Related: Complete Coverage of TCA Summer Press Tour
Beverly Hills, Calif. — Don’t expect Heroes Reborn to pick up where the fourth season of Heroes left off.
“This is not the fifth season,” said executive producer Tim Kring Thursday during the TCA summer press tour panel for the NBC show. “We’re actually treating it as like the 10th season as though there were actually seasons in between.”
Kring explained that the exact amount of time the show has been off the air is where Reborn picks up.
“I wanted to make it something that was easy for viewers to watch the first time,” he said.
The series, which has a two-hour premiere on NBC Sept. 24, will air for 13 episodes, which Kring said allows them to give a beginning, middle and end.
But the EP teased the possibility of more, saying that though he has only spoken to NBC about Reborn, ”I’ve always felt that the brand is elastic enough.”
Other highlights from the panel included:
—On the demise of the original series, Kring said the biggest pitfall for the series was the amount of story they had to tell with 20+ episode season orders. “We were facing a kind of mathematical difficulty,” he said.
—Kring commented on the current comic book heroes-laden TV landscape. “You always hope that what you’re doing is different,” he said. The self-professed non-comic book geek added that “we can’t really concern ourselves that much with it.”
—Spoiler alert: Hayden Panettiere’s character is dead. There is no “save the cheerleader, save the world” in Heroes Reborn.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FLHB2zB_cA[/embed]
