Heroes: Too much Milo, not enough Greg

NBC, as with many other shows this TV season, is making the pilot episode of Heroes available here on Yahoo before its premiere next Monday. And I'm going to tell you this up front, so you don't get disappointed: Greg Grunberg isn't in it at all. He comes in with the next episode, or so I am led to believe. But it still works out better for him than the last time he was in a pilot, so as long as he doesn't get eaten, I'm not going to complain. Much.

But even if they didn't hold out the promise of future Grunbergitude, I would still want to see more. The premise is essentially the same as that of X-Men, in that humanity is reaching a new stage of evolution and some people get powers. In fact, there's a cab-driving professor who likes to tell us all about this phenomenon. Thanks, Professor X-position! Anyway, since we've all seen the premise before, the real reasons to watch are the characters. There's Claire (Hayden Panettiere), the invulnerable Texas cheerleader; Nikki (Ali Larter), who has some weird stuff going on with her reflection; and my favorite, Hiro (Masi Oka), the geeky cubicle slave who can travel through space and time. Seriously, when he went running through his office yelling about how he broke the space-time continuum, that's when I started to love him a little. And he was on Scrubs!


Of course, there's also Peter (Milo Ventimiglia, aka Jess from Gilmore Girls or Rocky Jr.), a nurse who probably flies, but we'll never know, because he spends so much time whining about his destiny. And his brother, who is more interesting, is a politician, so we've got this whole selfish brother/selfless brother dichotomy going on (The politician is actually the selfish one, but you can be forgiven for thinking otherwise, because Milo does spend a lot of time whining about himself and his destiny). The only part I liked about Milo's storyline came at the very end of the episode, and you'll see why when you watch it.

All in all, it's like a live-action comic book. But not in the Batman sort of way. I mean in a good way.