Ratings for the show's three-hour premiere were down a stunning 25% from last year, which has to be enough to make people over at NBC very nervous (especially when it can't be blamed on network ratings falling across the board; CBS' How I Met Your Mother leaped 21%, and even exceptionally unfunny hit Two And A Half Men jumped up 10% on the same night - gaining from NBC's misfortunes, perhaps) - and with good reason. If a one-time fan favorite show as massively hyped as this one was still manages to lose a quarter of its viewership, then there's definitely something wrong. But what? We've got some ideas.

Too Much Hype
Maybe they just had an hour to fill before the show properly started, but I can't have been the only person completely turned off by the masturbatory "countdown" to the third season premiere. Yes, the show's popular, we get it; no need to spend so long showing us clips boasting about how many countries love Heroes, or have the actors stand awkwardly in front of the camera with their microphones pretending that they care about us. If it wasn't for the wonders of fast-forwarding on TiVo, I wouldn't have stuck around for the real show - and I'm sure that many others felt the same.

The Second Season Syndrome
Yes, it may have fixed some of its problems before the end of its shortened season, but there's no doubt that a large part of the 25% of non-returning viewers jumped ship because of the slow, uneven and often just plain bad nature of the show's second season that squandered a lot of the goodwill that the first had spent weeks of ever-increasing sanity earning. No matter how good the teaser ads for Villains may have been in the middle of the Olympics, the taste of slowly-rotting cheese from S2 is hard to shift.

We Don't Need Another Heroes
We've already had a summer of superhero movies; maybe it's simply superhero exhaustion, and the fact that audiences may not want to watch the knock-offs when they can see the original real deals on the big screen? After all, given the choice between Robert Downey Jr. and Milo Ventimigilia, I can't believe that that many people wouldn't go for the one who didn't spend years on the (admittedly wonderful) Gilmore Girls.

No matter what the reason for the ratings slump, though, it's something that NBC and the Heroes creative teams should be taking steps to fix right away - Maybe a Sunday evening re-run will give the show's second episode a Fringe-like bump, but I'm hoping for something a little more story-led to shake things up enough to get viewers return to the series. Let's start by killing off the two Deus Ex Machinas, Peter and Sylar, and go from there...

Heroes Premiere Down 25% From Last Year [Hollywood Reporter]

According to SciFi Wire, another potential Hero heeding the siren song of wrong this season will be Mohinder Suresh, the show's powerless moral compass. Suresh himself, actor Sendhil Ramamurthy, explains:

Everybody has a little bit of an evil side. They have a little bit of a dark side, even people who are good. And you are going to see that part of a lot of the characters that you thought were fundamentally the 'good' on the show, and not just the Suresh character, but other characters as well.

The first step down the troubled and rocky road of evil? Suresh giving himself superpowers in the first hour of Monday's season premiere. Because, if there's one truism that superhero movies and TV shows like to adhere to, it's that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Unless your name is Peter Petrelli, in which case absolute corruption is counteracted by absolute emo pouting.

Will Heroes' Suresh Go Dark? [SciFi Wire]

Interviewed over on Comic Book Resources, Grant's mission seemed to be to lay out the fact that she has nerd cred:

I started reading ‘The Invisibles’ because my brother recommended it and got hooked. I just caught up on ‘Fables,’ read ‘Batman: The Long Halloween,’ and [I] am re-reading ‘The Sandman’ for a comic book club I'm in. I find that comics are the best thing to read on set because a lot times you have 10 minutes to kill and it's not enough time to read a chapter of a book, but it's plenty of time to get decently far in a trade paperback... I started doing research on characters with speed as their power - so I read a lot of old and new Flash (I particularly liked the Geoff Johns stuff) and now I'm reading ‘Supreme Power,’ [which] I think really deals with a lot of the stuff ‘Heroes’ deals with like what would actually happen in the real world if people suddenly had special powers. I don't necessarily think a person's first instinct would be to put on a cape and start fighting crime (unless you're Hiro Nakamura - except for the cape thing). I like the way ‘Supreme Power’ deals with the government's attempt to control people with powers by employing them or just brain-washing them. ‘Heroes’ explores the same issue with the cataloging of people with powers and the constant attempt to gain control over them.

See how she did that whole thing about talking about comics and then bringing it back to her show? The girl's a pro when it comes to interviews. Sadly, it looks as if her character - super-speed thief Daphne - will be a repeat of Kirsten Bell's Elle in terms of character arc:

There's lots of grey and I think Daphne is somewhere in the middle of it — just like most of us in real life - constantly trying to figure out where we stand.

Okay, so how many episodes do you think it'll take before Daphne has to turn to the light side and save Hiro's life in some freak accident?

'Heroes' Star Brea Grant's Need for Speed [Comic Book Resources]