various story arcs were never truly resolved and many characters were stranded narratively.
By the time the series got back with Season 3 and was able to p8ick up what had been meant for Season 2, there was a bit of a mess to clean up and things started to go off the rails. The series started changing the mechanics and rules of time travel, took its big bad Sylar (Zachary Quinto) and shifted him back and forth from hero to villain so frequently he became irrelevant, new characters were brought in that never really made any sense, and while the series tried very hard to pull things back together, despite the obvious efforts to right the ship the endless attempts to one-up that first season just kept falling flat.
By the time the final season arrived, the show had quite literally turned into a carnival. Years later, the series is still a compelling watch, even beyond the first season. There are characters and elements introduced deeper in Heroes’ run that are genuinely interesting and are worth exploring once again. The series also works much better when you can watch it as a whole; working your way through seasons back-to-back offsets some of the narrative loss delays between seasons created. Now, with it arriving to stream for free on Tubi, it’s a perfect opportunity to check out the series that simultaneously stands as one of the best examples of superhero television and as its biggest cautionary tale.
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