'Heroes' Welcome

A group of ordinary people discover amazing powers, and what they do with those powers can help save the world. “Heroes” has showcased this idea so well that the show has become a sort of savior for the embattled NBC network. Despite many critics' predictions that the series (which airs Monday nights at 9) had only a slender chance for survival, “Heroes” has become a surprise hit.

It seems audiences like the doom-and-gloom premise of “a seemingly random group of individuals” who discover they have extraordinary abilities. This motley group includes a Japanese office dweeb with the power to teleport himself; a junkie artist who paints a very dark future that keeps coming true; a politician and his brother who suddenly can fly; a single mother with a go-for-the-jugular alter-ego; a cop who can hear people’s thoughts and a cheerleader who won’t die no matter what awful thing happens to her.

James Endrst, a New-York based writer and former television critic, recently caught up with the creator/executive producer of “Heroes,” Tim Kring, whose credits include “Crossing Jordan” and “Providence,” to talk about the show’s popularity, and the need for heroes in today’s world.


Is this a story about comic book heroes, or is this about Armageddon? It certainly seems to have that dark cloud hanging over it.

Clearly it’s about both. But I don’t see it as being as dark as that. I see it ultimately as being somewhat hopeful--that the Earth has populated itself with people who are going to do something about these bigger issues. In the first season, we are going to deal with the prophecy of this apocalyptic event that is set up in the pilot. But we will move on to another major idea in the second season.

So the world lives.

If the series wants to live.

Is this about good and evil? About the ordinary man or woman with extraordinary abilities to deal with extraordinary circumstances and times?

The show takes its lineage much more from classic mythology. This is about heroes rising out of obscurity and being forced into a situation where they are presented with a gift. It’s about the whole learning process of trying to figure out how to use that gift and what to use it for. And ultimately it’s about how the hero is drawn to a higher purpose along the way.

How did you decide which superpowers you wanted and which characters those powers would belong to?

I started thinking about the different characters. And many of the powers sort of met the character half way. I knew that I wanted to do a story that involved a single mother who was really struggling to make ends meet and who is really stretched about as far as you could go. And I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting to have the power to be able to be two places at the same time, or to have a protective part of her that comes out, ala Mr. Hyde or the Hulk, that would actually make her life easier?

With the cop character, I started thinking about a lowly beat cop, and I wanted that character to get an ability that would change his life dramatically on the force and allow him to rise up the ranks. I realized that power would be the ability to hear people’s thoughts, because he would instantly know who was telling the truth and who wasn’t, where the money was buried, and where the drugs were stashed.

Hiro, the Japanese character, is an archetype for anybody who feels trapped in a life that’s not of his own making, caught as a worker drone in a sea of cubicles. It’s a drab life that there seems to be no way out of. And he literally has the ability to teleport himself out of that life and into great adventure. So the abilities came out of who the character was.

What about the cheerleader on the other side?

The cheerleader is another character in who the power develops in a strange sort of way. The idea is that teenagers feel they’re invincible and indestructible. And sure enough, the cheerleader is. I was also playing with the idea of being the most popular, of the desire to be popular, and then having to confront an ability that makes you completely different from everybody around you. It’s an exploration of the alienation you feel when the last thing you want to feel as a teenager is different.

Continued on page 2: Your world can turn on a dime... »