hatmandu

Happy new year, obviously. Can't be bothered to relate details of our very happy Christmas, so here instead is Surprise Comparison of the Year 2007:

We've been watching the boxed set of 2005's 15-part BBC Bleak House series - very good. And it strikes me that it bears a number of comparisons with Heroes:
- obviously there's the episodic format, and this production of BH really brings out the cliffhangers
- both have a large number of characters with complex inter-relations between them
- both revolve around either 'powers' (Tulkinghorn, Smallweed and Krook, for example, all exercise power over others through money or information; and Tulkinghorn absorbs power from others have already gathered information, not entirely unlike Sylar's absorption of power - and both generally do so to the ruin of others); or the discovery of 'gifts' (Esther's secret connection most notably)
- perhaps even the baroque nature of Chancery could be compared to the Company, though maybe I'm stretching this now.

brightybot observes that the character development of Heroes is superior in that there are various shades of moral ambiguity, whereas in Dickens the characters tend to be pure black or white (though I'd argue that John Jarndyce isn't, and is reminiscent of Noah Bennett...)

Anyway, in a Borgesian 'every writer creates his own precursors' kinda way, I rather like the idea of Heroes influencing Dickens. It's a pity that a lot of Dickens' other work (eg we watched The Old Curiosity Shop last night, which is painfully simplistic) lacks this complexity.