Welcome to the new site.

Many thanks to Mr. Amazing for his hard work and endless patience in making this happen. He’s my personal superhero. Which is interesting, because superheroes seem to be the week’s theme.

There’s a lot of superpower shows coming at us right now: Chuck, Journeyman, Bionic Woman and Reaper are all premiering this week. They are all about ordinary folks who have extraordinary powers thrust upon them.

It looks like a great learning opportunity to me. If we put our collective brains toward analyzing the phenomena, we can master the genre in a single week.

As you watch this week, let me know what you notice about :

• where in the pilot do the audience and hero first meet the powers (Journeyman=second scene, Chuck=first act break)?
• do we as the audience share the hero’s point of view or are we ahead or behind him in what we know?
• what is the hero’s attitude toward the powers — does he or she welcome or reject them?
• how long does the hero fail to believe that something extraordinary is happening and do we buy the disbelief as an audience?
• where does the comedy or drama come from?
• what else can we learn about rolling out superpowers in a pilot?

If anyone can dig out the pilot for Heroes and remind us what happened in that (Peter Petrelli standing on the edge of that building and you thought he was going to jump), that might help too.

Feed in, let’s see what we can figure out about the genre.

Coming up later today: posts on Chuck (City/NBC at 8 pm, ce soir) and Journeyman (Global/NBC at 10 pm).