X-Men, Heroes, and The 4400

So, I was on a TV message board and came across a comment about isn't the new show Heroes on NBC the same as The 4400 on USA Network and wasn't it better when it was The 4400? The comment went on to talk about Heroes similarities to X-Men. Here's my take...

I really like Heroes and never really liked The 4400. I didn't dislike it, more like indifference, it just never grabbed my interest the way a show should. I watched a few episodes of the 4400 and something about it didn't work for me. Maybe it was too dark in ways? I can't pinpoint it right now. I can see them being similar in terms of being from the same genres, but my understanding of the 4400 is that something happened to a specific group of people in the future who all knew it and the show was about the after effects when they return to the present which somehow or another will affect the fate of the world. I see similarities, but not enough to say I liked this one better when...

Plus, Heroes is, hands down, the better of the two shows, the acting and the writing are superior.

The comment I saw on the message boards talked of a larger budget to produce Heroes, and while I have no doubt this is true, The 4400 wasn't coming on Crappy Cable Network at 2 am it is a USA network original show in primetime, their budget is no slouch. Plus, since it seemed to me that their cast was larger than the Osmond family, grandkids included, I don't see how their budget could have been that small.

Now, about the X-Men comparison, obviously many say this is X-Men on TV. I think Heroes is very similar to X-Men in some ways and in other ways different which why the show is good, it is not something you've exactly seen before even though it seems somewhat familiar.

So, this is how I described the differences to a friend. Here's how the convo went:

She asked me about Heroes and how they all became mutants. I said, they're not mutants, this isn't X-Men. She has never seen any of the X-Men movies (can you imagine - she at least admits that this is pitiful on her part). Anyway, I said that on the X-Men, the mutants are close to half the population and they have special powers and are seen as a threat to the "regular" population by some. The X-Men also has a very important message, one of the reasons it was such a popular comic, that people are all different but we should be accepting of all of them no matter their differences. Whereas on Heroes, there are several people with special powers, it seems that number is 9, and they don't know how they have these powers and it seems they may have been given these powers in order to save the world from a catastrophic disaster that is happening at a specific time in the near future.

I'm not saying all of these don't sound somewhat similar, but I think there are enough
differences to warrant a respect for the originality of each one.