'Evolutions'
Worthy Digital Extension of the Heroes Universe
Heroes
has always had an eerie similarity to Lost, from recurring
concepts like fate and destiny to resemblances between their
creatively-conjured “universes.”
Even Entertainment Weekly writer Jeff
Jensen commented on these likenesses in an October 17, 2006, EW.com
article, pointing out that both Heroes creator Tim Kring and
Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof both previously worked together
on Crossing Jordan. Jensen then got Kring to admit that the
two producers had indeed discussed ways in which their shows could intersect,
but airing on different networks ultimately eliminated such possibilities.
Similarities—although
subtle—still exist, however, from the use of phrases about being
“on the list,” to incorporating such fictitious companies
like Gannon Car Rentals. But the similarity that most stands out between
these two competing shows is their ambitious use of the Internet in
order to both enhance and compliment their respective storylines. Lost
began planting various websites for many of its fabricated entities,
like Oceanic Airlines and the Hanso Foundation, from its very inception,
and during the summer of 2006 launched an interactive game called the
Lost Experience that sent fans scurrying across the web in
search of clues to the various ongoing mysteries of the series. Heroes,
meanwhile, quickly followed suit in January 2007 with its own digital
extension called Heroes 360, likewise providing fans with a
multitude of clues and Easter Eggs to search for on the Internet. (Heroes
360 was rechristened Heroes
Evolutions
at the start of season two.)
According
to Kring, the idea of taking advantage of the World Wide Web was an
intention of the show from the start. “I pitched Heroes
with the idea that it would not only be a show on the air but it would
also have this very large component that reached in many different platforms,
beginning almost immediately with the idea of the Internet—chat
rooms, online comics, online gaming,” he says in an online video
interview available on NBC.com.
“Those kind of things became hugely important not only for me
but for the network as well.”
“‘Heroes’
gives us such rich content to work with, and the show’s fans are
so curious and smart—it creates the perfect opportunity for us
to create a full 360 digital entertainment experience,” Vivi Zigler,
Executive Vice President of NBC Digital Entertainment and New Media,
later added. “Allowing the audience to ‘peel back the onion’
and interact with the show on a much deeper level is what TV360 is all
about.”
The Primatech
Paper Company,
the undercover corporation which employed “Company Man”
Noah Bennet, was the first Heroes tie-in to launch when its
website’s URL was shown on a business card in the season one episode,
“Godsend.” Most of its pages are now defunct, except for
the addition of an “Information Concerning Noah Bennet”
message stating that the infamous HRG (“Horned-Rim Glasses”)
is no longer employed at the company.
There are
now many other fictitious websites associated with Heroes Evolutions,
and while most of the links on the Nathan
Petrelli for Congress site have likewise
been turned off, the Yamagato
Fellowship
is a goldmine of multimedia nuggets. The site acts as a tribute to “heroes”
of the past, with brief biographies of Beowulf, Sir Gawain of the Knights
of the Round Table and Crazy Horse, among others. The centerpiece of
the site, however, is the original documentary “Takezo Kensei:
Sword Saint,” which tells the story of Hiro Nakamura’s boyhood
idol in a six-part video presentation replete with a narrator, animation
and interviews with the likes of “Professor Donna Dorn”
of the Japanese Studies Department at the University of Chicago.
The Activating
Evolution website, meanwhile, acts
as the personal site of Mohinder Suresh and is named after the book
his father, Dr. Chandra Suresh, wrote about the eventuality of ordinary
people acquiring extraordinary abilities as part of an evolutionary
process. The site contains the introduction to that book, as well as
a “Theories” pages explaining such concepts as DNA and the
Human Genome Project, and a “Resources and Interviews” page
that contains video interviews with “the foremost geneticists,
scientists and doctors working in the field today.” While “The
List” page has been removed “for security reasons,”
“Mail Bag” offers e-mails received by Mohinder about his
father’s research.
The Corinthian
Casino and Hotel site is another remnant
from season one, and not only mentions the death of founder Mr. Daniel
Linderman but adds that the casino is now closed and scheduled for demolition.
While most of the pages reflect an actual hotel website (“Rooms,”
“Dining,” etc.), the “Gaming” page features
a video of said demolition before allowing visitors to play virtual
slot machines, poker and blackjack. It’s the “About”
page, however, that’s most intriguing: an online chat between
Mikah Sanders and mysterious blogger Hana Gitelman slowly floats across
the screen, and available links lead to additional dialogues between
the two. Hana also has her own website, samantha48616e61.com,
which gathers clues and links for fans to follow in the same manner
that Rachel Blake’s blog did on the Lost Experience.
Although
Hana briefly appeared in the season one episode “Unexpected,”
where she mentally instant-messaged nuclear Ted before leading him to
HRG and Primatech, she plays a much larger role in the true centerpiece
of the Heroes digital experience: its webcomic. A “canon”
extension of the show, this online series of graphic novels fills in
gaps between television episodes and serves as a further examination
of both the main characters of Heroes, as well as the lesser
ones (like Hana). A must read for fans of the show, the season one collection
has recently been released as a hardcover anthology available at any
local book store.
“We’re
able to use (the webcomic) to tell different parts of the story,
to tell deeper parts of the story, to actually create storylines in
the comic book that then crosses over,”
Kring says in his NBC.com interview.
“The ultimate goal of the show is to have a kind of crossover
feel between what people are experiencing online and what they’re
seeing on the show, so that they feed and cross-pollinate one another.”
How successful
is the online Heroes experience? In March it was announced
that Heroes 360 had garnered forty-eight million page views,
seven million unique visitors and over twenty-seven million video streams
in just eight week. Its efforts where even acknowledged by the mainstream
media when TV Guide announced the finalists for its inaugural
Online Video Awards: Heroes received three nominations for
“Best Extras,” “TV Drama Webisodes” (for the
“Takezo Kensei: Sword Saint” documentary) and “TV
Show Site,” which it ultimately won for Evolutions.
The merging
of television and the Internet will only increase in the years ahead—if
such an assessment was not true the current strike by the Writers Guild
of America either would never have occurred or been settled by now.
More online interaction, original webisodes, fictitious websites and
the dovetailing of storylines will thus soon become the norm as opposed
to the current exception. When that happens, the shows that most excel
and take advantage of New Media possibilities will no doubt owe a large
debt to the efforts of Heroes—as well as Lost—for
paving the road and leading the way.
December
31, 2007
