Tim Kring on ‘Heroes Reborn’: ‘We’re Treating This as the 10th Season’

If you’re confused about where Heroes Reborn will pick up when it premieres, just know that it won’t be directly after the events of the original Heroes fourth and final season.

The show’s creator and executive producer cleared up the amount of time that’s passed since the end of Heroes and the beginning of Heroes Reborn. “This is not the fifth season; we’re treating this as the 10th season — as if there were stories in between. I’d always wanted to tell the story of what happened in that time,” Kring told reporters at the Television Critics Association’s summer press tour.

“The show ended and we didn’t know we were going off the air,” he said. “We left at a time where Hayden Panettiere [who played Claire] for four seasons, the whole world had never known there were people with powers in the world and we ended on a scene where she outs that there were people with powers. It was almost an obligatory baton pass to where we needed to go from there. Because we didn’t get to have that fifth season, I had in my mind that there was an unfinished [piece] of this. We now have the benefit of being five years later — and we’re starting the show … [with that’s] how much time has passed. We’re saying the exact amount of time that [Heroes has] been off, is the amount of time the story moved.”

Speaking of the cheerleader who started it all, fans shouldn’t look for her character to pop up at any time during the series…as Claire Bennett died a year before the show picks up.

“In the real world of the story, [Claire Bennet] died a year prior to our story starting,” Kring said. “That gets into some of the mythology that’s attached to the original show.”

Guess they didn’t save the cheerleader…so what’s happened to the world since then?

Are you ready to find out when the show returns? Let us know in the comments below!

Heroes Reborn will now premiere as a two-hour event on Thursday, Sept. 24 from 8 to 10 p.m. ET on NBC.

Photo Credit: NBC