Heroes / Jericho

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CITY CITY, BANG BANG
Both ‘Heroes’ & ‘Jericho’ go boom

The atom bomb must have seemed a charmingly retro device back in pilot season, a pleasant escape from post-9/11 fertilizer, cell phone and shoe bombs. But now that Kim Jong-il has demonstrated that everything old is nuclear again, two network shows suddenly find themselves at the fore of the apocalyptic zeitgeist.

NBC’s “Heroes” looks and feels like a graphic novel—the kind you can’t put down despite yourself. Taking a cue from “Lost,” the show introduces a menagerie of attractive strangers, then warps the rules of physics around them. They encounter both a mysterious enemy and the prediction of a mushroom cloud over NYC. The kicker is that, like an R-rated X-Men, each character has a seedy superpower. An artist can paint the future, though only after shooting up (i.e. a hero on heroin). A cheerleader is impervious to injury and ceremoniously sticks her hand down the garbage disposal. She’s a bit more distressed when she wakes up dissected on a coroner’s table, but her splayed open abdomen is the best gross-out of the TV season so far. A stripper has a murderous doppelganger albeit they both inhabit a tiresome subplot, and a Japanese clerk with the ability to traverse time and space might save the world if he can just learn a little English. Even Milo Ventimiglia shows up (with much larger biceps than he had in “Gilmore Girls”). He has no powers of his own but, in a nice twist, can absorb those with which he comes in contact. With Batman-like angst and Spider-Man-esque self-obsession galore, the question is: Can these individuals defy their egocentricity and band together for truth, justice and a second-season renewal?

Whereas “Heroes” speeds toward a big bang, CBS’s “Jericho” begins with a handful. Denver, Atlanta, Chicago and maybe a dozen other cities have gone bye-bye in a nuclear attack. This leaves the good folk of Jericho, Kan., in quite the quandary. Love thy neighbor? Do unto others? Yep. Torture to death a stranger suffering from severe radiation burns in order to get some answers? Well, OK. In the heartland, no one freaks out, but no one is particularly interesting either. The joys of “Jericho” lie in the 10 minutes or so per episode when the show embraces its inner “Twilight Zone.” Yes, communal paranoia and creepy tragedy beat bad dialogue and clichéd relationships every time. Whether they can be used to beat “Dancing with the Stars” in the “Jericho” time slot is another matter.

- Stan Friedman   November 1, 2006