Bryan Fuller talks 'Heroes' return, finale

Is Bryan Fuller the saviour of Heroes? Coming off two seasons of oft-derided storylines and dwindling ratings, the show was handed a lifeline when Fuller's own series - the acclaimed Pushing Daisies - was cancelled by ABC, allowing the exec to resume his Heroes writing duties. But how do you turn around such a large ship? We called up Bryan to get an insight into the show's woes.

In the couple years that you were away from Heroes, did you still watch it?
"I had been watching it very regularly. I think that there were always interesting ideas at work in the show, but for me, it became too intricate. As an audience member who watched that show for the characters, it became so specified that all the things that made it great - ordinary people doing extraordinary things - kind of went out the window. Everything about the show became extraordinary - from the viruses, to the formulas, to the catalysts, to the villains - it felt like they were forced to take a shorthand with the characters just to have the real estate to tell convoluted plots. Does that make sense?"

Definitely towards the end of season two and for most of season three, it was quite complicated. How did your return to the show come about?
"They called me before Pushing Daisies was even cancelled. They were like 'Jesse [Alexander] and Jeph [Loeb] are no longer on the show and we really need your help in the writers' room. Would you mind coming by and helping out?' I was like 'Sure!' - I had the back nine [of Daisies] already broken out and ready to go, I was just waiting for the order. So I would literally go over to Heroes at lunches and sit in the writers' room.

"First they sent me the remaining episodes of the Villains arc that I hadn't seen yet so I could catch up. I was like 'oh I don't know if I can do this, I don't recognise the show any more'. It just felt like a completely different show - it didn't feel like a network television show, it felt like it should be on the Sci Fi channel. I didn't have a foothold in to care about my favourite characters. Everyone was so mad, pulling guns and yelling 'you ruined me'. Everyone was !@#%ing a lot. For a second there I was like, 'I gotta get out of this'. I strongly believe that you should not write a show if you wouldn't watch it.

"Then I started reading the Fugitives arc. I thought 'this is interesting, they're back in their real lives', but then it took another tumble down the rabbit hole of getting really dense and characters being angry. The characters' anger at their situations was such a barrier to entry for me, because I don't relate to !@#%ed off people. I have to know there's something in that person that makes me want to root for them and care for them. I thought 'well, if people are angry, let's understand why they're angry so we can sympathise with them.'

"The good thing for me when I came back is that the pendulum was already swinging back the right way and everybody on the writing staff recognised the problems with the show and how far afield it had gotten from where it was. Often that writers' room is like alchemy - you have the person with the crazy ideas, the person with the funny ideas, the person who defends the characters at any cost. When I came back, it was a little bit like coming home from college and realising 'oh, mum and dad don't talk to each other any more, little sis is a cutter and little bro is hooked on meth'. The room was a completely different room. What was a cohesive group had become divided, so it was a matter of someone coming in and saying 'let's work together'."

Was episode 20 your first episode back?
"I came back for episode 19, so we started breaking that. When they were breaking that, Sylar's dad was going to be the ultimate evil, the devil essentially. I was like, 'didn't you guys just do that with Arthur Petrelli?' They agreed, so we took it in a different direction. It helped having fresh eyes in the room. For me, one of the reasons the Villains arc didn't work is because I had no investment in any of the characters as villains. Right from the off, they were twirling their moustaches and frying people at gas stations for no reason whatsoever."

Then in the next episode, you killed off two major characters. Was that your decision?
"Well, we killed one. Just Daphne. Tracy shatters and then you see her blink and the tear goes down the drain. We will see Tracy again. I'm such a sci-fi geek so the tear coming out was totally a shout-out to Zhora from Blade Runner. When I came in, they were planning to kill Tracy off. She was gonna get shot in the back of the head! I was like, 'couldn't we have her go out in a way that is more dynamic, fun and open?' I guess I was trying not to have Ali Larter basically die in the same way she did in the second season - 'I'm a hero!' Then she dies. It felt redundant to have her go out the same way, so I was like 'let's not kill her, let's see how these events change this character and stay with her on the journey as opposed to just cutting it off.'"

You had Swoosie [Kurtz] from Pushing Daisies in for a cameo. It seemed quite brief!
"It was painfully brief, but originally in the pitch for that episode, you didn't see Angela Petrelli at all after she got out of the taxi. One of our NBC execs said he wanted to see what happens to Angela afterwards, so we crafted this whole story about her regrets. Again, Angela had become such an arch cold character, saying things like 'I'm going to feed you my child!' She used to be this sad lady who would steal thoughts and was haunted, but when she's twirling her moustache I kind of had a hard time tracking the emotional arc of that character. So I was like 'let's go back and see a woman with regrets, who is realising she didn't always make the best decisions, and see her try to get her and her sons out of this mess'."

We're very close to the finale now - what sort of an ending is it?
"I'm very excited about the finale of this season. I think it's the best finale the show has had. We were sitting in the room, planning the last couple of episodes, saying we know the mistakes we've made, we don't want to make them again, so how do we tell an effective story given everything we've done in the Fugitives arc? I think we came up with a really good way to pay off the season."

And how does it set up things for next season?
"Last week we had a writers' retreat to talk about season four. It was pleasing that there was so much juice left in the berry, as it were! By the end of this season we've set up a fantastic arc for HRG, for the Petrellis, the Bennets. All of the main characters that are surviving the finale have great ways to propel them into new stories. We'll keep it grounded - now they've gone through the Fugitives arc, they can have their lives back but what do they then do with those lives?"

Given the ratings issues and storyline backlash, how confident are you over the show's longer term future?
"It's so hard to say with viewership patterns and all that Nielsen bullshit. Heroes is not a cheap show but it's gotten fiscally more responsible in the episodes we've done recently. Big parts of the conversation for season four are how we do this more cost effectively because right now with networks, they're like 'you've got to pull it in on budget or you're not coming back'. For Heroes, the budgets in the second season and the start of the third season just ballooned and ballooned. It was like 'How much did that episode cost? Are you kidding me?!' On Pushing Daisies we had a locked budget we couldn't go over and it was significantly less than the Heroes budget. So when I heard the Heroes budget was getting cut down to X amount, I was like, 'That is still a lot more than some people have! That's plenty to do the show'. All of those parameters are helping us corral the next season into a much more character-oriented pace. Much like the first season, because that wasn't big and sprawling. It was a lot of characters having chance encounters without blowing the lid off it every week. It's exciting."