Tuesday morning, following the season finale, “How To Stop An Exploding Man,” Tim Kring and CBR’s Jonah Weiland spent an hour on the phone conducting something of a post-game report.

They discussed the journey he’s taken with this show, the season finale, what effect, if any, “Heroes” had on the cancellation of his other program, “Crossing Jordan,” his newly prominent role in American pop culture and much, much more.

Here’s a portion of part one (of two) You can read the whole interview at
www.comicbookresources.com

Yeah, very odd. So, as we begin our chat today I ask that you indulge me for a moment. Before “Heroes” began you were Tim Kring, respected TV writer/creator. You had a successful series going into its sixth season on the air in “Crossing Jordan.” Your résumé is rather extensive and includes work on shows like “Providence” and “Chicago Hope.” By any measurement, prior to “Heroes” you were in an envious position in Hollywood. Now, here we are, a year or so after you first pitched “Heroes” and had the show picked up by NBC and you’re still that same respected TV creator, but now you add world builder and the man behind what has been a major contribution to pop culture. Can you talk a bit about how your life has changed through this “Heroes” journey both personally and professionally?

Well, god, that’s a really interesting question. The truth is that the work is very similar whether you’re on a show that few people are watching or a lot of people are watching or one that becomes a phenomenon. The actual work of doing the show is very similar. It’s usually more work than you can imagine doing and because the nature of the work is that you’re several months ahead of where the audience reaction is - when they are watching an episode you’ve moved past that by often 10-12 weeks - so the brush fires and the daily dealings of your job have very little to do with what America is reacting to at the moment. So, there’s this odd sort of disconnect between where you are in your life and where they are.

The truth is, like I said, the work is so difficult that every once in a while you look up from the computer or come out of the dark cave of an editing room to find out that people are really loving the show and it just feels kind of anecdotal more than anything else. It’s odd. You work really hard on a show all week long, then you go to a grocery store on a Saturday and you see a magazine with “Heroes” all over the cover of it. It’s all a very odd disconnect between your daily life and what’s happening outside of it.

The more serious answer is I had what I thought was huge success in having a show on the air [”Crossing Jordan”] for six seasons that was wholly created by me and was used to running a show with a few hundred employees. So, I couldn’t imagine it feeling any bigger than that. The other truth of it is that it’s never gotten better or more heady than the first time I sold an episode of television in 1985 when I sold an episode of “Knight Rider.” That has never been topped.

That’s still the biggest moment for you? Despite a show that generated five alternate covers on “Entertainment Weekly,” that “Knight Rider” script is still the top moment for you?

Oh yeah. Well, it wasn’t the “Knight Rider” script, but it was the idea that I could make that much money for a weeks worth of work and that I actually knew that was a career. It was the first time I realized this was what my career was going to be. It was such a validation of a lot of years of work and that has never quite been replaced by any other success.

Let’s talk for a bit about the finale. First off, in these final three episodes some very big things happened. Numerous characters died, numerous characters stepped up to the plate. Old questions were answered and new answers were posed. Obviously you had all been working towards this conclusion, something very close to this ending, but how much of this final episode changed before you arrived there? For instance, did you ever have another ending planned for season one?

No, in fact it’s pretty much the opposite of what you’re asking.

How so?

The final episode was so pre-determined by the events that came before it that writing it was a very complicated thing. We were just talking about this in the writers room before you called as we were doing a post-mortem on the show following watching it on the air last night and talking about what we don’t want to duplicate and what we do want to duplicate in the future. The writing of this particular episode was extremely difficult because in some ways, for me it was more like taking dictation than writing an episode of television. Everything was so slotted in. You were dragging so much story behind you that you had very little wiggle room as to what people could say and how they could say it and what their attitudes were. It was all pre-determined. We looked at the last three episodes as kind of one big movie starting with episode #21, following our departure episode where we went five years in to the future. The final three episodes really are just one big episode.

The stories in this final run were broken a couple of months ago and we slotted almost everything into it. The idea of the flash back or the dream sequence of Peter going back to the rooftop and seeing himself in the finale is maybe the one piece that was added later. It was determined that the story had become such a freight train that you needed something to help you breathe and I also felt very strongly that the message of the show had to be imparted by one of the characters, so that scene delivered that message.
Plus, it was great to have Richard Roundtree back.

Exactly!

Shows grow organically over time and that’s certainly been the case with “Heroes.” HRG went from being a guest star to a regular and critical character in the series. Mohinder de-aged and became the original character’s son. Can you give us a peak behind the curtain of things that might have been if - and excuse me for borrowing a phrase from the writers room - if Tim Kring-Prime hadn’t made the decisions he did?

Well, the most obvious would be the advent of this terrorist story that was woven into the original pilot. The bomb that ultimately goes off or is prevented from going off in New York was actually attached to a terrorist story and at the heart of that terrorist story was a very sympathetic character, a middle-eastern engineer. A young, very brilliant engineer who had become disillusioned and disenfranchised and finds himself involved with a terrorist cell and is basically the architect of the bomb. That character could actually generate and emit a tremendous amount of radioactivity through his hands. That character became Ted on our show once we moved away from the terrorist story. The terrorist story was actually shot and beautifully finished, but it never saw the light of day. It didn’t make it past the screenings at the network. That entire storyline would have been an extremely different story. In retrospect, I am fairly relieved it went away. Now, at the time, I had to replace it with a story that I didn’t know what it would be, I had to come up with entirely new stuff after having already worked it out, but in time I came to be relieved that I wouldn’t be living with a terrorist story every day of my life. You take a lot of this stuff home with you every night and I’m glad not to be taking that home.

Especially in today’s day and age.

In the “Tim Kring Cut” of the original pilot, Matt Parkman (Greg Grunberg) had an entirely different origin and Ted Sprague (Matthew John Armstrong) wasn’t even a character in the show.
Exactly and my whole thing was I thought it would be a relevant story and a relevant story to deal with some of the complexities of the issue by having a character who you felt very ambivalent about because you understood him and felt for him. It was built into a redemption story. He would have been the one who helped stop this from happening. Again, it was part of the theme to try and depict people from different parts of the world in positive ways. That’s the one thing I can definitely point to.

And that sequence will end up on the DVD collection?

Yes, it’ll be in the uncut 72 minute pilot, what they’re calling the “Tim Kring Cut.” And it actually is the reason why Greg Grunberg’s character, Matt Parkman, wasn’t introduced in the pilot because his character was actually attached to that story. So, when we cut that story out we had to cut his story as well and find an entirely new way to introduce him, which I don’t feel was done nearly as elegantly as I would have liked. We backed into some really complicated stuff to introduce Greg’s character.

(end of part One) Part Two to be posted tomorrow.

Source: www.comicbookresources.com