• by Don Seaman , Featured Contributor, May 14, 2010

Bring back "Heroes" -- online.

NBC's kept the show on the fence for long enough. It's past the point of diminishing returns for a prime-time television series. Not only does it not deliver the audience of a tentpole series, it's not even delivering as a pup-tentpole TV series anymore. But it still delivers a sizable amount of impressions online.

According to NBC's own TaMi data (a proprietary system that aggregates a program's audience delivery across multiple viewing sources), nearly a quarter of the impressions generated by an average episode of "Heroes" comes from online viewing. This is NBC's strongest online show, period. So it already IS an online hit for the network.

Critics will say that it's too expensive to consider moving such a high-budget show to a purely digital medium. It has a big-name cast with costly special effects - hardly something that you'd characterize as being ripe for experimentation.

However...

NBC, and its regulatory-dependent Comcast owners, are quite interested in the idea of "Anytime/Anywhere TV." Having what would actually be a tentpole online series puts them right at the leading edge of original online content. If they're serious about being a strong digital player, this is a golden opportunity to leverage an established program with a proven online viewer base.

Yes, it's an expensive gamble. But there are ways that they could probably curb some of the costs without significantly impacting the story lines and overall theme of the show. Limiting the core cast to a smaller number of episodes would be one way; taking advantage of digital special effects and editing to curb the "second location" budgets and high-octane analog visuals might be another.

There's some talk now about creating a TV movie of the series, to provide whatever closure remains from the Season 4 season/series finale. But that's really a meek way to end what might be a heroic experiment.