Behind the Scenes With Heroes Creator Tim Kring and "Hiro," Masi Oka

[Emma]

Tim Kring has never been much into comic books. As a kid growing up in Santa Maria, California, he was more into running track and playing acoustic guitar. "The idea of the dialog bubbles always bothered me," he says. (That's a major tip-off - a true comics fan knows those things are called speech balloons.)

As an adult, Kring found success as a writer and creator of mainstream TV dramas - Chicago Hope and Providence in the 1990s, Crossing Jordan in 2001. His only brush with geekdom was when, at the age of 24, he sold his first script to the so-lame-it's-cool show Knight Rider.

Now, lo and behold, he's television's lord of the geeks. Kring is the creator of Heroes, the Monday night NBC drama that's one of the few breakout hits of the 2006-07 season. It regularly scores 15 million viewers and ranks in the Nielsen top 20. So how does a guy who doesn't know Magneto from Wolverine find himself running a smash show about ordinary people who suddenly and inexplicably develop amazing superpowers?

In today's increasingly splintered TV landscape, a successful series has to cater to multiple audiences, and Heroes is both a mass-market success and a cult hit. But other TV creators who bridged the mass/niche divide - Lost's JJ Abrams, Ron Moore of Battlestar Galactica, Joss Whedon of Buffy the Vampire Slayer - were intimately familiar with the sci-fi and horror genres they were reinventing. Kring? Not so much. He freely admits that his show was partly an attempt to recreate the success of Lost, which explains why Heroes follows a similar formula: a dozen central characters, a touch of the supernatural, and an overarching mystery with clues dribbled out gradually.

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