[IMG:L]It’s good to be the Kring.
That’s Tim Kring, the creator and executive producer of NBC’s ratings smash Heroes, the epic-yet-intimate look at a disparate collection of once-normal people who suddenly discover that they have superhuman powers akin to comic book heroes and find themselves at the center of world-threatening calamities and conspiracies.
The series caused such a sensation in its first season that it’s home network has tasked Kring (who’s also delivered lower profile hits like Crossing Jordan) to not only deliver a second season but to craft a hiatus-bridging self-contained miniseries spin-off, Heroes: Origins, an anthology showcasing various other meta-powered characters outside the main show’s big picture.
Even further, NBC’s relying on Heroes to “Save the cheerleader, save the network” by setting the tone of the Peacock net’s new direction, with new sci-fi and fantasy series like The Bionic Woman and Chuck joining its roster next fall. Now fully powered up himself and less than a week into shooting new episodes, Kring gave Hollywood.com a post-game look at Season One, and a prognosticative peek at what can be expected in Season Two.
Hollywood.com: How do you feel about the fan reaction to the finale, positive and negative?
Tim Kring: I heard anecdotally that people loved it, and clearly on a show like this is one of the problems with a big serialized show which is that by the time you get to 23 episodes in you’re dragging a tremendous amount of story behind you. So when people wait that long for answers it gets very hard to satisfy people. This is another reason why I think these volumes are really the way to go because it allows us to not have people build up expectations for so long as to how things are going to be resolved. When you build up for a whole year with a show like this it has an addictive quality to it and so it has to really pay off. Sometimes those expectations are too high for a mere television show.
HW: Are you keeping a lot of that in your head as you prepare for the second season? NBC has obviously put a lot of hope on the show, and filled out the schedule with new series in a similar vein. Do you feel that creative pressure going into a second season where it’s easy for fans to go “Oh, well, now we’ve seen this before.”
TK: Yes, exactly. Oh, yeah. The cautionary tale of how like this is that the fans are very fickle and they’re always looking for what’s shiny and new and you just hope that you can keep them interested when you’re competing with all of these new forms of entertainment. So there is tremendous pressure, absolutely.
HW: You have at least eight new or recurring characters. Has it been difficult integrating them in the stories?
TK: A lot of it was planned for and felt fairly natural. So it’s a big cast. One of the things that we are doing this year – because we’re not asking the audience to start absolutely from scratch – we’re not so concerned about every episode having every single character in it. So we’re able to sort of pull back in the ebb and flow and let certain characters come to the surface for an episode and sit out an episode.
HW: Are you talking more about episodes like “Company Man,” where it’s focused on one story?
TK: Yes, exactly. The idea of being able to focus on a couple of characters is something that we really learned last year is a very valuable thing to do, but you had to have earned enough interest in those characters to be able to then focus on them.
[IMG:R]HW: And you’ve said the second season will break into smaller story arcs, rather than one major story running through the entire season?
TK: Well, it’s designed to be three. We’ll see how that works out…It’s [a challenge] that we live with and deal with on a daily basis and it’s sort of the crux of our job, how to squeeze the square peg of making a show in eight to 10 days into the round hole of this giant and ambitious production.
HW: Now that Heroes has become a major television phenomenon does that give you a little more confidence and little more leeway to start planning long-term, far-reaching story arcs?
TK: Yeah, to some extent, but I have to tell you that the amount of work, the volume of work – I mean, we chewed up a tremendous amount of story in one year, and any time that you plan for a story it’s almost a given that you will get there much faster than you think you will because this monster just eats constantly. So the best-laid plans are always, “Oh, it’s great. By mid-season we’ll be here…” and then sure enough we’ll get into the writer’s room and you’re there by episode six. That’s just the nature of the storytelling.
HW: How far do you think you are at this point?
TK: Well, we’re obviously taking it one season at a time, and I have some big ideas of what the sort of big tent pole ideas of each season are, but this season when we started we knew where we were going in terms of the themes and the ideas behind it, but it’s 10 writers in a room for 10,000 hours talking to each other.
HW: Are you going to do anything this season for fans who didn’t watch last season to be able to jump in this season?
TK: Yes, that is a big part of what we’re doing. I mean, one of the things that I sort of learned in the first season was that we called season one Volume One and it was entitled “Genesis.” It just happened to be 23 episodes long. Volume II is entitled “Generations” and it by no means has to be an entire season long. I wouldn’t expect it to be an entire season long. In fact we’re looking at that volume to end in the middle of the season which allows us to wrap up certain stories and allows us to have new stories begin. So you don’t get a sense that if you jump on the train that you’re aggressively being pushed off of the train because you don’t know what’s going on. That’s a big concern with us.
HW: So will there be some kind of recap for people who didn’t see last season?
TK: Only slightly because the actual episode itself – it’s an episode entitled “Four Months Later” and so we pick up the stories four months after we left off at the end of the season. There is tremendous mystery in what happened during those four months and that’s part of why you’re watching these first few episodes. They’re revealing what actually happened. So the recap, in a way, is sort of built into the story.
HW: When you say Season Two starts four months after the finale, does that mean that Hiro will have been in feudal Japan for four months a well?
TK: No. Hiro’s story is the only one that picks up exactly where we meet him. So he’s existing on a timeframe outside of the rest of the story.
HW: How are you creating feudal Japan in modern day Los Angeles for Hiro’s new adventure?
TK: Well, as we know, Los Angeles has doubled for many, many things. On this show it’s doubled for a lot of things. So it’s a fairly rural view of feudal Japan which allows us to use a lot of the outlying areas like the Santa Monica Mountains and north of here.
HW: How massive can those samurai armies get on a TV budget?
TK: That’s a very valid question. Obviously not huge. We’re doing some stuff with CGI and designing the stories so that they’re not completely dependent on anything that has to look like a $200 million feature. That’s always been our dilemma on a show like this. It’s that it circles in the same world as a lot of the big giant budget movies, but it has to come at things from a different way so that we can actually produce it every week.
HW: Are the network purse strings opened a little bit more this time around?
TK: [Laughs] One would think that that would happen, but this is a very large company with a bottom line. So there is a natural bump in every budget every year because of contracts and cost of living and all of that kind of stuff, and so we’ve been held to the standards. The good news about a second season is that you learn a tremendous amount from the mistakes. You learn how to get more efficient and how to move faster. For us, the number of days shooting has always been our big issue and that usually centers around how quickly we can work, how many pages we can do. That has to do with efficiency. With a show like Heroes, you have to remember, that the visual look of the show, in every scene or every other scene there is usually an angle or a shot that you don’t usually see on television. It’s a completely different odd angle – maybe a super wide angle or a very low angle. You always see a lot of ceilings on our show, which with most shows you don’t see ceilings. And so we have to build sets with ceilings and things like that which are just more complicated. So in order to do that one angle we have to set up that one angle, we have an entire setup for that one shot which usually takes about 45 minutes, and if you multiply that by three scenes a day you can see how at the end of the week you’re a day behind the normal schedule. So that’s always our issue.
HW: Will comic book artist Tim Sale, who did all of last season’s paintings, continue to be involved in Season Two?
TK: Yes, Tim will be staying involved. So, the idea of the paintings is going to have a clever sort of reentry into the show.
HW: Expanding on the “Generations” title, will we see more of the story with the earlier line of super-powered people?
TK: The idea of “Generations,” last year we set up this sort of sense that there was this other generation represented by the Linderman character and the Petrelli’s mom and George Takei and Richard Roundtree‘s character. All of these characters set up the idea that there was another generation that had secrets of their own, and this season one of those themes that we’re going to talk about are the sins of the parents being visited upon the children. That’s one of the themes: this idea of how generationally we are left with problems that we have to fix.
[IMG:L]HW: Are there any other big themes that you’ve already got planned for this new season?
TK: Yes. One of the things that we wanted to do – and this is getting back to the idea of how can you come back to a second season and get people to start over again or how do you stay on the farm after you’ve gone out and had these amazing adventures – a lot of these stories are resetting at the beginning. We’re getting to sort of come back to the touchstone of what it’s like to try and live a normal life while having these issues going on with you, as opposed to the first season where it got so cranked up with the plot that that idea sort of fell by the wayside.
HW: How did you decide to reveal HRG’s name as Noah within the first season, and was that the name that you originally had for the pilot?
TK: We actually talked about what the name was all year long. So I would be lying if I said that I knew what his name was, and we just felt that in the spirit of answering questions, one of the things that I’ve talked about with probably many of you is this feeling that this show is a show that has committed itself to the idea of answering questions along the way so that we didn’t build up a frustration level of “Why aren’t they telling us what’s really going on and why aren’t they giving us the answers.” So we decided that that was one question that was nagging people, on their minds.
HW: Can you talk a little about Heroes: Origins, the series you’re working on to sort of fill the gap with the regular series? Have you started scripting it yet?
TK: No, not yet. We are now in the process of talking about who is going to be writing and directing them.
HW: Would it be fair to describe the show as an anthology series?
TK: Yes. Right now that’s the idea. It will not be a continuing cast or storyline.
HW: Do you see a lot of the current cast members being in it?
TK: Right now, no. This cast has 24 episodes, which is a giant mountain of work to do already. The idea is that these are the stories of other people. The show has posited this idea that this is happening all over the world and so this is an opportunity for us to tell some stories about some of these other people out there.
HW: Do you think all six episodes will run in one six week block between a break in the regular series?
TK: Right now that’s the idea, yes.
HW: Can you tell us about any of the new characters we might meet?
TK: I don’t know if that’s something I’m supposed to be talking about or not. There are a couple of new characters that will fold in and a couple of them have already been announced in the press.
HW: Do you have any hopes or expectations for Emmy nominations? Is it hard with an ensemble cast – someone doing great work – or everyone – might get left out of the mix?
TK: Well, yeah, obviously I harbor hopes of that…This kind of show is a hard show for the Emmy voters to wrap their brain around. It has some sci-fi elements, which traditionally isn’t the most praised by the Emmy voters, but clearly when you set out to do something bold and from your heart you hope that people appreciate it.
HW: So you’ve answered the nagging questions of Season One. Have you come up with some new nagging questions for season two?
TK: Oh, yeah. The questions are inherent in the storytelling, and hopefully they’ll be just as intriguing as they were this season.
