Tim Kring

February 2, 2009 World Screen

The thousands of Heroes fans who were in attendance at Comic-Con this year received an unexpected treat when Tim Kring announced that they were about to see the entire first episode of the new season, months before its TV launch. The verdict was a standing ovation. It was good news for a show that had been off the air for months as a result of the writers’ strike. In the interim, there have been lots of ways for Heroes fans to maintain their connection with the series, from T-shirts and jewelry to action figures, comic books and webisodes. Kring talks about the evolution of the brand in its third “volume,” Villains.



WS: What are your plans for the show in its third season?
KRING: The show is divided into volumes. Volume one just happened to be one season long. The second season was going to be three volumes, but we got curtailed by the writers’ strike. Villains is 13 episodes long. It runs through the early part of December. We then take a break for about 6 or 7 weeks and then we come back for the next volume, which will be 12 episodes long. The idea is that 95 percent of the questions that are asked in the beginning of the volume will be answered by the end of the volume. Serialized storytelling has a certain amount of challenges. The big challenge is, How do you keep an audience interested for a long period of time? When you have a whole season of a story or several seasons of one story, you invariably have to stall. With these smaller volumes we don’t have to stall, we can hit an action-packed pace and go from there. In this third volume, we are starting with a tremendous amount of adrenaline rather than building a story slowly, like we did in the first two volumes. 
The idea is we’re unleashing some villains into the world that need to be taken care of. But more importantly, the show has always presented a basic theory that these are ordinary people, and ordinary people are forced to make certain decisions in their lives. Every one of our core characters is faced with a choice to make—whether they’re good or bad—and they will be put into positions where they will have to make that choice. When we first started the show, the characters asked very basic, almost primal questions: Who am I? What’s happening to me? How am I connected to these other people? Where do these powers come from? We answered all those questions in some way, shape or form. In this third volume, we take every one of those questions and we turn them on their head and we reframe them and we re-answer them. 


WS: During the strike, was it frustrating for you, not being in production, or did you enjoy having the free time to think about where you wanted to take the show?
KRING: It was very much both of those. I felt badly for the crew and the cast and people who get paid on a week-to-week basis who were suddenly unemployed. And it was hard to not be telling [the story of] the rest of the season, which we wanted to tell. It’s like watching a movie and having the projector break 40 minutes in. There was a certain amount of frustration there. If there was a silver lining, it was that we did get to take some time away to assess what it was that we wanted to do next. You just need time away to be able to look at it from afar and see what it is you did right and what you did wrong and what you want to change and where you think you can improve. 


WS: When we spoke last year, you mentioned that running Heroes was a bit like being the CEO of a company. How do you manage the show and all of its various extensions?
KRING: There are literally a half a dozen of us at the top who share a tremendous amount of responsibility, and because of the size and scale and pace of it, it’s almost like being in wartime! You’re making decisions on the fly and in hallways and on the stairwell on the way to a meeting. You cross paths every once in a while and bark out orders to each other and then go in different directions. It’s a real three-ring circus! But the truth is there are divisions within the ‘company,’ if that’s what it’s called! (Laughs) We have a whole separate division that handles most of our online content. The show is owned by the studio, [which] is very invested in trying to find ways to expand the brand, as well. It’s kind of a cross-pollination. We come up with ideas. They come up with ideas. What’s interesting for me is that I didn’t come from a background of running a large enterprise. I didn’t go to business school. There was literally no training at all. You just invent the wheel every day. 


WS: How involved are you in all of the various brand extensions?
KRING: Here’s the key thing, and this is probably the most important thing I’ll say. A show like Heroes has such a fragile relationship with its fans. There is a very tenuous thread that connects the show to the fan base, and that thread can be severed very easily by anything that feels as though it is phony or overly crass or just does not feel authentic to the brand. Therefore, it becomes extremely important that everything that is generated—
merchandise or online content or a comic book—be vetted by the creative forces of the show, which, by all accounts, is the 
writers’ room. This is an intense, passionate fan base that will turn on you very quickly. 
Another thing that is important is that everything that goes out must feed the mythology of the show. Let’s say that we put out a piece of merchandise that is a replica of the sword that Hiro Nakamura uses; on the back of that box will be a little story about the sword that is additive to the canon of the show. Another philosophy is that there are no wasted parts. A great example of that is when we killed off a character named Charlie. We created an entire [graphic] novel about the intervening time that Hiro spent with Charlie. 
What is really exciting is that both ends start to feed one another. There are characters that have been created online, have a life online and then feed back in to the show. There are characters that have dropped off of the show and then have whole story lines online. 


WS: You mentioned how devoted the fan base is. What was it like having the entire Heroes cast on tour last year and being able to engage with your audiences in that way?
KRING: It was an amazing experience! You have to understand, when you work on a television show, you work in a very isolated environment, and usually not a very nice environment! (Laughs) It’s dingy sound stages, people come to work in their sweat pants and they get dressed up in these fancy costumes and then they go home in their sweat pants. It’s a surreal existence because you make the show completely in a bubble. It doesn’t have anything to do with the real world whatsoever. To venture out into the real world and to be recognized and lauded is really a very strange experience. 


WS: Would you consider doing it again?
KRING: Masi [Oka, who plays Hiro] just went to Japan. We just sent a couple of actors down to Australia for four days. I went to the U.K. We’re reaching out to the [international] territories [that air the series]. But to be really honest, the show has been off the air for nine months, so every single effort of ours is concentrated on relaunching it. You hope the audience is there, you hope they come back and until they do, everything has to be on hold. 


WS: It must have been satisfying to get that reception at Comic-Con for the first episode.
KRING: That is a kind of marketing and promotion that money can’t buy—entering an episode like that to the fans, close to three months before it airs. [We received] a tremendous amount of buzz. It starts a viral whisper campaign, if you will. Just watching from politics, we know how dangerous and how volatile a whisper campaign can be, both in the positive and the negative. All it takes is for somebody to start saying, “I hear the show is terrible this year,” and pretty soon that becomes a reality, whether it’s terrible or not. By the same extension, [by fans] talking about how great the show is this year, that can be hugely effective for us in generating that zeitgeist buzz that can’t be done any other way.