Despite being brought back due to worldwide fan demand, the latest iteration of the superhero TV show Heroes, Heroes: Reborn, has been cancelled by NBC.
There will be no second season of the show, nor will there be any further Heroes spinoffs, confirmed NBC entertainment chairman Robert Greenblatt at the Television Critics Association winter press tour.
In the face of low ratings and a lower-than-anticipated audience connection, Greenblatt delivered the news with an air of sadness.
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The original Heroes TV series premiered in 2006 and ran for four seasons. NBC added some members of the original cast (Jack Coleman and Sendhil Ramamurthy, among others), along with some new characters (Zachary Levi and Ryan Guzman, for example) to launch Heroes: Reborn last fall.
“It’s not a huge surprise,” says TCA President and Remotely Girly co-host Amber Dowling about the cancellation. “The return was always slated to return as a miniseries only, although I understand the hope was that if ratings soared talks of future installments would continue. Unfortunately there are just so many heroes on television and in movies nowadays, the series just never took off the way anyone involved hoped it would.
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“The entire return was more a play on nostalgia than anything else, and it didn’t long for most former fans to remember that while the first season truly was groundbreaking television, the subsequent seasons didn’t exactly live up to expectations,” she continued. “The miniseries was no exception.”
Veteran TV columnist Bill Brioux agrees with Dowling.
“It’s a shame for the Toronto crew but it should have been called Heroes: Stillborn,” he said. “It was DOA. Not a single question about it during NBC’s TCA press tour executive session. I understood NBC reaching for a known brand in these cluttered TV times, but clearly an example of trying to revive a series that flamed out beyond the revival stage.”
The final episode of Heroes: Reborn airs on Global TV next week. It will serve as the series finale.
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