TV Week: Heroes, Breaking Bad, Little Britain USA
By Dan Owen
HEROES (BBC2, WED 9PM) After a phenomenal debut that earned widespread admiration and huge audiences around the world, this superhero drama's second season slipped into a creative coma faster than a speeding bullet -- resulting in a premature finale and months of debate about where it all went wrong...
"The Second Coming" (how appropriate) aims to woo back its lost audience, with a resolve to ensure season 3 is fast, fun, exciting and fresh. But there are still concerns; not least because the original appeal of Heroes was in seeing normal people deal with superpowers in a vaguely real-life context. Now that everyone has their allotted power and two major disasters have already been averted, Heroes' most intriguing aspect is a distant memory.
Regardless, this new season got off to a vigorous start. The cast are still a likeable bunch (if not equally talented in the acting stakes), the special-effects are great, and season 1's sense of fun was more evident. However, its pretentious tone can be off-putting, and key problems still remain unfixed: the dead never stay dead, losing the show a sense of life-and-death danger; while some characters are too powerful, so must make stupid decisions to keep the plots going.
But generally this was a confident start; certainly far better than the dawdling and morose season 2. Highlights included a prison break of super-villains, cheerleader Claire with her brain exposed, and omens of an earth-splitting disaster to prevent. It's true the storytelling scars are still there, so it'll perhaps never be must-see television again – but it's dumb fun that I'm prepared to give a second chance.
BREAKING BAD (FX, SUN 10PM) Bryan Cranston (Malcolm In The Middle) headlines this acerbic drama from former X-Files scribe Vince Gilligan. He plays Walter White, a high school chemistry teacher whose 50th birthday delivers an unwanted gift: terminal lung cancer. Suddenly facing his own mortality, Walter takes the unusual decision to help a dropout student cook crystal meth -- so the drugs money will provide for his family after he's gone. It's edgy material, brilliantly performed by Cranston (who recently won an Emmy for his work) -- blessed with strong, detailed, witty writing. It remains to be seen if Breaking Bad can sustain its less-psychotic tweak on Falling Down, but it's off to a gripping start.
LITTLE BRITAIN USA (BBC1, FRI 9.30PM) Matt Lucas and David Walliams continue their quest for world domination with their risqué Little Britain sketch show. This HBO-produced series is their attempt to crack the States, as they relocate the best of their British characters to the US, and create some American ones for the locals to chuckle over. The result is the creative equal of the BBC show's latter seasons; cheeky, well-performed, crude, fitfully amusing, but painfully repetitive. The politically-incorrect comedy hasn't been lost in translation, but whether it's still funny is down to your tolerance for catchphrase-heavy, repetitive schoolboy humour.
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Dan Owen is a self confessed TV "obsessive" and passionate film buff. Check out his blog at danowen.blogspot.com
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