Here's what the suits at NBC and Warner Bros either don't know or have forgotten: people who like comic books like heroes. While it is true that anti-heroes and bad-assery will show momentary favor, those of us who like super heroes want our heroes to be, ultimately, heroic. We all go through our Punisher and our Wolverine phase. But the way in which those characters have stayed viable throughout the years is by having authors that show the inherent goodness inside the rage and the revenge. I mean, you don't hear much from Lobo these days, because he was too much of a one-note character. He rarely was a hero and that's what audiences ultimately want.
This season, Heroes has turned nearly everyone into a villain of some degree. We no longer have Claire and Peter to rely on to be the "good guys" and Hiro has become such a joke as to be not very funny any more.
The Dark Knight worked as a "darker" movie because Batman is an inherently darker product than Superman. Batman chooses to use fear as his main weapon against criminals and, ultimately, that same fear to keep the average Joes from becoming criminals. For as much as people say the Big Blue Boy Scout's modus operandi (doesn't kill, value system ala the 1950s, etc.) makes for boring stories, we need him to always be the one filled with hope, the one who sees the best in humanity, and the one with all the power who constantly and consistently does the right thing-- especially when we know we wouldn't. He is the Christ figure of comic book products-- the one with absolute power who is not corrupted absolutely. Superman wants his example to lift up humanity and bring out its inherent goodness, while Batman wants to scare humanity into being law-abiding and force it, through fear, to supress its penchant for evil.
Another arena that showed this need for super hero fans to be heroic can be found in one of my favorite games, City of Heroes. COH introduced first an Arena, where heroes could fight each other, and then the expansion called City of Villains wherein you can play the same game from the bad-guy's perspective. Both of these expansions have been financial and fan-based failures; again, the vast majority of people who like super heroes secretly want to be a super hero-- we simply don't want to be villains. From what I've been able to gather from talking on boards with fans, there is about a 4:1 ratio of people playing COH versus COV. And the Arena is nearly always silent and empty.
How would I fix NBC's Heroes? Immediately shift Peter and Claire back to being heroes. Make Hiro expand from being the comic relief and allow him to develop into the hero that the show itself has hinted he becomes. No matter how dark you go, you have to always have a hero. Constantly shifting sides and moral gray areas only work for short periods of time and then the audience wants its heroes to overcome and be even better than before.
How would I make an interesting Superman movie? I would take world events as they are right now and show them through the prism of someone who has the power and desire to change it and the morals and values to know he shouldn't. Can you imagine what it would be like for someone with Superman's value systems and abilities to have lived through September 11? He would probably feel absolutely horrible that he was somewhere else and couldn't save those killed by the terrorists in the first place, a huge amount of revenge toward those who did it, and he would have the ability to literally go over there and do something quite permanent about it. Honestly, how many Americans had the thought, no matter how fleeting it may have been, that we should have turned wherever we found Al Queda into a flat pane of glass about three feet thick with our nuclear arsenal? Now, imagine actually having the power to single-handedly do it. But Superman can't. He knows that it is a very slippery slope and he would quickly become a world despot if he allowed himself to let loose in such a manner with all that power. Add in a super villain of the Metallo, Brainiac, or Darkseid level as, say, the ultimate power behind Al Queda, end it with some sort of hopeful message about using your power to its fullest against the right target (in this case the super villain and not just willynilly against anyone in the middle east), and you have yourself a Superman movie I want to see.
City of Heroes, meanwhile, has already corrected its "mistake;" the company has made both products one game and you can play either side you want. There are a couple of zones you can play hero versus villain in, and they have added an end-game feature that allows the heroes and villains to work together against a common threat. The vast majority of upcoming changes are for the heroes side, or universal, but they aren't doing a lot of work on only the villain side of things.
So, NBC and Warner Bros should take a long, hard look at their properties and ask themselves, does "dark" work for this product? Is the character ultimate heroic? If the answer is no to one or both of those questions, a rewrite of the script is required.
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