Greg Grunberg’s band played. Greg was on drums, James Denton (DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES) played guitar, and Hugh Laurie (HOUSE) was on keyboards! Tim Kring got on stage with a guitar and jammed. Wendy and Lisa (our composers) took the stage at one point along with Sheila E. on drums and they ROCKED THE HOUSE! Jack Coleman, (HRG himself) got up there and sang his lungs out. Even Noah Gray-Cabey got on stage on keyboards and blew the roof off the place...

Adam also had to deal with a bit of last minute budget cut compromises, and he dealt with these gracefully. Dealing with the budget on HEROES is a bit like playing a fish on a hook. We’re always letting out line and then reeling it back in. We look at the needs of the script, where we are in the season, whether it’s a sweeps show or a bookend show or not. Sometimes we’re just looking at whether we’ve recently been good or bad and whether we have to make up for it. Unfortunately for Adam and episode 19, we’d just come off a spending spree and needed to cut back. Like a suburban couple, looking over the credit card debt from last month’s drunken weekend in Vegas, we realized there’d be no eating out this month, and that the 60’ flat screen would have to wait.

Several significant cuts were made, literally a day before shooting. First, we had a really great location for, what we called, “the bowels of Prima-Tech”, HRG’s company. It was a place where they’d built and tested jets with a lot of cool rooms for cells and corridors. We brought those scenes back to the existing cell that we’d built on stage for Sylar, and to the halls and corridors that surrounded our sets. Also, originally, HRG, Matt and Ted were going to have their dialogue scene (“wait a second, your middle management”) on the run, while stealing a car. We moved that back to the diner set we owned. There were also more beats of action in the Sylar/Peter fight, including that Sylar was pushed out a window by Suresh and fell several stories to the pavement.