If you’re ready to feel old, buckle up: Heroes is celebrating its 20th anniversary today, which just doesn’t seem possible. Has it really been that long?
The series arrived before the MCU, and before superhero storytelling completely took over movies and television, introducing audiences to an ensemble of ordinary people who discover extraordinary abilities and are slowly drawn together by one unforgettable mission: save the cheerleader, save the world. At the time, it felt fresh, ambitious, and genuinely exciting. While the seasons that followed never quite recaptured the magic of that first year, Heroes remains fondly remembered as one of the defining genre shows of its era.
More Heroes?
Heroes lasted four seasons before it was cancelled in 2010. It returned as a revival series in 2015, but Heroes Reborn lasted only a single season. Even so, series creator Tim Kring believes the show could return once again.
“I do think there’s more story to tell,” Kring told Entertainment Weekly. “The world was purposefully built to be really broad; this could be any number of people popping up with these powers. Because of that, it lent itself to an entire universe that could definitely come back. We were the first and only really successful superhero brand to launch outside of the DC and Marvel universes, and, unfortunately, it was only a television show, so it lived or died based on the ratings. Had it been designed more as a universe that had multiple platforms for people to reach the story, Heroes might still be out in the world right now.“
When Heroes first aired, most shows were still pumping out seasons with over 20 episodes. Kring thinks the streaming world would be a better fit for the franchise, with a new version of Heroes spanning just 8-10 episodes per season.
The show’s concept was designed to allow new characters to come and go, although Kring admitted it didn’t always work out when certain heroes (and villains) got too popular.
“That’s what these volumes were supposed to do: wrap up and give you a brand new palette to work with. I had always wanted to repopulate the show with new characters, and that idea ran headfirst into a brick wall of, well, when a show becomes a hit and characters become really popular, you can’t kill them off,” Kring said. “But some characters maybe would’ve lent themselves better to dying a little earlier.“
The Fourth Season Wasn’t Supposed to be the End
As I mentioned before, Heroes ended with its fourth season, but that wasn’t meant to be the end. Kring said they didn’t know the show was going to be cancelled when they shot that ending, which featured Claire Bennet, the late Hayden Panettiere, revealing her powers to the world.
“It left on an interesting cliffhanger: Claire Bennet does a redo of her iconic scene from the pilot where she jumps off of this tower, but this time in front of news cameras,” Kring said. “The idea was that now the entire world is going to know about these people. We were going to jump ahead in time and start to show what the world would be like if people actually understood that there were people with superpowers. Because, for four seasons, there was a lid kept on it by the Company, and so what’s the world gonna look like in a post-superhero, superpower world? And we never got to tell that story. But it was a kind of fortuitous place for it to end because it feels like an entire chapter of the show got wrapped up by this concept that now the cat is out of the bag.“
Would you like to see Heroes return?
The comment section exists to allow readers to discuss the article constructively and respectfully, focused on the topic at hand.
What’s Not Allowed