Micah Sanders You scored 50 Idealism, 33 Nonconformity, 66 Nerdiness

Can we play Scrabble tonight? Congratulations, you’re Micah Sanders! You’re good-natured, intelligent, perceptive, and naturally inclined toward technology. You’re also quite innocent and loving. You’ve got a fondness for computers and Scrabble. Your best quality: You’re extremely perceptive Your worst quality: You can be a little demanding at times

h/t: Jay (he’s Mr. Bennet, a.k.a., HRG)

Some Heroes/Trek geeky coolness: click.

Kewl: NBC’s “Heroes” triumphs over Fox’s “24″

It was another win for NBC’s “Heroes” (13.6 million, 6.1 rating/14 share in adults 18-49), although it was down 8 percent in the demo compared with last week’s return to the air. “Heroes” was still the dominant player, with a 13 percent margin in the demo over “24″ (15.3 million, 5.4/12) and 33 percent above “24″ in adults 18-34.

Entertainment Weekly has an interesting piece on the show and on the future of superpowered tv and movies: The Powers That Be.

While I fully take the point made in the EW piece and briefly in the slide-show at the previously-mentioned Slate piece (see previous post), the authors may be giving JMS’ Rising Stars too much credit in terms of basic story inspiration as Rising Stars’ basic premise sounds a lot like that of Wild Cards: an extraterrestrial object causes mass mutation and the creation of super-powered individuals.

Slate has an interesting piece on Comics that reinvent the superhero genre–more specifically it looks, through the lens of Heroes at comics that have looked beyond the normal “men in tights” approach to the super-powered world and have focused, instead, on character issue.

I was intrigued to see that Concrete was still around, as I remember his earliest days (and still have his early books around here somewhere).

One side note that I think intersects with the story, as well as with Heroes itself would be the Wild Cards books from the 1980s which deal with the implications of the sudden acquisition of powers on a large scale in a way that deviated from standard comic book formulae. Of course, they were short stories and later novels, so don’t quite fit with the Slate story. Indeed, I think that the series was recently revived.

Jan Cooper has a theory on Heroes–and it is a plausible one.

Also: does Hiro’s sword (or the history thereof) suggest that heroes have existed for a centuries?

“Heroes” grows Web power

The hit NBC series is relaunching its Web site Monday with new interactive features coinciding with a batch of new original episodes. The multiplatform strategy will deepen the “Heroes” mythos with additional content for Internet and mobile applications.

New add-ons include a real-time, two-screen application that plays out on the PC along with each episode, commentary from cast members set to streamed episodes, and mobile content.

Interesting.

Christopher Eccelston, better known at the 9th Doctor, is going to be in several episode of Heroes: Who Joins Heroes?

Former Doctor Who star Christopher Eccleston will appear in several episodes of NBC’s hit Heroes as an invisible-man character aptly named Claude, after Claude Rains, star of the 1933 classic SF film The Invisible Man, Tim Kring, creator and executive producer, told SCI FI Wire. “So far, he’s been in four [episodes], and then we’re trying to work out his dates with his movie that he’s doing,” Kring said in an interview at the Television Critics Association’s winter press tour in Pasadena, Calif., on Jan. 17. “We’d like to have him come and play with us for a while.”

With George Takei slated to play Hiro’s father, the show is becoming quite the harmonic convergence of the scifi genre.

Eccleston was quite good as the Doctor, and I thought it was a shame that he only stayed in the TARDIS for one season. Still, his addition to Heroes is quite welcome.

Via Mediaweek: TCA: NBC Announces Full Season Orders for Heroes, Office, Earl

NBC Entertainment president Kevin Reilly kicked off the network’s portion of the TV critics convention today by announcing that Heroes, My Name is Earl, The Office and Law & Order: SVU were given full season orders for 2024-08.

Given the show’s ratings, this is no surprise. Still, it is welcome news.

SciFi Channel is showing four of the episodes tonight.