Originally Posted by
Powerboy
Basara wrote: "Heroes - Okay, the first season was pretty good because they heavily adapted one of the X-Men's most popular stories and had a pretty terrifying villain. Then they completely forgot what they wrote in the first season and started introducing the most boring characters simply to promote political agendas. It was horrid and I burned my season one box set so I never had to watch this wretched series ever again."
Okay, that's a bit extreme.
Supposedly, the creator of the show had written the second season or commissioned it all ahead of time because everyone knew there was probably going to be a writer's strike. Unfortunately, he made one error. In an interview, he mentioned that one mistake a lot of shows make is that, because they are episodic, a show introduces characters with a story that is relevant to that character but, as the seasons go on, they've got to keep telling stories about those same characters even when the stories that were truly relevant to those characters are done. Their story has been told. So his plan was to keep a couple of the characters for the second season but otherwise introduce new characters. Then, in the third season, all the first season characters would be gone but keep a couple of the second season characters and otherwise introduce new characters, etc.
Unfortunately, the visceral fan reaction on the Internet amounted to, "Nooooo! I don't want new characters. I want endless, repetitive stories about the characters I already like!" Then the network panicked and ordered him to change the whole storyline of season 2 to include all of the first season characters. So he not only had to throw out all the scripts or at least rewrite them to force all of the original characters into them but now he had to do it with the writer's strike which meant a short season.
Basically, his whole original plan for what the show would be after the first season was forcibly taken away from him by the suits panicking and dictating creative direction and we all know the disaster that turned into.
I thought Arrow was also really good at first but that sort of "darkness" show tends to have a short lifespan for me. I think dragging the whole flashback stuff out for season after season got old. But that's a problem with most shows is that things that were fascinating at first get old yet changing things takes away what was originally interesting about a show. It's a Catch-22. People just lose interest.