Blu-Ray Review: Season Three of ‘Heroes’ Designed to Please Fans

CHICAGO – I’m one of many fans burned by the fizzling out of “Heroes,” a show that started incredibly strong and went from “must-see” to “meh” in just a few seasons. Despite the show’s overall dip in quality, the Blu-Ray releases have been heralded as leaders in the format, filled with special features designed to please hardcore fans. But special features are only one part of a Blu-Ray set and “Heroes: Season Three” falls short in all others.

Blu-Ray Rating: 3.0/5.0

The Universal-produced set includes all 25 episodes from the season three volumes of “Heroes,” “Villains” and “Fugitives”. After the disappointing second season of “Heroes,” fans were excited to see how the once-clever show could return to form with a reportedly reinvigorated writing crew who publicly acknowledged the failures of season two. To this viewer, season three is just more of the same with cluttered storytelling, characters that we stopped caring about years ago, and ridiculous twists.

Having said that, I can still step back and tell the hardcore “Heroes” fans out there that the special features on the third season Blu-Ray are undeniably great. It’s nice to see a studio design a Blu-Ray release to honestly please a show’s devoted fans. Universal could have simply included the episodes and nothing more and most “Heroes” nuts would have bought the third season set. They went above and beyond.

Heroes: Season Three was released on Blu-Ray and DVD on September 1st, 2009.
Photo credit: Universal Home Video

How so? The third season set includes hours of special features, many of them presented using Universal’s spectacular U-Control, a functionality that allows viewers to see behind-the-scenes details while the show plays. U-Control is used in two ways on “Heroes,” allowing for people to view cast & crew commentaries on an episode or to see bios of the characters as they appear on-screen in a function called “Hero Connections”. Both the commentaries and bios are the kind of special features that enhance an episode of a show like “Heroes” instead of just serving as filler.

But they’re just the beginning. All five discs include deleted scenes and “Hero Connections - Network” with other special features, disc by disc:

Disc One: “The Super Powers of “Heroes””
Disc Two: “Completing the Scene,” “Alternate Stories,” and “Pinehearst Commercial”
Disc Three: “The Prop Box” and “Tim Sale Gallery of Screen Art”
Disc Four: “Genetics of a Scene”
Disc Five: “The Writers’ Forum” and “Building Coyote Sands”

As for the episodes themselves, they certainly sound great but the HD transfer is undeniably disappointing when compared to other TV on Blu-Ray or the show’s original HD broadcast on NBC. Daylight scenes look great but the more darkly-lit scenes have come out murky, grainy, and with a noticeable loss of detail. Some of the grain is clearly intentional, but I’ve seen a majority of the episodes when they originally aired and the show looked more well-defined in its original HD broadcast.

A lot of viewers may have jumped ship (the average ratings for season three - 7.6 million viewers - were nearly half that of season one - 13.86 million viewers) but there are clearly still loyal, devoted “Heroes” fans. Enough that NBC saw fit to renew the show and bring it back for season four starting Monday, September 21st, 2009. Maybe there’s still enough fire burning in the world of “Heroes” that the show could be the water-cooler hit it was in season one once again and the care put into releases like this one is helping to keep the flame from going out.

By BRIAN TALLERICO Content Director HollywoodChicago.com brian@hollywoodchicago.com