'Heroes'' Kring: Too Many Digital Cooks Spoil Broth

Product placement and overstaffing of digital divisions are hurdles for television producers and creators as they craft extensions of their shows, said Tim Kring. The executive producer and showrunner of NBC’s “Heroes” took part in a panel discussion Wednesday at NATPE's LATV Festival in Hollywood.

“At NBC you have this giant corporate, vertically integrated company, and what ends up happening is the digital division at NBC had seven people a few years ago and then three weeks later there were 67 people and there was this giant mandate from GE to put a lot of eggs into the digital basket,” he said.

“What wound up happening once the corporate entity took hold on the TV show and now 67 people in this job want to feel they are controlling this … the big fear for us is that when that material and content start to be generated by people who are outside the main or inner core of the creative force of a show, you have all sorts of pitfalls and things that can go wrong," Mr. Kring said. "You throw a little bit of sponsorship and product placement into the show and you have a recipe for all kinds of serious problems.”

"I have very little knowledge of the sci-fi world — and almost none of the comic book world,” Kring said in a recent conference call. "So, my influences ... came from just the idea of basic storytelling and character development.”

"I chose to approach this material almost entirely from the idea of who these characters were,” Kring said. "I created the powers to reflect who the characters were, and not the other way around.

"So, I didn't start off by saying I want a guy who can teleport. I started off by saying I wanted a guy who felt trapped in a life that was not his dream and what could be a power that would be most wish-fulfilling for that character? And that was the ability to teleport out of that life. So, that's how I sort of approached it.”

"If I can represent the geeks, I'm very fortunate to be able to do that. For me, the notion of a geek has always been someone who's passionate about something — whether it's computers, ant farms or musicals, or storytelling or paperweights — whatever it is,” Oka said.

"That's what makes us human. It defines us as individuals. It gives us our uniqueness. And I think it's more human, it's more us. It's more commendable to be a geek — and be passionate about something — than be apathetic about everything.”

SHH!: We got a taster for Volume II at the end of the last season, so is Season 2 going to have a very different tone and are episodes going to focus more on single characters now that they've been introduced?
Kring: Well, no. We still have a huge cast to service, but the season is going to feel different definitely. One of the things about a show like "Heroes," it sort of lives or dies by its ability to defy expectations on a weekly basis and that's a big chunk of why people are watching it. They want to have that experience of "Oh, I didn't see that coming." In many ways, the second season has to fulfill those same expectations, so it can't just be a redo or replay of the first season. There are a few new themes that we're playing with. Volume II which will probably last until the middle of the season is called "Generations" and for those people who were watching closely, they've realized that there is this other generation of people, parents like the Petrellis' mother and Linderman and Richard Roundtree's character and George Takei, all those characters represented another generation of people who dealt with these same issues. Season 2 will deal with some of the legacy that they've left behind, some of the mess they've left behind for the next generation to fix, so there's a big thematic as far as that in the sins of the parents being visited on the childen.

SHH!: Will we see some of them, like Linderman, in flashback sequences so they'll still be around?
Kring: Um, there are going to be some clever ways that we will see some of them, yes. While that's one theme of the show, the other theme of this volume is…. Season 1 was about these ordinary people who become extraordinary and Season 2 or Volume 2 starts with these people trying to be ordinary again. Most of them, we pick back up in their lives with "How do you keep them down on the farm after they've had these amazing adventures?" That's one of the themes we're going to be playing with as well.

SHH!: I know you weren't really a comic book person before you started, so have you gotten more into comics? I was really impressed with the comic book downloads relating to the show.
Kring: They're unbelievable. They're the best graphic artists in the business have worked on them, literally the cream of the crop in terms of artists have participated this year, and we're compiling them into a hardback book at the end of the summer. It's going to be spectacular, but yeah, just by osmosis, I'm around it all the time. I'm looking at them. Usually, my interest in comic is really centered around the show, because that's all I have time for now, but I've now become a real fan of these various artists and Jeph has really educated me quite a bit about it. He's always pulling something up on his computer to show me somebody's artwork and to explain why it's better than this guy's and why it's cooler than this one. It's been a fun learning curve.

SHH!: Do you have a date for the season start yet?
Kring: Well, our official start date is September 24, but knowing the way things change, I think it's probably safe to say the end of September.

Q: Is everyone coming back for Season Two?
Kring: Well, I don't want to spoil that for the fans. Clearly we left things up in the air with several of the characters and we want to make sure that the fans don't know what's going to happen so that it doesn't spoil their [enjoyment].

Q: You have at least eight new or recurring characters. How has it been integrating them in the writing?
Kring: A lot of it was planned for and felt fairly natural. So it's a big cast. One of the things that we are doing this year, because we're not asking the audience to start absolutely from scratch, we're not so concerned about every episode having every single character in it. So we're able to sort of pull back in the ebb and flow and let certain characters come to the surface for an episode and sit out an episode.

Q: Are you going to do anything this season for fans who didn't watch last season to be able to jump in and understand what's happening?
Kring: Yes, that is a big part of what we're doing. I mean, one of the things that I sort of learned in the first season was that we called season one Volume One and it was entitled "Genesis." It just happened to be twenty three episodes long. Volume II is entitled "Generations" and it by no means has to be an entire season long. I wouldn't expect it to be an entire season long. In fact we're looking at that volume to end in the middle of the season which allows us to wrap up certain stories and allows us to have new stories begin. So you don't get a sense that if you jump on the train that you're aggressively being pushed off of the train because you don't know what's going on. That's a big concern with us.

Q: Do you see the second season as being two big arch's or do you not know yet about the second half?
Kring: Well, it's designed to be three. We'll see how that works out.

Q: Now that "Heroes" has become a pretty big phenomenon, does that give a little more confidence a little more leeway to start planning arch's far ahead?
Kring: Yeah, to some extent, but I have to tell you that the amount of work, the volume of work, I mean we chewed up a tremendous amount of story in one year and any time that you plan for a story it's almost a given that you will get there much faster than you think you will because this monster just eats constantly. So the best laid plans are always, "Oh, it's great. By mid season we'll be here –" and then sure enough we'll get into the writer's room and you're there by episode six. That's just the nature of the storytelling.

Q: Will Tim Sayle be involved in Season Two?
Kring: Yes, Tim will be staying involved. So, the idea of the paintings is going to have a clever sort of reentry into the show.

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."

Speaking in an interview with Comic Book Resources, series creator Tim Kring discussed the significance of a few events in the season finale of the show as well as shed some light on the first "Heroes" spinoff project.

"We just have branched into a new spinoff, ‘Origins,’ that's really like a whole new kind of animal," Kring said in the interview. "Hopefully that will be something that takes off and will allow us to broaden the franchise a bit. So, I'm still here and plan to stay here."

According to Kring, the spinoff project has been given a six-episode pickup by NBC and will be made up of standalone episodes which focus on characters who have yet to be introduced into the main "Heroes" show. But the real difference about this show is it will have a direct impact on what people see on "Heroes" in Season 2, he said. Apparently, viewers will have the option to decide which "Origins" character makes the jump to "Heroes."

Although Kring will find his talents in a little bit more demand with the spinoff series, he insists that it will in no way impact the quality of "Heroes" and he has no plans to pick up his sandbox toys and run anytime soon.

"There's a true collaborative spirit on ‘Heroes,’" Kring explained. "I realized very early on the only way to mount a show that was this gargantuan and this complicated was to get into the row boat with like-minded and creative people and all try to row in the same direction. So, I've surrounded myself with so many brilliant writers and creative directors. Real visionaries. A lot of my show running style is to delegate quite a bit and I really feel like there is a kind of collective brain that starts to form when you give up the reigns a little bit."

The first season of the series, which has been called "Genesis," was designed specifically to lead up to the events of "How To Stop An Exploding Man." However due to the complicated nature of the seasonal arc the episode was incredibly challenging to write.

"The final episode was so pre-determined by the events that came before it that writing it was a very complicated thing," Kring said. "You were dragging so much story behind you that you had very little wiggle room as to what people could say and how they could say it and what their attitudes were. It was all pre-determined. We looked at the last three episodes as kind of one big movie starting with episode 21, following our departure episode where we went five years in to the future. The final three episodes really are just one big episode."

Aside from bringing all of the seasonal arc together into a neat bundle, what Kring aimed to do with the last episode is take the series back to the beginning. Particularly, concerning the connection between Sylar and the common cockroach.

"It's talked about in the very beginning of the pilot. One of the lines was that a cockroach could remain alive headless for weeks at a time, which a cockroach can do - a fact I always found amazing!" Kring said with a laugh. "So, this idea that we just watched this guy die and clearly somehow dragged himself into a manhole is exactly the signal that perhaps this character is still alive."

To read more of CBR's interview with Kring, check out the entire Q&A by clicking here.