Whose Heroes?
My 11-year-old son gets a little anxious about extreme violence in movies and television. That doesn\'t mean he doesn\'t like thrillers, science fiction, or the like. It\'s just that really graphic gore and suffering tend to give him trouble when it\'s time to turn off the lights and fall asleep. It\'s been a tricky job, balancing his desire to keep up with what his peers like to watch (and what\'s marketed to his age bracket) with his distaste for disturbing content.

He has been begging to watch Heroes since he saw the ads for season 1. We weren\'t worried about it -- we just don\'t watch much weeknight television, and we prefer to wait until a full season comes out on DVD. Looking back on it now, I guess I had an uneasy feeling all along, but, I must admit, I didn\'t give it much thought: It\'s on network TV at 8pm.

Silly me. How quickly I forgot our unfortunate attempt to watch the pilot episode of Lost, which we had to abort after four minutes, when one character got pulped in a jet engine and the hunky doctor walked into a dangling arm. So when the Heroes disc arrived in the mail, we set aside Saturday night to relax and watch it as a family.

We got off to a good start. Heroes is basically a somber rip-off of X-Men, but done well: good acting, a crafty story arc, engaging characters (well, my son didn\'t really care for the Internet stripper, but he didn\'t mind). The cheerleader who dismembers herself and reconstitutes wasn\'t too taxing on him, either. But he did seem a little subdued when the painter overdosed on heroin.

I suppose I should have seen trouble coming when the loan sharks showed up and began to sexually torment the stripper -- it was pretty clear she was going to waste them with her magic powers. But you hate to hit the panic button. Sometimes worrying about media generates more anxiety in your children than letting it roll. Could I have predicted that a primetime show would go so far as to portray the stripper waking up to find the loan sharks impaled through the neck, their blood splattered all over her garage? Or that she would open the trunk of a mysterious red Cadillac to find their bodies lying in what looked like a huge serving of cherry Jell-O? I guess so.

But I\'m old-fashioned -- I\'ll be the first to admit it. I just can\'t shake the expectations of my youth, when television was so tame that you wished it would go a little farther. Maybe that\'s what\'s going on today: Everyone from my generation on down has to fall all over themselves to equate sadism with cool so they won\'t feel like they\'re peddling their parents\' corn. It\'s not hip if it doesn\'t push the envelope, even during family hour.

I can relate. Who wants to play the self-righteous, offended old dad? Come on, it\'s all in fun, right? Maybe that\'s why I didn\'t turn it off. Until the decapitated corpse scene.

I can\'t tell you what was going on at that point in the show, because by then I was distracted by the fact that my child was looking very uncomfortable. He didn\'t want to admit it, but there are subtle cues a parent learns to recognize: the ashen pallor, the blank affect, the repeated, heavy swallowing. All I recall is that the Japanese guy had a gun, and there was a dead body on the floor with the top half of its head lying a foot or so from the bottom half -- and lots more Jell-O. There was no more playing along. It was time to quit.

Let me just step out of my satirical tone here to tell you how painful it is to inflict this kind of discomfort on your own child. The minute it happens, you can\'t fathom how you made the same mistake again, in the name of entertainment. To see your boy go from gleeful anticipation to muted misery, betrayed by his own wishes, lying in bed with that far away look that can only mean he\'s replaying the shot of the mangled head over and over again, cueing it up for nightmares, in a word, sucks. Yeah, I know, there are 2-year-olds that can stomach Chucky, and Quentin Tarantino says you\'re supposed to take your pre-teens to see Kill Bill. But I\'m not going to blame my kids or myself. This may be the norm, but it\'s not right. It\'s cynical, desperate, and, most of all, in a TV show about comic book characters, totally unnecessary.

After my son drifted off to sleep, I decided that the people at NBC should hear from me. I went to NBC.com and scrolled down past the cheerful button declaring, "Heroes, 8p," past the promotional interactive games and Brian Williams\' blog and the behind-the-scenes photos from Coastal Dreams to the tiny words "contact us" at the very bottom of the page. I clicked and waited. And waited. I clicked again. Nothing.

Just to make sure that there wasn\'t anything wrong with my browser, I moved the cursor over and clicked on the words "corporate info," whereupon I was immediately transferred to a page of advertisements.