Tim Kring is bringing a new show to TV that might take a hint from AMC’s ‘The Walking Dead’. Talking earlier this month with Metro, the 52 year old writer / producer who found success writing for the original ‘Knight Rider’, created NBC’s once phenomenal series ‘Heroes’. Combining top notch production values with a great cast, the series never found the same success after the first season and was marred by the writers strike which debilitated the storylines during season 2.
With AMC’s ‘The Walking Dead’ pushing the limit of horror and storytelling on TV, Kring uses the show as an example where sometimes having less is better than having more.
… 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… It gave it more of a sense of an event rather than a series that would go on for years and years…
He contrasts this to ‘Heroes’ and the pressure they were under to deliver complex storylines and fantastic reveals over the course of such a long season.
With Heroes we put a tremendous amount in one episode and raised the bar for what came afterwards. It becomes hard to blow people away week after week.
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.
We hinged on, ‘I didn’t see that coming’, moments but after a while audiences see those things happening. We had a rocky road with the writers’ strike. Coming back after ten months off the air on a serialised show is hard.
Kring’s logic presents an interesting perspective with some of today’s cult favorites such as ‘Mad Men’, ‘Breaking Bad’, and ‘Boardwalk Empire’ consisting of only 12 episodes. The shorter seasons don’t burn out the viewer’s interest so quickly and leaves plenty of narrative juice in the tank for later.
Kring may now get that chance to deliver a new series that doesn’t run out of steam with his new script written on spec and recently given a pilot order from Twentieth Century Fox Television.
Touch will be an hour long drama that focuses on a father who discovers his autistic, mute son has the ability to predict events before they happen. Kring will executive produce and write with Peter Chernin and Katherine Pope also serving as executive producers. No cast or director is yet attached and the show is still in the early stages of development.
We’ll have to wait and see if the long deserved break from ‘Heroes’ and his desire to create a more meaningful viewer experience translates to the screen with this new supernatural drama.
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