TRAILER PARK: Heroes - Villains Trailer

There are too many trailers being released this week. It's brilliant! But I know embedding videos slows down DMD's front page. Sorry about that. Anyway, next up is the 60-second trail for the third season of Heroes, which is subtitled "Villains" and their new catchphrase seems to be "Choose A Side". No, it's not quite "save the cheerleader, save the world", is it...

I'm having a tough time getting excited about Heroes right now, not only because of the lacklustre second season snuffed out season 1's momentum, but also because the superior Watchmen is 8 months away. And you just know it'll show up Heroes for the cut-rate TV pretender it always was. Still, I hope Heroes will return to being richly-entertaining and the viewers who dropped out last year are tempted back.

I know a few people who stopped watching around episode 4 of season 2, and don't have the time or inclination for a catch-up session over the summer. Will season 3 be enough of a reset to get them watching again? It's the bane of heavily-serialized drama (particularly ones that continues its stories every year) -- they take huge viewer commitment. But when it works, you have a regular army of viewers who'll follow you everywhere until the very end. It didn't work that way for Heroes, but hopefully they've regrouped and can get back on-track.

The trailer itself is decent enough. It's not enough to get me thrilled and excited, but I like the idea of a some super-villains escaping from a secret prison to wreak havoc. The show will work better with human threats like that, instead of dancing around a disaster-zone once again...

The Watchmen-influenced NYC bomb worked fine, but the NYC-based Shanti Virus was just too similar. Oh, and it looks like Mr. Bennett is back to being the good guy again -- although his allegiance changes with the wind. They really need to decide if the mysterious Company are good or bad. I'm not sure about the "baddie" Claire and Peter, but I'm sure there's a reason for their leather get-up – we're in another dystopian possible future, a parallel universe, or there's been a body-swap, etc. It's a comic-book after all.

Premieres: 22 September 2008 (NBC)