Heroes: a model of efficiency

I was late getting into the tv show Heroes, but better late than never! This is my favorite show since Joan of Arcadia. It combines the supernatural with everyday people, giving them lots of action, but lots of real-life stuff too. It could be described as a mash-up of Lost and X-Men, but without the endless mysteries and without the tight suits.

How does this excellent show manage to pack so much interesting stuff into just one hour a week when it has to follow over 10 main characters, all with seperate storylines? My original theory is that it does it by recognizing that the average TV viewer has watched thousands of hours of modern television. Therefore, when we get to a familiar sort of scene, for example, one in which a police officer interrogates a suspect, we don't have to spend a lot of time cutting back and forth between the two characters, question answer, question answer, yawn! Everyone's watched an interrogation scene before, we know the drill, so Heroes skips ahead to the important part. Often the show doesn't even bother to finish scenes. It sets up scene A, then cuts to scene B, never to return, leaving the rest of scene A to be filled in by our experience, and our imagination.

This trick is brilliantly efficient, and let's us busy viewers get more story and action out of each viewing minute!