Tim Krings talks about Heroes, its success and downfall

One of my favorite shows of the past 10 years was Heroes, I was crushed when the show got canceled. For me personally I didn’t think the show was a failure and I stood by it till the very end. I have always wondered though, where did things really go wrong? In a recent interview it’s creator Tim Kring has revealed his personal thoughts and feelings on the show’s success and it’s downfall.

When asked why Heroes was such an initial success he said: “We tapped into a zeitgeist that enjoyed this postmodern take on what a hero was. We’ve come not to rely on government to save us so it posited the idea: ‘What if someone very ordinary possessed powers that could save the world?’ We also put a message of interconnectivity and global consciousness into the show that connected with people. Characters represented different cultures and nationalities, which struck a chord with people.”

He spoke how why he thought the show lost viewers so rapidly: “It’s hard to sustain something that’s a zeitgeist phenomenon. Things burn bright and short these days. We did an awful lot of episodes – 24 a season – which is difficult to do. A little less of it might have gone a longer way. People talked about the first season because it was new. Once the initial premise has been explored and the characters come to terms with what’s happening to them, once those questions have been answered, the questions that are asked after that are less interesting.”

He commented on the future for genre shows: “The last series of Lost was panned and FlashForward didn’t last long… There are so many different things to watch that to invest in a show that asks a million questions and doesn’t deliver many answers for an extended period of time is a lot to ask for. A zombie series called The Walking Dead just launched here, which was a huge success because it was good quality – but also because it was only six episodes long. People knew it wasn’t a huge time commitment. It gave it more of a sense of an event rather than a series that would go on for years and years.”

Source: Metro

Marcella Papandrea

Film nerd extraordinaire from the land down under.

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