Heroes creator admits the show is ‘broken’

Mike November 9th, 2007 Television

It’s great when shows aren’t going well and the writers and producers behind it actually admit their mistakes, listen to the critics and do something about it.

Such is the case with Heroes‘ creator Tim Kring, who spoke with Entertainment Weekly on Monday of this week. With a 15% loss in ratings from last year at this point, the show has suffered a creative lapse and Kring admits that.

He is “keenly aware” that the show is broken.

What exactly did he think is broken? Well, most everything that we all have complained about all season:

It’s too slow
The new heroes aren’t great and were introduced cheaply
Hiro was in Japan too long
The romances suck
There was nothing at stake in the early going.

A lot of this is stuff we all noticed. There was no point to the show in the first 6-7 episodes, and it wasn’t until Peter Petrelli went into the future to see the virus-inflicted world that we even knew something apocalyptic was at stake.

”We took too long to get to the big-picture story,” Kring says.

The other part is that the romances didn’t work at all or were too long. The Hiro princess story he admits should have only been three episodes at most, not seven. The boyfriend of Claire’s has also been a bust.

”I’ve seen more convincing romances on TV,” he admits. ”In retrospect, I don’t think romance is a natural fit for us.”

The major problem was the pace though. It was just too slow and nothing happened.

”We assumed the audience wanted season 1 ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â‚¬Â? a buildup of intrigue about these characters and the discovery of their powers. We taught [them] to expect a certain kind of storytelling. They wanted adrenaline. We made a mistake.”

The good news is that Entertainment Weekly has seen the next two episodes and likes them a lot. They say the show is getting back on track.

The final episode we’ll see until the strike ends is on December 3rd, which has been re-done to fit a more “mid-season finale” type of story. This enables the show the ability to start over “with a clean slate” and get things back to awesome.