Are you still watching NBC’s “Heroes”? The show’s initial shine has worn off since 2006 and viewership is consistently dropping. Many fans have left the show, citing its tired characters and uninspiring plotlines as their reasons for leaving. “Heroes” was a great show in the beginning. What happened to it? Get the low down here with this interview that show creator Tim Kring did with the AV Club recently.
Q: Whenever anyone talks about Heroes, they always go back to that first season, especially in storytelling. It feels a lot like it had a much clearer idea of where the show was headed than this recent season. What do you make of the comparison?
Tim Kring: It’s always hard. For us, the seasons aren’t really seasons. We took about four days off between season one and two—we never stopped writing. Same directors, same actors, same everything. So when someone says they don’t like season two, it’s like, “Well, that was yesterday.” We don’t have a sense that the seasons are divided by ideas or timeframes; it’s just this big long continuum. I think the first season can be divided into two places. We took a seven-week break, and the audience never came back after that. The first 16 episodes was the part everybody talks about.
The other thing is, you can only be shiny and new one time. Also in that first season, we probably should have done two volumes or three volumes, smaller stories. I think people would have gotten used to the fact that we tell a story in volumes that have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Because we didn’t, and we ended with sort of a finale, it felt like, “Well, I guess that’s over.” So how do you go back to saving the world again? In reality, that was an issue for me. I was very interested in the origin story of where these characters came from—that first blush of discovery. It’s the most fun to write, and ultimately it’s the most interesting for the audience. Once you answered the big questions—“What is happening to me? How am I connected? What does it all mean?”—as we did, then those questions have to be replaced by other questions. And those are usually plot questions as opposed to primal questions. To be really honest, those questions aren’t as interesting for an audience. So you have to keep going to those original questions by turning things on their head. Maybe it isn’t an evolutionary thing, maybe it’s scientific. Or you keep wiping a character clean and bringing them back to being evil again.
Q: So… Sylar?
Tim Kring: Yeah, I guess. One of the issues of serialized storytelling is that the characters have to change. If they don’t, the audience says, “Why aren’t they changing?” And obviously you have actors to deal with. They’re people, they have to play these parts. They’re not robots, they can’t do anything without understanding it or making it work for themselves. You just naturally gravitate toward changing these characters, and if they change so much that they no longer resemble who they were at the beginning, you’re either held to some standard where the audience wants them back, or you have to just say, “This is who they’ve become.” On a procedural, that cop can be the same guy every week for 10 seasons.
Q: What’s frustrating about the show now, though, is that it feels like characters such as Noah Bennet are changing just for the sake of changing. Is there pressure to change characters, vs. letting things happen naturally?
Tim Kring: Again, it’s one of those things that’s very hard to tell from the inside, when you’re under pressures that come to bear on every decision. This is not the kind of show where every episode was planned out in a bible. You can’t do that. Listen, certain characters change in and of themselves. It’s funny how you’re not in complete control of a character; really powerful characters on TV are a combination of the actor meeting you partway. Bennet was a classic example: He started with five lines in the pilot, but because he was played by Jack Coleman, who brought so much pathos to this character, we started writing toward all his nuances and tics, and that character was developed. Same with Sylar: He was meant to be a shark, a serial killer who’d be after our people. But by hiring Zac Quinto, who has this infinite sense of vulnerability below the surface, we started exploring that idea. I mean, listen, I’m probably the wrong guy to analyze where and how things change, because I’m so far in the inside. We’re in the weeds a lot.
Q: Popular characters won’t get killed off, but you’ve mentioned in other interviews that you didn’t want the show to get unwieldy with too many characters. This season feels like the worst offender: Multiple weeks go by between resolving character cliffhangers.
TK: That’s a product of a few things. First of all, there are only so many storylines you can actually do. The first season, there were six or seven—little bit of this, little bit of that. The haiku type of storytelling was effective when characters had very separate storylines. My idea was for them to stay apart for as long as possible. The network wanted them to be together on the second episode, and we really fought that. Once characters start crossing, you can do fewer stories. One of the tricks to making a show efficiently and hitting a pattern budget is by telling fewer stories per episode. When you have a certain number of characters, you’re facing a mathematical reality that not every character can be in every episode. So some have to sit out. That’s the only solution a bunch of smart people sitting in a room for a few years has come up with.
Q: What’s it take to kill off a character, then?
TK: A million things. Sometimes it’s Kristen Bell going off to do movies. If we don’t kill anybody, then eventually people are convinced there aren’t actual stakes to these stories. Somebody pulls a gun, you go, “They never kill anybody, so no one’s gonna get hurt.” Or the story just dictates that the characters have run their course for whatever reason.
Q: Have you thought about killing off any more major characters?
TK: Not really. We’re down to a real core group right now.
Q: That becomes a problem in episodes like the recent one where Hiro battles the brain tumor. We all expect him to live, and the episode deflates.
TK: It becomes very hard to kill off certain characters. You get a big bump from the shock of that, but the fallout will be a lot harder to deal with. The network has a very strong say in this, because of actors who are under contract and do publicity for them. It’s not just up to the writers to decide.
Q: How do you balance what the network wants and what you want? In the beginning, it seemed like you could get away with a lot more, since there were no expectations as to what Heroes was.
TK: That’s a very astute observation. It gets more complicated when you have a show that gets more popular, not just with your audience, but with your own network. We were very free to do whatever we wanted until people had opinions. There’s a real luxury to making your show in a vacuum, when the microscope isn’t on. It’s why every year we make eight or nine episodes before the audience starts watching, and it’s always more comfortable to work.
Q: Was it always the plan to have some characters way more powerful than others, then limit them? Peter now can only have one power at a time, and great lengths go into ensuring Hiro never has the full use of his powers—so he can’t go back in time and strangle Sylar as a baby or something.
TK: If you sit in a writers’ room and try to come up with these stories—for this particular character, especially—you come to the conclusion that he’s simply too powerful. He can stop anything from happening at any time. You face the problem of having to throw dirt in his eyes or kick him in the shins. You find ways to cripple him. While that may become obvious to the audience, the flip side is that we just can’t figure out how to keep him from using his powers in a way that could affect the story at the drop of a hat.
Q: That must get tiring.
TK: You know, that’s the challenge of serialized storytelling. You keep coming up against the same issues over and over, and putting new hurdles down. It’s exciting, and hopefully you get more than four days off between seasons so you can think of new hurdles to put in front of people.
Q: Were you aware that this was an issue you were going to have to deal with when you introduced Sylar, Peter, and Hiro?
TK: At the very beginning, the conversation was, “This is a really powerful character.” It was a concern from the very beginning. It’s why Hiro often keeps separate from other characters—a tangential story that runs parallel to your story. An errand he has to succeed in. Those little methods keep him from being planted in the center of the story, going “I’m gonna stop time and change history.” We’ve gotten so used to those challenges that no one is really articulating it anymore; it’s just part of what we do.
Q: What do you make of all the comparisons between the show and comic books?
TK: I knew from the very beginning that I was stepping into a world where people had very strong emotions about comic books they’ve grown up with. I naïvely thought I could live in those waters and swim comfortably. We’re just often in the world of comparing us to a million things that have already been done. I had the same issue when I made a procedural drama—we were in competition with all the other shows that were solving crimes. “Man, CSI had an episode where a guy’s stabbed with a knife made of ice, and we’re shooting that episode right now!” That was the world we ventured into just by opening the Pandora’s box of superpowers.
Q: Do you see it as a positive comparison, or a limiting one?
TK: Well, fortunately, I don’t read. Or watch TV. Or go to the movies. Or go out very much. Living in a bubble where I make a TV show keeps me blissfully unaware of other things.
Q: Another thing you mentioned to EW is that romance isn’t a really great fit for the show. Why is it still part of the show, specifically the Claire-may-be-a-lesbian subplot?
TK: We experimented with Claire having a relationship in high school, and the truth is, we all struggled with it as writers, because the engine of the show was always hyped up. It became complicated to stop that train for romance. It has to be very cleverly woven into the narrative in order for it not to feel like you’re putting the brakes on something big so you can have a relationship. If you can weave some romance into action, that’s great. But we struggled with that… This year with Claire, we wanted to explore the idea of her being a college freshman, living in the dorms, having friends—the theme was, “How do I blend into life, and what would happen if I were to actually try and present myself to the world as I really am?” To come out of the closet, so to speak. But there’s no such thing as saying “never” on a show like Heroes: We’ve got so much story to tell, best idea wins. We’ll take an idea from the guy who gets our coffee, you know?
[Source] AV Club
