The limits of a screener

In my duties as screener reviewer, I made my way through Heroes. I remarked at the the time that it was odd that Greg Grunberg wasn’t in the pilot. Turns out, they edited the pilot down to an hour for screening purposes and he’s now going to be in the second episode.

It’s a little unclear from the SciFi Wire article whether the screener version is now the official pilot, or whether the original pilot will be the one that airs, but it’s an interesting twist. In particular, one of my concerns about the screener was the pacing. If there’s an hour’s worth of extra footage due to be inserted into it, it could well veer into “too slow by half” territory.

Let’s just see.

US TV

Preview: Heroes

Heroes

In the US: Mondays 9/8c, NBC. Starts September 25, 2006
In the UK: Not yet acquired, although Channel 4 is most likely to pick it up

After last year’s sci-fi ‘dump’, where virtually every new drama commissioned by the US networks – Invasion, Surface, Threshold, etc – had an SF theme, it’s interesting to note that NBC’s Heroes is more or less the only new SF show this time round. Even then, it qualifies more as fantasy than SF, since it follows a group of ordinary super-heroes – if there is such a thing – rather than aliens or some other sci-fi staple. It’s not very original and clearly owes The 4400 a debt or two, but it’s actually pretty good.

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