I’ve just written a long-winded, self-important rant in email to Lou Anders and Sean Williams, and figured I might as well inflict a version of it on you nice people, as well.

It began innocently enough with Sean asking me and Lou what we thought of an element of the most recent episode of Heroes.

Now, what you may not know about me is that I don’t watch Heroes. I watched the first episode, and quickly decided it was Not For Me. I thought the writing was sloppy, the ideas half-baked, and the plot extremely poorly worked out, among other sins. (I’ll give just one example: Just what time is it, anyway, when a mother in America is getting her kid ready for school in the morning, and the Japanese office worker who’s paying her online to take her clothes off in front of a webcam is at work with the sun shining outside? Hmm?) Other people liked it? Fair enough. To each their own.

But it didn’t stop there. See, everybody on the planet is watching this show, it seems. Everyone in my family. All of my friends. It sometimes seems that everyone whose blog I read is following it, too, posting comments and reviews about the most recent episodes every week. And lots of people I know have been after me to watch it (Finn, I’m looking at you), pointing out that the pilot wasn’t all that great but that the show got better as it went along.

Back to my email. In this innocent exchange, Lou happens to mention this fact, and reminds me that I’ve watched other shows that had not-so-great pilots but went on to be watchable. To which I responded with this long-winded, self-important rant about Heroes and Lost and television series in general.

And, because I’m convinced that everyone simply has to know about my every stray thought, I’m quoting the relevant sections of the mail here.

Enterprise had much more than just a stinky pilot. It sucked for a *long* time until it got good. The difference there was that I stopped watching it after the first few episodes for the same reason you did, but years later happened to watch the *last* episode, just to see the franchise put to bed, and it was AMAZING. [NOTE: I'm actually referring to the next to last episode here. I like to pretend the last episode didn't happen.] So there I knew that despite a rocky beginning, the show found its feet and ended up terrific. We went back and watched from the beginning, knowing there'd be a pay off at the end.

Now, we did something similar with Babylon 5. Both Allison and I had watched early episodes and stopped watching quickly, though she held out much longer than me (this was before we met). Years later, after hearing everyone bang on about how great it was for so long, we decided to give it a shot, and watched through to the end. Now, again, that's a show that was pretty damned rocky at the beginning, had some consistent flaws throughout, but got better, only to end on kind of a shaky note. It was a show where the *point* of us watching was the over all arc, not the individual moments. And the first few seasons were not so great, the middle seasons were good, and the last season was not so great.

When JJ Abram's Alias started a few years ago, I said at the time that it was either genius or a pile of shit, but I couldn't tell until I saw how things worked out. As it happens, it was a pile of shit, but it took all the way to the LAST episode to find out. It was a show driven by the big, underlying secrets, and in the end, it turned out that the show runners didn't have a fucking clue.

I'm still watching Lost, because so far the series gives every indication that the runners know exactly what's going on. A lot of viewers are complaining that the secrets are being revealed too slowly, but I think on the level of the individual episode it's one of the best things on, in terms of character and writing, and when the secrets *are* gradually revealed, they're internally consistent.

Now, if someone had told me years ago that they'd peeked into the future and seen that Alias *was* a pile of shit after all, I'd have happily stopped watching it. I wasted hundreds of hours on that tripe, thinking it would all make sense in the end. Similarly, after watching at least two or three seasons of Smallville past the point I should have stopped, I'd love to be able to go back and save myself the trouble.

X-Files is famous for being a show that hinted a deep, big mysteries that its show runners weren't equipped to deliver on. Again, show that I didn't watch at first, got dragged into by everyone banging on about how great it was, then gave up in disgust when it became clear it was a pile of shit. Hundreds of hours wasted.

Here's my current philosophy on such things. If a show that appears to trade on big mysteries doesn't, from the first episode onwards, have a) terrific writing, b) great characters, and c) clear evidence of a well-thought out and internally consistent structure, I'm likely going to give it a pass. BSG is a show that trades on big mysteries, and met all of those criteria at the beginning; if the (c) category had been as shaky when the show originally aired as it is now, I might well have stopped watching, but as it stands (a) and (b) are still good enough to keep me watching. Lost hits all three marks, dead center, and so I keep tuning in. What soured me on Heroes immediately was that the writing in the first episode was embarrassingly bad, I didn't find any of the characters original or compelling, and the hints at the big mystery weren't enough to sell me on the idea. So I gave it a miss.

I'll make you Heroes viewers a deal, everybody I know that's been trying to get me to watch it. If, years from now, when Heroes finally wraps up and airs its final episode, the consensus among viewers is that the showrunners *did* know what they were doing all along, and the mysteries when revealed are internally consistent and clever, all along the way, then I'll get the DVDs and give it a shot. But at this point I'm hedging my bets, and taking it on faith that, like Alias, like X-Files, like Smallville, et cetera, et al, that when its said and done there'll have been some good episodes, maybe even good parts of seasons, but in the final summation the shows will have ended up closer to the shit end of the scale than genius. I'm happy and willing to be proved wrong, but I'm not going to invest the hundreds of hours to find out for myself. I'll let someone else be the canary in the coal mine!