TV Hero: Tim Kring Readies Season Two of NBC Hit Heroes

From mediaweek.com

TV Hero: Tim Kring Readies Season Two of NBC Hit Heroes

by A.J. Frutkin

Heroes creator Tim Kring shows off his new iPhone to a guest in his office. First, he conferences two separate callers onto his line. Next, he gets on the Web, and heads to a site offering guitar lessons (Kring is an avid strummer and guitar collector). Then he shifts to the iPod, noting he's already downloaded—what else?—Heroes' pilot episode.

But for all its super-powers, the iPhone still lacks one thing Kring craves. "I'd like to be in multiple places at once," he says. "That would be very helpful."

After last season's success with the series, Kring has observed he no longer manages a show. He manages a brand. Indeed, there are Heroes-related downloads, Webisodes, online games and a graphic novel. A line of high-end, Heroes-related merchandise will be available in the NBC Experience store this fall. The DVD release of season one hits shelves nationally on Aug. 28. The series itself has been licensed in approximately 150 foreign territories. In fact, Kring and the cast leave on a world tour Aug. 25 to promote both the DVD release and some of those overseas broadcasts.

Stateside, Kring goes into production on 24 more episodes of Heroes, plus six episodes of Heroes: Origins. And he knows next season has got to be as good as the last—if not better. Either way, he says, "A second season of this show can't look like the first season of the show." To that end, Heroes made a number of casting announcements earlier this summer, adding three new regulars and ten new recurring characters to the show. Kring acknowledges that with the entry of new roles comes the exit of old ones. As to whom he'll kill off, though, Kring is undecided.

"It's just that so many of these characters really popped," he says. "But one of the blessings—and curses—of the show is that it defies expectations on a weekly basis. It lives or dies by these moments where the audience says, 'Wow, I didn't see that coming.'"

Along with defying expectations, part of the impetus to up the ante on Heroes also is due to the surprising ratings drop it suffered last spring. On April 23, after seven weeks off the air, Heroes returned with the first of its final set of original episodes. But it drew only 12 million viewers—a 19 percent drop from its seasonal average of 14.8 million viewers. The broadcast scored a 5.3/13 among adults 18-49—marking a 20 percent decline in the demo from its 6.6/15 average.

Kring offers several reasons for that drop, including an earlier introduction of daylight savings time and the increased competition offered by ABC's spring cycle of Dancing With the Stars. He also says the show's scheduling may have contributed to its ratings drop.

Long before NBC knew whether Heroes would be a hit last year, the network had fanned out the show's 23 original episodes over the course of the 36-week season. Consequently, the series aired in what Kring refers to as pods, with cliffhangers carrying viewers from one pod to the next. And for much of the season, it worked. That is, until the final break in March and April, before the last run of original episodes.

"The biggest issue was the idea of breaking the habit of a habit-forming show," Kring says. "Like any addiction, if you break that addiction, it's hard to jump back on." Kring's previous series, NBC's crime procedural Crossing Jordan, offered close-ended stories, whereas Heroes' are serialized in nature. And, in a 36-week season, Kring sees a vast difference between the two formats. "I think a close-ended show has an easier time," he continues. "You can put in a rerun and it does okay. But on a show like [Heroes], where you can't really rerun the episode, you're just out of sight and out of mind."

Other contributing factors to the show's ratings decline, Kring says, were the numerous storylines that he and his writing staff found themselves having to wrap up by season's end. "This idea of having to pay off things in episode 23 that we'd set up in episode 1," he says. "It got very complicated to drag that much story behind us."

So much so that Kring has restructured season two to include several so-called volumes. The show's initial volume, Heroes: Genesis, ran from September through May last season. Volume 2—Heroes: Generations—will be shorter, ending in December, at which point Volume 3 will begin.

Kring believes the structural change will tighten the show's writing. "This idea of volumes allows us to tell stories in a slightly shorter arc than you would normally do in a season," he says. "This way, we can end a storyline when we determine if it's the end of a storyline."

Even as NBC saw ratings decline for Heroes at the end of last season, network execs knew they would need to rely on Heroes throughout the coming season, as they once again will try to pull themselves out of the ratings basement. So, rather than tighten up Heroes' schedule and air it in a contiguous fashion, as Fox does with 24, NBC announced last spring that it would bulk up Heroes' output by producing Heroes: Origins, an anthology series initially comprised of six episodes, each of which will introduce new characters. Based on fan feedback, some characters could live on either in the series or on other platforms.

"The show posits a world where these characters are popping up all over the place," Kring says. "So why not carve out a separate series-within-the-series that could focus on the origin stories of some of the characters whom we don't know." With the addition of Origins, the show expands from 24 to 30 episodes for the season. And even though buyers have supported NBC's move, some still question whether upping production might negatively impact the series as a whole.

"The show could gain in creativity or it could suffer," says John Rash, Campbell Mithun's chief broadcast negotiator. "To the degree that Heroes, or any program, is the unique vision of an individual, it can make an already taxing task even harder to keep up with."

Ben Silverman agrees. The recently appointed co-chairman of NBC Entertainment admits Heroes is carrying a lot of weight for the network. But he believes Kring is up to the task. "Tim is a great executive producer," says Silverman. "And he knows how to manage it."

Despite his role as Heroes' creator, Kring says the show is less the product of his vision than it is that of his entire creative staff. And so, to avoid adding to his staff's workload, Kring is looking to outside writers for help on Origins. At last month's Comic-Con, the annual convention of comic book and fantasy fans held in San Diego, Kring announced that indie filmmaker Kevin Smith (Clerks) will write and direct one of Origins' episodes.

"The real key is to try and not tax the production here," Kring says. "But to carve out an entirely separate production, with an entirely separate team of writers, directors, and crew—except for a couple of people at the top. Because I really believe that even though it does not necessarily connect that tightly to the world of Heroes, it still occupies that same world."

As Origins gets off the ground, Kring has begun formulating what this anthology series might look like. With only six episodes airing, Kring knows he's got to hook viewers quickly. "If we're going to dig in and tell one story [per episode], I'm a little wary of that. Maybe that character doesn't connect and doesn't land. So how do you get traction in only two weeks?" he asks, rhetorically.

The answer, he believes, may be in telling two stories per episode, perhaps with each crossing over to the other. And they don't have to be 30 minutes. "You could do one 38-minute story, and one 12-minute story," Kring says.

In hopes of avoiding the type of effects-driven look that Heroes demands, Kring also is hoping to scale back production on the anthology series. "Because it's all about character and all about what happens to these people at the first blush of discovery, you could very easily tell a story that takes place on a bus going down [Los Angeles'] Wilshire Boulevard."

A lingering question about Origins regards when it will air in the season. To get the biggest bang out of the original series, conventional wisdom might have assumed NBC would run Origins in that March/April bloc, and hold the Heroes season finale for May sweeps. But as it stands, the network is planning to run Heroes continuously, and follow it with Origins' six episodes. "We have gone back and forth on this," says Katherine Pope, president of Universal Media Studios, which produces the series. "But the plan is still the plan."

Kring has known Pope since Crossing Jordan. It was his first pilot—and hers, as an executive. Kring first took Heroes to Pope. For advertisers, Kevin Reilly, NBC's former entertainment chief, is widely perceived as having championed the series. But Kring says he has relied more on Pope, adding her continued presence on the show helped ease the news of Reilly's departure.

Now, Reilly's oversight on the series falls to Ben Silverman, who counts himself among Heroes' many fans. "This is a very strong and important franchise for the network," he says. "So I'm going to give it all the attention that is required, vis-à-vis marketing it, and making sure it gets everything it needs."

Despite last spring's ratings drop, Silverman also believes the show can grow. "You make sure you save some marketing dollars to use against it," he says. "And the fact that Heroes is an established series this season always helps. You hope to see more pop—that people who didn't see it last season, will want to see it this season," he continues.

"It's easier to grab those viewers when a show starts in the fall. Sometimes they don't want to join midway through the season. So I think there's a real opportunity to expand out from the show's group of loyal viewers."

It was Dennis Hammer who bought Kring the iPhone. "He likes toys," says Hammer, who has been Kring's business partner for about eight years. Hammer describes Kring's creative method as one of collaboration. "We have a saying," Hammer adds. "If you're ego-driven with lots of drama, you don't do well in Kringsville."

Kring's democratic approach to TV production may come from having spent years in the trenches as a writer. In fact, his leap from Crossing Jordan to Heroes seems less anomalous knowing that his first TV job was on the pseudo-sci-fi cop show Knight Rider, after which he wrote the TV horror movie Bay Coven and the feature comedy Teen Wolf Too.

Heroes' success has catapulted Kring to a short list of A-tier creators who wield enormous power in Hollywood. And the creative freedom that he's achieved still seems to come as a surprise. "For many years in my career, I never made a decision. I went wherever there was a job. I still remember the first time I had to choose between two jobs," he says, noting it was two TV movies. "And I realized after 12 years of writing, that I was completely ill-equipped to make these kinds of decisions."

With one of the most lucrative development deals in TV history, Kring, 50, seems more prepared to choose. Although he hasn't set upon an idea to follow Heroes, he says the show's success on multiple platforms has opened his eyes to emerging formats. "I think you would be very remiss to go in and pitch a show nowadays that does not have some thought placed on how it is going to tell stories in some of these alternate platforms," he says. "The old model of making a show and selling it into syndication and rerunning it just doesn't work anymore. And as people get their entertainment on iPods and cell phones and computers, the new model has to be able to tell stories on all these multiple platforms."

Heroes, he adds, was designed to do just that. And so will his next project—whatever it turns out to be. "We're approaching a time when the audience finds their entertainment in a very different way," he says. "I'm very interested in the idea of where it's all going next, and trying to be right there. I don't want to be the guy who missed the wave when it hit the shore."