Hulu Heroes

A few months ago, the brilliance at NBC/Universal officially ended their contract with iTunes after Apple refused to raise the price of a download to $4.99 per episode (NBC still claims, by the way, that there is no profit to give to the writers). They vowed to create their own video service that would compete, and they did. It’s called Hulu, and is in private beta testing right now. As far as I know, if you go to hulu.com you might still be able to get an invitation code to use the service before it’s “officially released.”

I signed up early and have been playing around with it… I wouldn’t call it anything like iTunes, but I see how it might steal away some customers. A lot of entire shows are available for free, right on the site, and not just ones from NBC. Fox, and a few other cable networks, are on there as well. And you can’t download them or otherwise take them with you (yet), but the quality is 10x better than anything you’d find on YouTube and it even (surprisingly) lets you embed the video files into your own site, like I’m about to do.

What’s even cooler, is that it lets you embed specific clips of the episodes.

Like so (don’t watch if you haven’t yet seen the last episode of Heroes):

That’s the last part of the finale of Heroes, which I finally watched yesterday. I think, based on the un-Heroes-like editing and Lifetime style montage, that that’s the part of the episode that was re-edited to serve as the finale because of the WGA strike.

I have to say, as bored as I was with the first half of the season (like I said here), the second half picked up. (Technically, I guess I should be using the term “volume” instead of “season,” since season two might still continue after the strike is over.) All of the reasons I was losing interest were eventually addressed by the series creator so things are turning around, I think.

The one remaining gripe I have with the show is that there seems to be little lasting consequences. With the exception of a few very minor characters, there have been no real deaths on the show. Don’t get me wrong — death just for death’s sake isn’t required — but people get shot, fall from buildings, even explode in a nuclear blast, and are able to just walk away from it twenty minutes later after some dramatic music.

I had tears in my eyes (shut up) when Claire’s dad, Noah, died. There is some good development! I thought. Noah was a great character… we thought he may be evil during season one, and, I guess he kind of was. But all he ever really wanted to do was protect Claire and his family, and seeing Claire’s reaction to him being shot point blank in the face was a very powerful scene. Claire vowing to avenge his death and bring down the company — whatever it takes — was a pretty good direction for her character to go. I was excited to see where things were going to go next after the death of such a pivotal character, and then… the last ten seconds of the episode was him hooked up to an IV being fed his daughter’s indestructo-blood, miraculously healing, and then sitting upright whispering profanities.

Sylar is another one! He should have been killed off at the end of season one! Except the camera pans down after all the action to see a trail of blood leading into a sewer. His character hasn’t really made me hate him like a good villain should, but he might be off too a good start after killing Maya. No, wait, he didn’t kill her. She was miraculously healed, too. There I was, thinking they might actually kill off one of the least liked characters in order to help Sylar’s development along. Heh.

Actually, this “no death” thing isn’t entirely accurate. DL died in a flashback showing what happened between season one and two, which actually was pretty heroic and for once made the title “Heroes” seem to fit the show.

So, although Nathan is shot by an unknown assassin, the drama and suspense of that scene just wasn’t there since there’s a pretty good chance he’ll be healed soon anyway.

Although, I was pumped that he was going to say, “I have the ability to fly,” which would have (hopefully) added a whole new layer to the show: the public calling him a lunatic until he actually flew away, at which point this whole “mutant phenomenon” would be made public, X-Men style.

Oh! And my prediction about Adam was right on! The speculation out there was that he could either travel through time or has lived 400 years. It’s very cool that he actually lived 400 years. Imagine being born in the year 1600 and realizing you’d never die, meeting someone who claimed to be from the future, and then, 340 years later, you actually meet them at the point of time they came from originally. Trippy!

Speaking of trippy: Later, I’ll get into my theory about how Hiro must be a space/time anchor since he apparently can’t travel through time and come back to his point of origin seconds later… in other words, when he spends 6 months in the past, he’s gone for 6 months in real-time. ::thinks:: Hmmm, yeah. Later.

Here’s another clip from Hulu, having nothing to do with Heroes:

Keep in mind that as of right now, the studio is the only one making money off of this thing. They sell ad time to companies who slap their logo all over the video and play commercials in the middle of episodes and, well, that’s the whole reason the WGA is on strike — to get some of that action. Right now, writers, actors, directors, editors, staff, etc., are paid nothing when you watch their work on Hulu.com. Since it’s in Beta and I’m able to give feedback on how to improve the service my main complaint is going to be that the writers aren’t getting a cut of the profits and if they don’t I’m not going to use the service after it’s officially released. Take that, evil studio heads! That’ll learn you!