So I’m risking my (tongue-in-cheek) position as an arbiter of good taste here, but back in the day I was a massive fan of the television show Heroes. The show is mostly remembered as a bit of a joke these days, as a series that briefly flew high before crashing so hard that it bore a hole into the Earth, and it’s a reputation that’s certainly been earned. A few years ago I sat down and rewatched the first season and a bit of what came after and thought the early stuff mostly held up; at first there was solid character work, a real sense of wonder and that it was building to something fantastic, some truly pulpy twists, and good special effects for the time. In retrospect it all fell apart a few episodes short of the Season One finale, when it became clear the writers were never going to be able to pay off everything they set up satisfactorily, and from the second season onward its attempts to replicate its early magic failed spectacularly, in increasingly dumb and frustrating ways.
My sentiments here seem to be echoing the general consensus nowadays, so I want to point out that this is a more recent development for me. At the time I wasn’t one of those fans who bailed during Season Two. I watched all four seasons. At one point I owned them all on DVD. I cancelled plans with friends to stay home and watch the series finale live. I even attempted to watch the Heroes Reborn continuation in 2015, though I didn't get very far before dropping it (it was bad, even in comparison to what came before!). I’m admitting this — at great risk to my own reputation — because I think it’s important to know the position I’m approaching Heroes from. I wasn’t a casual fan or someone who just jumped onto the hype of a cultural phenomenon. I was a mega fan.
I actually hadn’t thought about Heroes at all for years, though, until a few weeks ago when Variety released an article by Leonard Roberts, who played D.L. Hawkins on Heroes in its first season. It’s a fascinating and crushing piece about the discrimination he faced on set, and it’s an essential read.
In fact, I’m going to recommend that you read Roberts’ piece before continuing on with mine, so please click here to do so. It’s far more important than anything I’ve got to say.
Being a white man, I can’t personally speak to the kind of discrimination Roberts faced, and I’m not going to attempt to do so. I can say that I fully believe and support Roberts, and as that former Heroes mega fan, much of what he wrote in that piece rang true, corroborated with thoughts I had and things I noticed while originally watching the series. I suppose this newsletter exists because I wanted to explore and expand upon those thoughts with all of you.
I always liked D.L., though I tend to be a fan of underused and underutilized characters in general. He was one of the most grounded and moral characters in the cast; not perfect by any means, but he radiated a sense of sheer decency that was rare and appealing. His greatest desire was simply to protect and care for his family, and he even got to be the one who killed Linderman, one of the Season’s big bads.
Other than that, though, Heroes had some clear disrespect for D.L. First of all, D.L.’s power was to phase through solid objects, yet he was shot at least three times in the course of his time on the series. And though we did get to see his perspective a few times, he rarely got his own storylines, essentially being a supporting character for his wife, Niki Sanders. That in and of itself isn’t unusual for Heroes, as every character had their own sidekick or two, but D.L. was the only cast member considered a regular who filled this supporting role (other than perhaps Noah Gray-Cabey, who played D.L.’s son Micah, and Tawny Cypress, who played Simone Deveaux; not coincidentally, these were the season’s only other black regular cast members), which isn’t a good look.
Heroes was the first network show that I followed on my own from its very beginning, not on syndication or because my family was watching it, and it taught me a lot about how TV works, especially in the sense of regular and recurring characters. This was my first experience watching recurring characters get bumped up to regulars (H.R.G., Ando) in real time, and my first time learning that not all regular characters are treated equally and given the same chance to carry a storyline, and D.L.’s treatment was a big part of that. He was even the only regular cast member of the season not introduced in the first two episodes, instead held back until the fifth, so from his very first appearance it felt, at least to this viewer, like the writers weren’t invested in D.L. the way they were their other regulars. Even worse than that belated introduction, though, was his exit, where D.L. — again, the character who can phase through solid objects — was killed by a gunshot in one of the series’ single most baffling and disrespectful moments, a moment that ultimately wasn’t even about D.L., but again, all about Niki’s reaction.
(Also, the last time saw D.L. in Season One he was suffering from a gunshot wound. When Season Two premiered and D.L. was confirmed dead fans assumed it was from that wound, but instead they brought Roberts back for a flashback just to kill his character off by shooting him again. It’s insulting! It’s unnecessary!)
Much of Roberts’ account is about the preference shown to his white cast-mate and primary scene partner, Ali Larter, who played D.L.’s wife Niki. It’s all gutting and important, but to me, the most telling moment is when one of Roberts’ other cast-mates says “Can you really say you lost your job because you’re Black? C’mon, man. They’re gonna always keep the hot blonde on the show. That’s just Hollywood.” It’s appalling, but not surprising, how said cast-mate completely overlooks the role whiteness plays in the sex appeal that supposedly kept Larter (and other “hot blondes”) on the show in the first place. The racism is obviously the most galling part of all this, but it also plays into other tendencies, not just in Hollywood but in life in general (especially in dysfunctional families), to attempt to pacify the person causing the most problems at all costs, while expecting the victims to just take it and “not rock the boat.” It’s not good for anyone.
(It’s also why any workplace calling itself a “family,” as the Heroes set did in Roberts’ piece, is a glaring red flag.)
In this case, Heroes’ decision to protect and promote Larter at all costs did not work in their favor. Niki’s character arc was over after Season One. This was true for much of the cast, and the writers clearly flailed trying to find stuff for many of them to do in Season Two, but none moreso than Niki, who receded into the background and repeated many of the same character moments and growth she already underwent in the first season. Yes, Niki continuing to relapse and suffer from her Dissociative Identity Disorder is true to life, and might even work on a Prestige show like Mad Men that’s all about cycles of addiction, but on a show shaped by pulp-storytelling and superhero tropes, it felt like backtracking and undermined much of the work Season One did. It’s notable that, while the Heroes writers continued to try to find stuff for all the other characters to do as the show went on, Niki was quickly and unceremoniously killed off after Season Two.
Yet, yet, Ali Larter continued on, as they brought the actress back to play a new character, Tracy Strauss, in Season Three. Tracy’s likeness to Niki was explained by a convoluted backstory that Niki and Tracy were part of a set of identical triplets who were separated at birth, a convoluted backstory that was never mentioned again by the way. Tracy was a character who never worked, and was clearly created, not to be an essential part of the story, but just to give Larter a reason to be on set. Tracy didn’t really have a backstory or any sort of personal life outside of the increasingly convoluted and nonsensical main plot of the season. Her personality was just that she was ruthless and self-interested. For all her flaws, Larter isn’t a bad actress, and she did a good job creating multiple distinct personalities for Niki, but Tracy didn’t allow Larter to do anything new or impressive, just play a riff on Niki’s “Jessica” personality. The few successful Tracy moments all had to do with cool imagery and direction: the first person she froze to death shattering on impact; Tracy chained to a chair under heat lamps, seething; Tracy standing in a parking garage beneath pouring sprinklers, freezing an entire room of federal agents and killing herself in the process.
But cool images alone do not make a good character, and Tracy, Larter, and Heroes would’ve been better off if her end had been that heroic sacrifice. Instead, the Season Three finale brought Tracy back again, on a rip-roaring mission of revenge. Turning her full-on villain had some potential, but it was immediately abandoned in the Season Four premiere, leading Tracy on a tepid and unfocused path of self-discovery throughout the first half of the season. Then she disappeared entirely, and Tracy’s storyline was wrapped up in a supplementary comic book. It appears that Larter wasn’t available to film because of another project, and they barely managed to drag her back for a thirty second cameo in the season/series finale. By that point, even back when it initially aired, I was pretty sure I could feel Larter’s disdain for her own job radiating through the screen.
I’ve explained all of this in such detail, not for the sake of trivia, but to drive home what exactly happened here. According to Roberts’ piece, Larter was an antagonistic and divisive presence on set in the eyes of other co-stars as well, yet the producers instead fired her co-worker and kept her on for the entire life of the series, despite her presence no longer really being necessary, despite their attempts to keep her characters relevant feeling increasingly desperate and aimless, despite her apparently attempting to jump ship herself near the end of its run. It’s not even like they kept Larter over Roberts because she was an essential piece of the ensemble even if she was difficult. Prioritizing whiteness effected the quality of their work for the worse both on-screen and behind the scenes.
And I specifically say “prioritizing whiteness” because that’s the kind of racism we’re dealing with here. I want to highlight a quote from Roberts’ piece from Heroes creator Tim Kring: “In 2006, I set out to cast the most diverse show on television. Diversity, interconnectivity and inclusivity were groundbreaking hallmarks of ‘Heroes.’ So too was the huge, diverse cast that continually rotated off and onto the show, with none ever being written off based on their race.”
I believe Kring when he says that he was trying to be diverse. Six of the twelve regular cast members in Season One were non-white, as were two of the four new regular cast members introduced in Season Two. For 2006, on NBC, that wasn’t terrible. But “diversity” isn’t just about the people on the screen, it’s about how you treat them, and about the people behind the scenes making those decisions. Roberts’ piece confirms that there were no black writers on staff, and it shows in the thoughtless ways some of these characters were treated. All three of the main cast members from Season One who didn’t return for Two were people of color (including both adult black leads), and all three characters were killed off. All four of the new characters introduced in Season Two had been written off by the half-way point of Season Three, but it was the lone black character of the four, Monica, who vanished without a trace, without even a send-off or any sort of resolution to her story up to that point. There were no black regular cast members whatsoever in the final two seasons. Heroes’ most prominent and long-lasting black character was, very unfortunately, “The Haitian,” who was never more than a recurring character and was largely used as a plot device, barely speaking ten lines over the course of the series and not even getting a real name and the vaguest of backstories until some point in Season Three. All that is…very bad. Worse than I even realized when I sat down to write this.
Kring’s line about rotating characters off and onto the show is interesting because it’s not really true. According to interviews, Kring’s original intention for Heroes was for it to be more of an anthology type series, with each season bringing in a new set of characters in this shared world, but the popularity of Season One’s cast nixed that idea pretty quickly. Kring did try to bring in quite a few new characters in Season Two, but the negative response to that season seemed to largely turn him off to it, and Seasons Three and Four had essentially the same cast for their entirety.
This was bad for two reasons. First of all, part of the success of Heroes’ first season was its “anything can happen, anyone can die” reputation. Once Season Three set the fact that none of the remaining regulars were ever going to die or leave the series in stone, all stakes were gone and that sense of excitement just died. Second, the stable cast that those final seasons finally settled on was overwhelmingly white, with no black actors and only three actors of color out of eleven. Of those three, only Masi Oka’s Hiro Nakamura got much to do; Ando served primarily as his sidekick, while Mohinder Suresh’s Season Three storyline was rightfully reviled by just about everyone, and he only appeared in four episodes out of eighteen in Season Four, with the character literally trapped in an insane asylum by another character to keep him from interfering with the plot, and once he escaped he ran out of the series as fast as he could and never came back. (Good for him.)
So it’s clear how whiteness was prioritized more and more as Heroes went on. Were these character intentionally pushed because they were white? I doubt someone sat down and said “We need to give Greg Grunberg more screen time because he’s white” (though maybe someone did! Who knows?), but it’s clear from what showed up on the screen what kind of actors and characters the writers cared most about even from the very beginning, and that they migrated towards more and more as the series continued. Some viewers have argued that Simone or D.L. weren’t given much to do because they weren’t very interesting characters, but that makes the mistake of thinking that these characters are…real people. They’re not! A character is only as interesting as the writing given them, and when the series’ two black characters both just so happen to be the ones considered “boring,” there’s clearly a problem.
Obviously, the greatest consequence of these kind of decisions is the toll it takes on black people, whether it be actors like Roberts who lose out on parts and have their reputations suffer and have to deal with the indignities up-close and often, or viewers who don’t see themselves represented or see characters who look like them mistreated and neglected. Their experiences should always be at the forefront of any and all discussions about race. But to speak in a language that the executive types behind shows like Heroes would understand: Do you not see how investing in diverse voices behind the screen and diverse characters on-screen is a benefit to any project? Don’t be an echo chamber putting the same stories about the same characters out there over and over again, don’t protect people who aren’t benefitting your project just because they look like you or like the people you’re used to seeing on screen!
I guess I’ll just close by saying that I think Leonard Roberts was quite brave for writing that article, for putting his story out there; I see and appreciate it, and hope to see him in a big project soon. On my end, 15 years removed from Heroes, I’m going to pay more attentions to the kinds of doubts I had at the time about D.L.’s treatment on the show, speak up and better articulate when a piece of media, even one I like, is being racist, and of course, do better to make small and large actions in my everyday life to stand up against systemic racism.
CHECK OUT
Back in October I did a piece about the band PUP’s most recent livestream and how it was finally helping define livestreams as a medium and not just an “almost-just-as-good” concert replacement. I also specifically mentioned one moment where singer Stefan Babcock sang one song from a stall the venue bathroom. Well, PUP has gone and released the footage of that song as a music video, so check it out!
They also released another video from the livestream, this time for “Rot.” I like this song more than “Edmonton,” actually, but alas, there’s no toilets in that video.
ABOUT
“Do You Know What I Love the Most?” is a newsletter from Spencer Irwin. Spencer is an enthusiast and writer from Newark, Delaware, who likes punk rock, comic books, working out, breakfast, and most of all, stories. His previous work appeared on Retcon Punch, One Week One Band, and Crisis on Infinite Chords, and he can be found on Twitter at @ThatSpenceGuy. If you like this newsletter, please subscribe and share with your friends!