NBC loves Heroes (it’s one of the network’s few successes this season). Audiences love Heroes (more than 14 million viewers tune in each week). Entertainment Weekly loves Heroes (it’s the magazine’s cover story this week).
Know who doesn’t love Heroes? Right-wing pundit L. Brent Bozell III, founder and president of the Media Research Center.
In his latest syndicated column, which sports the headline “Heroes and Horrors,” Bozell uses the series as a prime example of TV producers’ “need to dig deep, deep into the muck of shock in search of the acclaim of jaded TV critics and the respect of their race-to-the-bottom Hollywood peers”:
Perhaps the most disturbing scene so far involved a teenage cheerleader character dying after impaling her head on a log during a rape. She later comes back to life in a grotesque spot: split open on an autopsy table. How much of this would make the airline version? And would it be missed?
But the networks today are focused on delivering an audience to advertisers focused largely on 25- to 54-year-olds with a lot of disposable income, and in an effort to grab eyeballs for the sleaziest advertisers, from Toyota to Target, from Apple to American Express, there seems to be no mountain of muck they won’t climb. It is absolutely unnerving – and insulting – that they believe this age group must receive outrageous material in order to be entertained. It is offensive that every other demographic section of America is an afterthought.
Bozell goes on to wonder “Why can’t a show like Heroes be pitched expressly at an audience as a straightforward superhero story — without the creepy dark themes, themes that seem to be strictly enforced as if there were some sort of pro-creepiness Hollywood union rule?”
I’m going out on a limb here and guess he hasn’t read a superhero comic in a long, long time.
Related: In the comments section, reader Sean Juan points out that Entertainment Weekly has posted another Heroes-related story — this one asking whether the show is “helping or hurting the comic book biz?” For answers, EW turns to Joe Quesada, Brian K. Vaughan, J. Michael Straczynski and Matt Brady (whom it describes as running “the proverbial CNN of comic book websites”).
November 8th, 2006 at 10:02 am
I do agree that the amount of gore on this show was nearly offensive, but beyond that Heroes was still a good show. (And the gore seems to have been toned down lately.)
Some people just can’t look beyond the surface.
November 8th, 2006 at 10:40 am
I’m a right winger, and have been surprised by the gore, but not offended. Probably because I don’t have kids yet. But still, the idea that violence should be at all times shielded from our eyes is naive (and people from both sides of the political isle buy into it). The world is a violent place, and the sooner we come to grips with that, the better.
November 8th, 2006 at 10:53 am
EW posted an interesting follow-up piece to the cover story asking if ”Heroes” helping or hurting the comic book biz.
Features quotes from Joe Quesada, Brian K. Vaughn, J. Michael Straczynski and Newsarama’s own Matt Brady.
http://www.ew.com/ew/report/0,6115,1555891_3_0_,00.html
November 8th, 2006 at 11:00 am
What a ridiculous comparison.
Movies shown on airplanes are edited because those in flight have no choice but to see what is being shown on the screen and airlines don’t want to risk offending even one passenger.
TVs give you this amazing ability to change the channel or, you know, turn it off if you don’t like what you are seeing.
The other flaw in his reasoning is that the show’s darkness is part of its appeal. If the audience was really offended by the darker elements of this show, they wouldn’t be watching it in the first place, and the episodes which aired after the “gory” ones would have seen a huge drop-off in ratings.
November 8th, 2006 at 11:15 am
I find it hard to believe that there are 14 million jaded critics and Hollywood insiders out in TV land… Surely these viewers aren’t all just out to impress their friends at cocktail parties. Remeber, viewers, you don’t really like the show, you’re just under the thrall of Toyota.
November 8th, 2006 at 2:38 pm
If people didn’t want sex, violence, and language, they wouldn’t be on shows. Fact is, people DO want it and it shows in the rating.
A quick rant to people like this guy: Don’t tell ME what I should and shouldn’t watch. Instead, focus on yourself and your immediate family. The tools are there to keep you or your kids from watching things you find offensive. Why don’t you start using them?
November 8th, 2006 at 2:43 pm
The autoposy scene WAS disturbing. But that’s not what’s attracting viewers. More like the interweaving plotlines and mysteries surrounding the characters and their powers.
November 8th, 2006 at 10:43 pm
I hate generalizing Right Wingers in a lump, just as many of them call me liberal with abandon, it is a small segment of the right wing that also hijacks other forms of Entertainment. Long agao I checked out a copy of Seduction of the Innocent, you know, THE book. I tried to read the first chapter before placing it down and deciding it was utter farce and bad research.
The standard then applies now. See what you dislike, create a theory and place what you dislike as the evil casued in your theory. Much like THE book’s claim that reading comics caused a young African American kid to rob and in process kill someone. It was the comics. Today those of us with any type of educational degrees would also factor in the rest of the story, absent parents for different reasons. In the lower end of the economic strata, a Grandmother trying to raise him, unsupervised time on his hands, little around him to inspire a sense of hope, But it was the comics that caused all the bad decisions he made.
I have no care for Marilyn manson’s music, but after Columbine, his music was blamed. Micheal Moore titled the documentary Bowling for Columbine that name because the two guys went bowling before shooting up the school, why not blame it.
The segment of the Right Wing or Religious fundamentalists that do this have gained and maintained their power of control and staus by being against something, as the somethings get pushed away or proven ok, there must be a new evil to take its place.
As comics continue to break out of the streotype and into more mainstream culture, they will once again be a good target for those wanting enemies.
Sorry, I’ll get off my soapbox now.
November 9th, 2006 at 10:02 am
Bozell did write a horrific anti-comics column
http://www.mrc.org/BozellColumns/entertainmentcolumn/2006/col20060609.asp
He’s like John Byrne, with added political nonsense
November 9th, 2006 at 10:18 am
Really it is more an anti-gay article than anything to do with comics. The guy is shocked, SHOCKED! at the tone of comics. He wonders whether ten years ago anyone would have thought comics would become his xyz opinion. It shows he was not reading comics ten years ago.