Superpowers vs. Supermodifications

For a while the show Heroes on NBC was actually decently entertaining. It all eventually went down the crapper through some really poor writing choices and ultimately the bad acting of the first season could only have been dealt with for so long. Over this past season Heroes became the show that was either abandoned by its fans or kept as a dirty little secret. I can stand on the rooftops and shout that the show losing popularity is because it’s a smelly garbage pile but ultimately that’s just an opinion.

The long story short, Heroes has been doing something wrong. And I can prove it because right now, across the sea, there’s another show that is doing the superpower thing the right way.

Heroes tells the story of a bunch of people scattered throughout the world who suddenly realize that they have powers. The powers range from invisibility to flight to putting audiences members to sleep (I’ll stop making snipes, I promise). Anyway, as soon as the pilot ends and all of the characters are introduced, the characters basically begin saving the world at an alarming pace.


And with that rush to save the world comes a price, the powers become the characters and suddenly the characters themselves don’t matter at all.
It got to be that when a problem occurred on the show you could easily piece together what would happen based solely on who had what power. The actors themselves didn’t even need to show up anymore because they simply didn’t matter. The show was quickly stripped of its humanity and quality as the seasons progressed and people just became uninterested. Long story short, the message that heroes sent to its audience was “Hey, we know you guys like super powers so… enjoy… I guess?” This was nothing more than low culture.

Enter The Misfits:



BBC took a shot at the whole superpower thing but as can be seen in my crafty title of this entry, they went with a different approach.

See “The Misfits” are 5 delinquent youth in England. They all get struck by lightning and find that they now have different abilities. Also, they don’t necessarily have control over the abilities. So what we have here aren’t powers per say but rather, modifications. For example, the loner of the group turns invisible when he feels as though he’s being ignored. While he later harnesses the ability and can shift in and out of states, the ability manifested itself out of his character.

That’s possibly the first thing that The Misfits got right. The character’s abilities tell us something about the characters themselves.

The attractive girl in the group for example can make any many go into an utter sex frenzy just by touching them. To her this is a blessing at first but it soon becomes a curse and a huge emotional burden.

And that is what makes The Misfits special. The characters don’t just take their newfound skills on a “let’s save the world tour”. Instead we see exactly how these newfound abilities actually affect and change the characters and by the end of the first season, which just a ended a couple of months ago, we see tremendous development of character.

Ultimately, that’s the mark of good storytelling and that’s the kind of television which rises above mindless fun and actually becomes a higher form of art.