My Hero

FOR most Hollywood producers, this year's strike by the Writers Guild of America was a disaster. Tim Kring, though, saw it as a blessing in disguise. Season two of his hit NBC series Heroes was one of the many shows affected by the lengthy protest, with just 11 of its planned 24 episodes going into production. And yet, Kring says, this unplanned truncation offered he and his fellow writers the chance to step back and reconsider the approach they had taken with their disappointing second run.

The main problem was that after the turbo-charged momentum of the first season (which itself ended with a whimper rather than a bang), season two seemed sluggish by comparison. "Making a show like this is not a precise science by any means," he admits when we talk on the eve of his appearance last week at the Edinburgh International Television Festival. "And one of the things we learned was that with volume two we tried to emulate the exact structure of volume one, where we created these characters with disparate storylines which converged six episodes in. Looking back, once these storylines had converged in the first volume, and the story took off with a certain kind of pace, I think the audience got very much used to that pace. So when you come back to the pace of building a story in a classic first-act kind of way, I don't know that the audience was particularly interested in that. They wanted to see that fast-paced storytelling they'd gotten used to. It forced us to really think: how do you tell a story where you don't build? How do you tell a story where you start at a dead run?"



He appears to have discovered the solution, claiming that season three, which premieres in the US next month and airs on BBC2 in 2009, "is very high adrenalin-paced storytelling. We're not doing a lot of build-up, we hit the ground running really hard and fast on this one."



A sprawling saga of everyday folks coming to terms with their genetic superpowers, Heroes was an instant critical and ratings smash when it first materialised in 2006. Borrowing both its visual and storytelling aesthetic from the dense, vibrant thrust of many a graphic novel, it's a series which – at its best – manages to appeal to both comics nerds and mainstream audiences alike.

"The central concept of Heroes was always about compelling characters that people could relate to," says Kring. "The genre elements of the show are really secondary to the drama of how these characters cope with this life-altering experience. The challenge for us was to try to be all things to all people. I wanted to do a show which would appeal enough to a genre crowd, that passionate core audience that stays loyal, but also to be able to reach across to people who were not interested (in comics]. We are a broadcast show, not a narrowcast show, and unfortunately a genre audience would not keep us on the air on a big American network."

You would assume that a telefantasy series featuring a large cast of characters who can variously fly, travel through time, read minds and fire electric bolts from their hands would be anathema to the notoriously conservative mainstream American networks. Not so, says Kring, whose experience as a trusted producer on the medical examiner series Crossing Jordan meant that NBC more or less gave him carte blanche to do what he pleased.

"It's a business where there's a tremendous amount of money at stake," he says. "And you want to hit a sure thing as often as you can, and that's antithetical to taking bold new chances. And yet I think that all of the networks have gradually realised that the only shows that break out are usually the ones which carve out new territory."

Creatively stifled by the repetitive strictures of genre storytelling ("in Crossing Jordan, a dead body came in every episode, somebody must pay for that death, and a crime was solved"), Kring longed for the opportunity to tell longer, arc-driven stories. "I started thinking about the whole idea of a Charles Dickens paradigm where you tell a story in one chapter instalments. Damon Lindelof, one of the creators of Lost, was working with me on Crossing Jordan when we were discussing these ideas, so you can sort of see how that turned out."



Kring claims that the initial idea for Heroes came about when, like many a concerned father, he began fretting about the state of the world his children would inherit. "I started thinking seriously about trying to do a show that had a message of interconnectivity, a message of hope, and a basic message of trying to save the world," he says. "A kind of lofty idea, I guess, but maybe in my own way it was something I could do. The normal genres of television just didn't seem to be big enough to encompass these ideas, and that started to lead me towards this idea of superpowers in this kind of postmodern way: what if the answer lies within ordinary people, you or me or somebody we went to school with? What if these people were somehow chosen to carry the mantle of saving the world? It didn't really come from wanting to do a genre show, necessarily. It was very much about the message first."



Kring prefers to think of Heroes not in terms of seasons but as different volumes of an overarching storyline. The truncated season two, for instance, was supposed to feature three rather than the eventual one volume. "What these volumes allow us to do is posit a tremendous amount of questions and answer literally 95 per cent of them in the course of one volume," he explains. "We can wrap up a story and move on to another volume, which allows new viewers to come on to the show and not feel intimidated by not knowing what's going on. It keeps the story fresh so that you're not dragging a lot of backstory behind you."

This approach is not without its drawbacks, and Kring admits that he and his team are constantly learning how to effectively adapt their methods. "Some of this came from the first season when we did 23 episodes, and by the time I wrote the final episode I felt very handcuffed to what had come before. We were dragging so much story, like a big dead horse behind us. We had all these clues that needed to be sewn up, so we decided very quickly afterwards that we were going to tell these stories in shorter chunks. Also, you need to be a show which is inviting to the audience. With some of these other serialised shows, you try to hop on three seasons in and you're aggressively kicked out of the club for not knowing the secret handshake."

Kring claims that uninitiated viewers could easily jump in at the start of season (sorry, "volume") three. He also admits to having deliberately geared the series towards an audience watching it on DVD box-sets, rather than on initial broadcast.

"I personally believe that it is a far superior experience to watch this show on DVD. You get all of the nuances and all of the continuity. I just much prefer to think about it being viewed on DVD.

"So we're constantly trying to tell the network not to worry and that when it's watched on DVD it'll make a lot more sense. It must be challenging to watch it in weekly instalments."

As for the future, Kring reveals that three more volumes are currently in the pipeline. As long as he can continue to learn from his mistakes, then hopefully they'll be driven by sturdier storytelling on a par with volume one.



"The wonderful thing about Heroes is that we do not posit an ending to the show. We don't have to get off an island or anything. The premise of this show has always been about how the world has populated itself with these unique individuals, and we know that there are many, many, many more out there. So it feels as though the world the show exists in can go on for a very long time."