Calling all Heroes

There’s an interesting interview with Heroes creator Tim Kring over at Comic Book Resources, with spoilers for the entire first season. Having been spoilerphobic during the season I can now relax and indulge in some background reading. Part 2 is particularly good, with info about the writing process, the structure of Season 2, and the Heroes: Origins spin-off.

Part 1 & Part 2.

Spoiler-free quotes below.

“The biggest was we learned how not to be precious with information, with answers. We learned that no answer is so precious that we can’t tell you what it is. I think people really expect on a show like this to learn what’s happening and what the secrets are. Secrets, if you wait to long, are ultimately going to disappoint the audience. If you wait a year and a half for an answer, no matter what you tell your audience it will disappoint them because it just can’t be a good enough answer. So, you learn to give answers at a frequent rate.”

(This would be the anti-Lost approach to making television, then.)

Season 2:

“Volume two… …in no way has to be an entire season and it won’t be. The idea now is to tell volume two in a much shorter amount of time so that we are not dragging so much story behind us 20 episodes into the show… … what we’re doing is wrapping these stories up in shorter arcs so that you can hop on the train as a new viewer along the way.”

Origins:

“Right now it’s six episodes, they are stand alone episodes that have a kind of, for lack of a better way of describing it, a Rod Serling quality to them… …we’re very conscientious about the brand and trying not to harm it and trying not to diminish or take away anything from the mother ship of “Heroes” because everything is sort of begat from there. So, the second this feels like it’s doing any sort of damage, we’ll cut our losses.”