I asked Hayden what she wants for Claire. Here's what she told me: "This show has been so broad, and it's been such an incredible thing that it seems like it can go anywhere and that she can go anywhere, so I'd like to see a change of location maybe. Toward the end of the season, I'd like to see her get a little bit of a change of style—more sophisticated, growing into her own. I'd like to see a boy in the horizon somewhere, which I've heard rumors of." Ooh-la-la!

But the good news is the cast actually starts filming new episodes next week, so spoilers are starting to leak out! I'm hearing a bit of The Black Donnellys may have rubbed off on Heroes, as they're welcoming a new recurring character named Will, aka Blackie, an Irish mobster who's mixed up in small-time crime!

I'm hearing we'll meet a new character who's been alive for 1,000 years. And sadly, he will not be played by David Boreanaz. I'm pretty sure it's the character David Anders is in the running for, but not sure.

Heroes is shot nearly entirely in Los Angeles with the exception of a small hand full of shots, yet the shows characters travel from India to NY - both now and in the future. To achieve this the production worked with Stargate Digital. In this week's podcast we speak with VFX Supervisor Mark Kolpack and Supervising Producer Mark Spatny about Stargate Digital's work on the NBC television series Heroes...

...Early on, the show had to deal with flying characters. VFX Supervisor Mark Kolpack wanted to produce feature film level effects and to improve on the normal solutions for flying. While some wire work is still done as in the shots above, they worked on new approaches. The show started doing full body scans and producing digital doubles to allow for more believeable flying sequences in the show. While initally considered a gamble, many of the actors have now been scanned and digital doubles are used as a standard part of the visual effects tools at the team's disposal....

She said she is hoping to devote herself to her new role -- which includes acting as a spokeswoman for AIDS issues -- and is also looking for a possible role on the TV series "Heroes," broadcast by NBC, which has rights to the Miss Universe pageant.

"As soon as I won Miss Universe I had this big chance," Mori, who teaches jazz dance at her mother's studio in Shizuoka near Mount Fuji, said. "I've never acted before. I went to the casting audition and read a script in English and Japanese, and they said it was really good. So I hope I can be in the show."

NBC Universal Launches Widgets to Expand Distribution of Content on Digital Platforms
New York, NY & Washington, D.C. – June 6, 2007 — NBC Universal today announced that it will enable viral distribution of its popular content online by transforming content associated with news, entertainment and sports programming into easily portable widgets, using the industry leading content syndication and distribution platform from Clearspring Technologies. Users will be able to personalize these widgets and post them on their own blogs, social networking profiles, web sites, wikis and personal start pages, allowing deeper engagement for fans of NBCU content.

Initial launch widgets include popular content from "Dateline," "Hardball with Chris Matthews," "Meet the Press" and "NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams," as well as content from NBC Sports, DotComedy.com and iVillage.com. Available content will continue to expand, along with increased personalization options and enhanced features.

"We want to create a fun, shared experience for our users and understand their needs as they interact with our content beyond our online properties." said Sab Kanaujia, Vice President, Digital Product Strategy & Development, NBC Universal. "Changes in the behavior of online users and innovation in technology has provided us with new opportunities to grow the reach for our content and brands online. Clearspring's content syndication and distribution platform provides us a robust distribution and analytics solution for our widgets initiative."

"We are delighted to have been chosen to deliver this start-to-finish solution for NBC Universal," said Chris Marentis, CEO of Clearspring. "By using our premium hyper-syndication platform, fans of NBCU's programming can now easily personalize their favorite Web sites with NBCU content. This allows NBCU to lead the shift to the new distributed web and deliver their premium content whenever and wherever consumers chose to enjoy it."

"I feel good about the direction it's heading in," said Pasdar. "I think it's across the boards surprising for each character and for each audience member, whoever their favourite character is. It takes a wildly different arc then you might think. Season Two is going to be a big surprise."

-Adrian Pasdar

"Hiro made a promise that he'll be back. Hiro is beginning his journey in the second season and he'll be by himself for a while but I'm sure we'll see [Ando] in some context so I wouldn’t count it out,"

-Masi Oka

"Masi and I were in New York a few weeks ago and we had the opportunity to go to Times Square and I had a little video camera and it was 8 o'clock on Saturday night and I said, 'Masi you have to go to the middle of Times Square and do the Yata scene,'" Pasdar said.

"So we go there in the middle of Times Square; we couldn’t have been more invisible. I was walking around him taking a picture, he's spinning around and he does the Yata, and nobody puts it together. And this fellow walks up to him and says, 'can you take a picture of me?' So Masi takes the picture. He was completely oblivious."

Kring told The Hollywood Reporter that he has gone "from showrunner who oversees writing and production on a show to a person managing a brand and everything involved in that," adding that he "relies heavily" on his team to manage the Heroes entity.

Katherine Pope, who only days ago was named president of NBCU Television Studio, is a long-time friend of Kring.

"He is a brilliant writer, and he also runs one of the tightest ships in town," Pope told the Reporter, explaining: "The reason this deal is so important to us is because of Tim's absolutely extraordinary ability to write all types of characters with such authenticity. He can find the humanity in the characters and everything he writes."