here's the article from the new york times. i'm snipping out the things that might be interpreted as spoilers.
It Doesn’t Take a ‘Comic Book Nerd’ to Create a Superheroes HitBy BILL CARTER
October 30, 2006
www.nytimes.com/2006/10/30/arts/television/30hero.htmlLOS ANGELES, Oct. 26 — On Tuesday, after NBC got the ratings for the latest episode of its new serial drama “Heroes,” Kevin Reilly, the president of NBC Entertainment, was ready to make it official.
“We have the only real hit of the fall, and it’s growing,” Mr. Reilly said.
ABC would argue about “Ugly Betty,” which until Oct. 23, when “Heroes” overtook it, had pulled in more overall viewers. But “Betty” has always been well behind “Heroes” in the younger-viewer categories that advertisers desire, which ABC, like NBC, uses as its chief measuring stick of success.
That “Heroes” broke through came as a surprise in some quarters; but NBC, putting more marketing effort behind “Heroes” than any other fall series, had pegged it, Mr. Reilly said, as its best hope.
All of those expectations rested on the slim shoulders of Tim Kring, a veteran writer and producer whose previous credits would hardly have foretold the creation of a show so sublimely in tune with the Internet-television-comic-book nexus that it was the hit of last summer’s Comic-Con International convention in San Diego.
When Mr. Kring and the cast appeared there for a screening of the pilot, the reaction was electric. “The first thing I saw was a guy jumping up and down with a horn coming out of his head,” Mr. Kring said. “The next thing I saw was a 400-pound Harry Potter sitting there with a wand.”
The series, which plays on Monday nights, has continued to exploit the comic-book association through its Web site (nbc.com/heroes), which offers a digital comic-book version of the series and regular interviews between comic-book publications and members of the “Heroes” cast and writing staff.
One of those writers is Jeph Loeb, a longtime friend of Mr. Kring, who is also a highly regarded writer of comics, including “X-Men” and “Batman.” Mr. Kring has also had a long working relationship with Damon Lindelof, another comic enthusiast, better known as one of the creators of “Lost.”
All of this makes it sound as if Mr. Kring comes from the same comic heritage — except he doesn’t. Mr. Kring, who is 49, has a résumé filled with shows that someone who likes to dress like Harry Potter would not likely ever become obsessed with.
The series he previously created for NBC, “Crossing Jordan,” is unabashedly mainstream television, based mainly in murder mysteries.
“I was not a comic book nerd,” Mr. Kring said, sipping an iced tea with lemonade in a restaurant near the studio lot here where “Heroes” is shot. “But the truth is that nowadays that world is so pervasive, especially when you have kids, that you go to movies in the summertime and that’s what you see. I didn’t really feel like I had to come from that world.”
The world Mr. Kring comes from seems almost antithetical to the comic traditions. He was a religious-studies major who somehow turned that interest into a master’s degree in filmmaking.
After several years getting by as a camera operator, Mr. Kring made a move in the mid-1980s into script writing, starting on one of the signature schlock shows of the 1980s, “Knight Rider.” For the next decade Mr. Kring built up credentials as a reliable writer of television movies before moving onto more high-quality series, like “Chicago Hope” on CBS. Eventually he landed as a writer and producer on the NBC series “Providence.”
Angela Bromstad, president of NBC Universal Television Studio, said, “I began to notice that every time Tim wrote a script for ‘Providence’ it was one of their best episodes.” Ms. Bromstad encouraged NBC to sign Mr. Kring to develop his own shows.
The first idea Mr. Kring hatched centered on a young woman who worked as a small-town sheriff. But the studio was looking for a show about a female medical examiner. Jordan Cavanaugh morphed into an Irish-Catholic medical examiner in Boston.
“Jordan” did well by NBC for five years, never a huge hit but always dependable. That encouraged NBC Universal to want more from Mr. Kring.
Like many writers he felt hemmed in by the conventions of series television. “The kind of closed-end TV that all of us have done for years is not what a lot of writers want to do,” Mr. Kring said.
He noted the emergence of shows like “24” and “Lost.” Mr. Kring said: “I wanted to do a large, ensemble saga. I was intrigued by these other shows that were working and this kind of Dickensian storytelling, with chapters unfolding one after another.”
But what kind of story would merit that treatment? “You know how when you raise kids you think about how complicated the world is compared to when you were a kid?” Mr. Kring said. “The world is a very big and scary place now. So I started to think about what’s missing. And what was missing was the idea of heroes.”
That’s where the notion of superheroes came in, though he had no interest in anybody “donning a costume.” Instead, he said, he wanted to make ordinary people suddenly extraordinary.
Mr. Kring called on Mr. Loeb (years earlier they had collaborated on that memorable film “Teen Wolf Too”), visiting his office on Ventura Boulevard. They walked for four miles discussing the series idea. “It turned out that everything I was thinking about had been done not only once but 50 times by every comic book in the world,” Mr. Kring said. “I was smacking into some sort of big archetypes.”
Still, Mr. Loeb was encouraging. So was Mr. Lindelof. Mr. Kring decided he could use the familiar archetypes of sudden superpowers as long as he ensured “it was about the characters and how it affected them.”
He said he first created the characters and then fit a superpower to them: a single mother who could be in two places at once, a teenager trying to be like her friends, except she learns that she is indestructible.
Mr. Kring ran into one issue. “I had a nagging feeling that the show was getting too dark in that the characters were all burdened by these abilities. There was just a lot of angst.”
He turned to his wife, who had an inspiration: Why not add a character somehow based in the Japanese comic-book genre known as manga?
Mr. Kring came up with what is now likely the show’s most popular character, the Japanese-speaking office worker who can stop time and teleport himself — a character, not coincidentally, named Hiro. “I wanted somebody to embrace the idea that this was happening to him,” Mr. Kring said.
Hiro became not only a character thrilled to prove he was destined to do the extraordinary, but also comic relief.
Mr. Kring said the show uses angles familiar from comics and graphic novels, like close-ups shot upward from the floor. The show’s on-screen lettering, including the inevitable closing “To be continued,” was taken directly from fonts created by Tim Sale, Mr. Loeb’s artist partner on comics.
With an audience of 14.3 million on Oct. 23, more than the comic-obsessed are watching now. Whether they will continue will obviously depend on how the stories play out. Mr. Kring said he had not laid out five years’ worth of plot twists.
“A show has a life of its own,” he said. “If you’re willing to listen to it, it will take you where it wants to be.”
That said, he did acknowledge that he knows exactly where the current season is going. [vague spoilers snipped]
And of course after that it’s “to be continued.”