Tim Kring

By Mansha Daswani

April 2007

NBC has been able to
regain some of its luster among the coveted 18-to-49 demographic this year, and
much of that turnaround is due to Heroes, a show about a group of ordinary
individuals who discover they have extraordinary powers. It is one of the
highest-rated new shows of the season, generating catchphrases and a collection
of merchandise, as well as spawning an online presence that has become the
centerpiece of NBC’s “TV 360” digital strategy. It was the first new NBC drama
to get a full-season order, and the first to be renewed for a second run. For
creator Tim Kring, Heroes, with
its interlocking story lines, provided a new challenge—serialized
drama—after cutting his teeth on shows like Chicago Hope and Providence before creating the popular NBC crime drama Crossing
Jordan. He tells World Screen about the genesis, and evolution, of a show that
is high up on many buyers’ wish lists this year.

WS: How did
you come up with the idea for Heroes?

KRING: I had a
development deal [with NBC], so I was supposed to come up with something! I had
Crossing Jordan on the air and
I was trying first and foremost to do something different. I wanted to connect
with an audience in a very big way. Also, I’m raising two small kids now, and I
was thinking about the world that they’re going to inherit and how complicated
it is, how troublesome it is. The issues just seem to be huge and
overwhelming—things like global warming, diminishing natural resources
and terrorism. What was missing in their world was some idea of heroes that
could do something about these larger issues. That led me away from the normal
cop show and law show and medical show—although those are certainly
heroes, they can effect change in a small way. I was thinking about what could
lead to a bigger change, and that led me to the idea of superpowers. That was
the genesis of it, wanting to make a statement about hope and about healing, as
pretentious as that may sound for a television show! When you get lucky you do
reach a large enough audience to use it as a pulpit for saying something.

I also was very fascinated
by the idea of the large ensemble saga. Most writers are interested in telling
continuing story lines—it’s only that the networks had forced everybody
into this closed-ended storytelling so they can syndicate the show. Most
writers would love to write that kind of stuff because you can really dig in
and tell a much longer, arcing, deeper story. I was interested in that and in
telling a story in almost a Dickensian way. Charles Dickens wrote most of his
great novels as one-chapter installments. There’s something fascinating about
that kind of storytelling, where you’re telling a story a little bit without a
net.

WS: How has
that transition been for you, after doing a procedural crime drama?

KRING: It was a
very, very jarring transition, and it really forced me to stretch different muscles.
But for many, many years I was a freelance writer and I wrote several things a
year, and every time I took another assignment I’d stretch in a different way.
So this idea of stretching and reinventing myself is something that I’m fairly
used to.

WS: How did you
determine what power each character would have?

KRING: I
started with the idea of completely anonymous people and I was fascinated by
the idea that these people could be like you or me or someone we went to school
with or our next-door neighbor. They’re not necessarily extraordinary people.
They’re very, very ordinary people. I wanted to have a cop character and for
him to be the lowliest of cops, the beat cop. When we first meet him he’s
relegated to directing traffic in front of a crime scene. He’s not even allowed
in the crime scene! I started to think about what power would allow him to rise
up the ranks in the police force in an interesting way. It just seemed to me
that the best power you could have as a cop would be to be able to read other
people’s thoughts. Along with that power comes the flip side of it, which is,
when you hear people’s thoughts, you hear what they’re thinking about you.

You take the Japanese
office worker. That character was actually developed fairly late, after I had
written the first draft. I realized that all of the characters had approached
their newfound power with tremendous angst and trepidation. The original idea
was that this would be played as real as possible. What would happen if you
woke up and you could hear people’s thoughts—you’d think you were having
a schizophrenic breakdown. With all of these characters dealing with it in a
very realistic way, there was a heaviness to it. I decided I wanted one
character who would embrace it with zeal and enthusiasm, and I started thinking
of a character who was trapped. He exemplified that by working in a sea of
cubicles. He was just an office worker, trapped in a maze of a life that he
didn’t want. The power that would be most appealing to that character would be
the ability to teleport himself into adventures.

These are all archetypes,
they seemed to connect very quickly and very immediately with the audience.
I’ve watched some of these other serialized shows this year and I couldn’t tell
one character from the next. The most you could do is, he’s a little skinnier
than the other guy and she’s a little prettier than the other one.

WS: Do you
already have your second season mapped out?

KRING: I
have the larger tent-pole ideas of where the show is going. Anybody who says
they know exactly where everything is going, they’ve got it all mapped out, is
either a liar or a fool! One has to look at this as a very organic process. The
show tells you where it wants to go and if you don’t listen to it, it can be a
very frustrating thing. You can have the best-laid plans of getting two
characters together and sure enough you get those actors together and they have
no chemistry. You’ve just locked yourself into a 12-episode arc with people who
have no chemistry. You have to be able to say, well, he doesn’t have chemistry
with her but he really has chemistry with that one over there, let’s go in that
direction!

Also, you can’t imagine
how much story you eat up in a show like this. It’s almost impossible to have
it mapped out. If you know where it’s going, you’ll get there too quickly,
you’ll eat it up too quickly.

WS: What are
the differences between managing a large, ensemble-driven show like Heroes, versus Crossing Jordan?

KRING: [Heroes
is] a much larger production than Crossing
Jordan; it has huge Internet and
merchandising and ancillary material. It’s like being the CEO of a big company.
It’s a giant ship right now.

WS: How
important are the online components of Heroes?

KRING: We have
been running an online comic book concurrently with each episode. It enhances
what you’re watching—a side story about a character that helps you know
more about them. We also have an online ­experience/game, sort of a treasure hunt, where you
follow a trail that you’re being led on and you gain little nuggets of
knowledge along the way.

WS: What impact
do the online initiatives have on the show itself?

KRING: We are
driving one towards the other. We just launched a character in the comic book and
that character has now made an appearance on the show. Also, the storytelling
is quite different from anything else that’s being done on television. Some of
it is a reaction to stuff that’s been done on television that people have
complained about. We try to answer questions along the way and make sure that
something happens every week. One of the big complaints about a lot of these
[serialized] shows is that you have to wait too long for something to happen.
We made a pact with the audience very early on—if you watch the show
something will happen every week.

WS: I’ve read
that you like to have a cliff-hanger at the end of every episode.

KRING: Well,
you definitely want something that is a burning question or fact. [You want the
viewer to get to the ending and say] “I’ve got to come back, I need to know
what happens next.”

WS: Are you
working on any other projects?

KRING: No, not
at all. I’m working primarily on Heroes. I handed over the day-to-day running of Crossing Jordan, although I still oversee it. My official role is
tiebreaker! It will probably be another year before I start venturing into
something else. This needs a lot of tending.