The Evos are back.
For a show set in the Heroes world where there are supposed to be more “Evos” (as they’re now called) than ever, there are surprisingly few in the series’ first two episodes, airing back-to-back on Thursday. That could be a metaphor for the two-hour premiere as a whole, which is lacking in the same charm and sense of wonder that captivated audiences with the original Heroes pilot.
It’s hard to view the new NBC show without comparing it to its predecessor. Showrunner Tim Kring has been open about the fact that this series is supposed to be accessible to newcomers while also having plenty to hook fans of the original. Maybe in this case it’s better to come in fresh and not be biased about what’s come before. As someone who watched and loved Season 1 of Heroes before falling off the bandwagon after that, I didn’t feel like Reborn recaptured the magic of what made that first season so special.
Heroes Reborn picks up five years after the events of Heroes, and one year after a terrorist attack against Evos takes place in Odessa, Texas. In the present day, evolved humans are targeted and hated, and they are forced to live in hiding so the government doesn’t capture them and vengeful normal people don’t attack them. Reborn is trying for a metaphor here between the Evos and other discriminated minority groups in our own world, but it’s handled with a heavy hand, and the message gets somewhat confused as potential antagonists who serve as the audience’s lens attack the Evos. Maybe the series will land the analogy better farther into the limited season’s run.
We want to hear it.
Story-wise, the biggest issue in Reborn’s return is the lack of actual Evos. Sure, this show isn’t called Evos Reborn, but many of Heroes’ heroes had a supernatural ability. Here, the only standout in that sense is Robbie Kay’s Tommy Clarke, and his storyline is in many ways the emotional core of the two-part premiere. Tommy and his mother are Evos who have been on the run in this modern, anti-powered people world. He’s a person of interest for several of the other more nefarious characters, but luckily he seems to have found an ally in his high school crush Emily (Gatlin Green).
Enough information has already been released about Heroes Reborn to let viewers know that more powered people — some new and some returning — will come into the story farther down the road, but it seems strange to not emphasize them more in the premiere. The characters who get the most screentime are Zachary Levi and Judith Shekoni as Luke and Joanne Collins, a couple whose son died in the terrorist attack and caused them to hate all Evos; Ryan Guzman as Carlos Gutierrez, an alcoholic war veteran who clearly is disenchanted with the idea of “heroes”; Kiki Sukezane and Toru Uchikado as Miko Otomo and Ren Shimosawa, the stars of Reborn’s wackiest storyline that partially takes place in a video game; and Jack Coleman and Henry Zobrowski as Noah Bennet and Quentin Frady, a Heroes alum and a newcomer who seem to be the central storyline the series is following.
We want to hear it.
That’s a big ensemble to introduce in two hours, and those are only the main characters. Of them, few actually make a big impact, and the number of non-Evos outweigh the people with any abilities who are being targeted. It’s HRG (obviously) and Tommy who are the most interesting characters, and Miko and Ren’s storyline is so strange (even on Heroes standards) that you can’t help but be interested, but I had hoped that many of the others would land better, especially Luke and Joanne’s. With these two, it’s hard to tell if they’re the villains of the story or two down-on-their-luck individuals who will turn good by the end — or a mix of both. Still, I can’t find myself engaged enough by what I saw in the first two episodes to be interested.
If the procedural nature of the original NBC Heroes series sometimes got the better of it, Heroes Reborn trying to go completely serialized puts it at a disadvantage. There’s no problem with serialized storytelling — in fact, I tend to like those types of shows best — but there still should be some sort of hook in each episode that keeps people wanting to come back for more. Heroes Reborn sets up its various plot threads in such a way that it’s likely nothing will pay off in the immediate future, but asking patience from its viewers after many were burned by the end of its parent show’s initial run may be too much.
We want to hear it.
It’s hard to become invested in Reborn because so much of it is a long throw; there’s not a hook to snap people back into the world like the initial pilot’s promise of something causing New York City to explode. While there are plenty of mysteries woven through the two-hour premiere, including the promise of some cataclysmic event, but none of it is as snappy what drew audiences in the first time around. Maybe my expectations were too high with Heroes’ return in Reborn, because I hoped Kring and the rest of the creative team had learned from the mistakes that caused the first run to spiral so quickly downward in its later seasons. Instead it feels like Heroes Reborn leans into some of the more bizarre, kitschy elements that made the first series unique, but misses the interesting characters and high-stakes storytelling from Season 1 that were big reasons it connected with viewers.
That said, I’m loathe to write Heroes Reborn off just from these two episodes. Revisiting even the better seasons of Heroes is a reminder that they weren’t without their flaws, and maybe this new show will just take a while to get going. There’s the opportunity for growth here, though I’m concerned Kring created this limited series run (Reborn is only 13 episodes) as more of a binging-viewing experience than the week-to-week one that it actually is. If Heroes Reborn saves all its meaty material for its final act like recent years’ movie-style TV shows have, this might not be the journey optimistic returning fans hoped it would be.
Heroes Reborn didn’t have the strongest premiere for a franchise that ended its previous series on a down note, but the heavy serialized nature of this 13-episode season offers the promise for something that could be really good, if not great. Hopefully once the new characters develop more and some familiar faces pop back up the NBC drama will recapture the glory that made it such a hit to begin with.
Heroes Reborn premieres September 24 at 8 p.m. on NBC.
