Heroes Season 1

Released by: Universal Studios
Released on: August 26, 2008.
Director: Various
Cast: Various
Year: 2006
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The Series:

More often than not, superhero TV shows either suck, or they don't find an audience fast enough and are cancelled before they get a chance to really pick up much steam. A pleasing exception to this rule is NBC's Heroes, entering its third season at the time of this writing. It's a smart show that manages to give us interesting characters we can care about, intelligent plots, and interesting ideas without straying too far from the comic books that so obviously inspired it.

When the series begins, ten seemingly unrelated people from different parts of the world are being unknowingly drawn together. Matt Parkman (Greg Grunberg) is a weary Los Angeles based police officer who hears other people's thoughts. Isaac Mendez (Santiago Cabrera) is an eccentric artist living in New York City who is able to go into a trance and paint what will happen in the future. Claire Bennet (Hayden Panettiere), is a pretty high school cheerleader from Texas who is able to regenerate and as such, is almost invulnerable. Hiro Nakamura (Masi Oka), is a computer programmer from Tokyo who has the ability to control time-space continuum at will and who desperately wants to be a real life super hero and make the world a better place. D.L. Hawkins (Leonard Roberts), is a family man who can alter his body structure and slip through solid objects (kind of like Kitty Pride in the X-Men). His wife Niki (Ali Larter), a former exotic dancer, has amazing strength that she's in manic denial about. Their son Micah (Noah Gray-Cabey) soon shows signs of having technopathic abilities that allow him manipulate electronics. Nathan Petrelli (Adrian Pasdar) is a young man hoping to win a seat in the New York State Congress who has the ability to fly, while his nerdy younger brother, a nurse named Peter Petrelli (Milo Ventimiglia), has empathic abilities that he's unsure how to use.

The first season of the series spends a fair bit of time explaining how and why these people are essentially called from their every day lives for a higher purpose and how they adjust to their (sometimes newfound) abilities and use or don't use them effectively to help. This adds a realistic and human element to the series - not everyone is a Superman right out of the gate - and the growing pains that many of these characters experience are half the fun of the early episodes.

With such a big cast it would be easy for the epic nature of the series to take over and alienate all but the most attentive of viewers. By sticking to an episodic format and taking the time to narrow down the series' focus to one or two specific characters for a few episodes, the show stays manageable and genuinely interesting. The character development is core to the series' success and plays a much more important part than the effects sequences (most of which are done using some painfully obvious and rather soulless CGI) or the more fantastic elements of the show and its premise. In short, this is a soap opera for superhero fans. It really sucks you in quickly and keeps you coming back for more as often as you can.

Not every episode works as well as the next, but by and large the series is intriguing. There's a sense of humor to a lot of the material and the villains are interesting and surprisingly original where some of the heroes are maybe a little too close to some familiar comic book creations. The show works, however, and it works well. This is comic book fiction gone mainstream, even more so than the success of films like the Spider-Man and Batman franchises or like Iron Man or The Punisher. The creative staff behind the show have taken the obvious idea of turning comic books into television and made it palpable even to an audience who isn't interested in the sequential arts at all. It's interesting to watch it all happen, and the success of the series has proven that maybe that audience was there all along - people just didn't realize it. Either that or we're all closet comic nerds. Regardless, the series is a whole lot of fun and quite clever at that.

The episodes that make up the first season of Heroes are presented in this collection as follows:

DISC ONE: Genesis / Don't Look Back / One Giant Leap

DISC TWO: Collision / Hiros / Better Halves / Nothing To Hide / Seven Minutes To Midnight

DISC THREE: Homecoming / Six Months Ago / Fallout / Godsend / The Fix

DISC FOUR: Distractions / Run! / Unexpected / Company Man / Parasite

DISC FIVE: .07% / Five Years Gone / The Hard Part / Landslide / How To Stop An Exploding Man

Video/Audio/Extras:

Heroes Season 1 is presented on a series of five BD-50 discs in a series of lovely looking 1.78.1 1080p VC-1 encoded anamorphic widescreen transfers. Shot in HD for broadcast, the transfers look quite good here and there's a lot of depth and detail present throughout the entire series if you want to look for it. Color reproduction looks nice and natural without ever feeling like it's 'too much' while black levels are rich and deep. Sometimes shadow detail isn't quite as strong as other HD transfers and some of the bright outdoor shots with a lot of white in them are a bit noisy looking, but aside from these two minor irritants, the series does look quite nice indeed in this collection.

Audio options are provided in English language 48 kHz/16-bit 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio with optional subtitles available in English SDH, French and Spanish. While this may be a superhero show, it's a pretty talky one and most of the episodes are dialogue driven rather than action driven. The rears aren't used for much more than ambient noise and for the score save for those few action intensive scenes that do crop up here and there. That said, everything sounds quite nice here, even if it isn't a super bombastic mix. Dialogue is always nice and sharp and easy to follow and the score sounds beautiful when it really starts to pick up. Bass response is strong enough and the high end has a nice depth to it that ensures it never sounds too shrill. All in all, there's nothing to complain about here.

First up is the seventy-three minute version of the premiere episode that is available with or without an optional audio commentary from series' creator Tim Kring. Presented in HD, this version is cut almost completely differently than the broadcast version and so it plays out with a different pace and a different emphasis. It's interesting to watch this and compare it to the version that originally aired when NBC debuted the series. Kring's commentary explores the origin of the series and discusses the differences between the two versions.

Up next is a group of nine-ten minute standard definition featurette entitleds The Making Of Heroes, The Special Effects, The Stunts and The Score, cover the special effects, the stunts and the music respectively (obviously). Through these four mini-documentaries we get a feel for what goes into putting an episode of the series together, how it was cast and why it was cast so specifically, the art direction, the computerized effects that are used and much more. Some interesting cast and crew interviews make these worth a look, even if none of them are in HD as some of us had hoped they would be!

From there, check out the Profile Of Artist Tim Sale to get a look into the mind and the creative process of the guy in charge of much of the design work for the series (and the artistic genius behind Batman: The Long Halloween and Daredevil: Yellow). This eleven minute SD segment really gives us a good feel for how important Sales' contributions to the series really are and it's nice to see the artist get some respect and appreciation in the supplemental material in this collection as it would have been very easy to overlook him and just concentrate on the cast members.

Rounding out the extras is a massive selection of fifty deleted scenes, a lot of which are hit and miss. While some serve to provide some welcome and intriguing background information on some of the characters, many of them feel like padding and probably wouldn't have helped the series much had they been left in the final versions. Regardless, it's nice to see so much excised/cutting room floor material included here for those who want it.

Exclusive to this Blu-ray release, by way of the 'U-Control' functionality, are a few interesting interactive supplements starting with the Artwork Presentation. Here, as the series plays out, you can check out some of the subtle and not so subtle details of Isaac's paintings as they pertain to what's happening or about to happen in the show. The Heroes Connections feature allows you to basically connect the dots between the various characters from the show and keep track of who is related to who and how, while the Picture In Picture feature gives you access to a bunch of behind the scenes footage, cast and crew interviews and more. This release is also Blu-ray Live enabled, so if going online and chatting about the show as you watch it in real time with other fans is your bag, you're all set (as long as your Blu-ray player has a broadband internet connection).

The Final Word:

The added 'U-Control' features alongside the excellent audio and video quality really pushes this release to the next level and it's nice to see Universal going all out with their recent wave of Blu-ray releases. The series itself is one of the better and more creative prime time series currently on the air and this Blu-ray release of Heroes Season 1 is the ideal way to experience it.