By Christina Radish

Zachary Quinto at the NBC All-Star Party held at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, Calif. on July 20, 2008.

From creator/writer Tim Kring, the hit NBC television series Heroes has returned for its third season with a brand new chapter, “Volume 3: Villains,” which will explore the nature of good and evil in all the characters, as a group of villains is unleashed upon the world. An epic drama that chronicles the lives of ordinary people who discover they possess extraordinary abilities, the first two seasons (which are comprised of “Volume 1: Genesis” and “Volume 2: Generations”) saw a handful of these individuals band together to save the cheerleader, New York City and the world, in order to prevent grim predictions of the future. Now, as ominous, new signs signal catastrophe ahead, new and familiar adversaries begin to gather.

Kring, along with actor Zachary Quinto, who plays serial killer Sylar, recently spoke to MediaBlvd Magazine about what fans can expect from this exciting new volume of the series.

MediaBlvd Magazine> Zachary, when you signed on as Sylar, did you have any way of knowing how big this character would turn out to be, and how the viewers would just love to hate him the way they do?

Zachary Quinto> Absolutely not! I don’t think there’s any way to predict the way that things will go. When you get involved in it, it’s something that takes you by storm a little bit. And, this is obviously the biggest example in my experience of that happening, but there’s really no way to predict it. Obviously, I’m most grateful that it did, but I had no way of telling that when I signed on.

MediaBlvd> Your performance of Syler is a very understated effort. You come at the character very quietly, and with a lot of menace. Can you talk about your theater training and how it’s helped you with this role, and other roles?

Zachary> Actually, I’m really grateful to come from a theater background because it has solidified my relationship to the work, from a little bit of a different perspective than you see in Los Angeles sometimes. For me, personally, I feel like my training allows me to look at things from more than one perspective. It allows me to have a little bit more of an oversight, and understand where a character lives in my body and my voice, and you modify those understandings to fit the format that you’re working in. When I was in school, I remember that teachers would always argue about whether there was a different technique applied to television and film than is applied to theater, and I think there definitely is. Coming from a theater background allows me to bring things down. It’s much easier to fill a 34-inch proscenium, or whatever the size of the screen is that you’re working on. That training gave me a really great basis from which to work, and I continue to learn about the technique and the tools that are necessary to work in television and film. I feel really fortunate to continue to have the experiences that teach me those new lessons.

MediaBlvd> Tim, how deep in the season will viewers get an understanding of how Linderman’s back from the dead, why Niki is called Tracy, and what Sylar did with Claire’s brain when he was fishing around in there?

Tim Kring> Some of those questions will linger a little bit, but by the end of the third hour of the show, you will know most of those. One of the goals of this season, because we will have been off the air for nine months, was not to drag a lot of story behind us. We didn’t want viewers to feel like they had to have watched two years of this show to catch up. We want to answer things really quickly, so that you could move forward on this volume and have a clean path in front of you, so there really are not a lot of lingering questions that you carry with you from before. The goal for us, from now on, with these volumes, is to try and answer literally 95% of the questions that are posed in the beginning of the volume, by the end of the volume. This particular volume, “Villains,” is 13 episodes long.

MediaBlvd> Syler was the main bad guy in Season 1. In Season 2, he spent a lot of time recovering. But, it looks like he’s more involved in Season 3. What was your intention for Syler, coming into Season 3, and what is your opinion of the scripts you’ve gotten so far?

Zachary> The scripts this season are just more exciting, more action-packed and more dynamic than ever. It keeps getting better. Every time I open a script, it’s truly a thrill. My approach is always the same, in whatever I’m working on, and that is to serve the text. We’re really fortunate to work with incredibly creative, imaginative, consistent writers that bring surprise. Sometimes, when I open a script, it’s difficult to keep track of exactly where I’m going because there’s so many different aspects of this character’s experience that are drawn upon this year. So, my approach really is just to serve that and to keep track of it, at the same time. People will see what I mean, as the season unfolds.

Tim> The truth is that what you were referring to as Season 2 was not really our Season 2. It turned out to be Season 2 because of the writers’ strike. It was really like watching a movie and having the projector break, 40 minutes into it. So, what we’re doing now, for Season 3, was really going to be contained within the body of Season 2. For a character like Sylar, who spent the first volume of Season 2 without his powers, in the subsequent volumes he would’ve gotten those powers back and then gone on a series of adventures. I just want to clarify that what people are referring to as Season 2 was not meant to be that, by our design. It was really by the design of the fact that there was a writers’ strike.                           

MediaBlvd> What was lost due to the writers’ strike? Will the virus storyline come back, and will we find out what happened to Caitlin (Katie Carr)?

Tim> The virus story was really a casualty of the strike. We literally re-jiggered the last couple minutes of that volume, when we knew the strike was imminent, and changed the ending so that that virus never broke out. The second volume of Season 2 was going to be an outbreak story that would last eight episodes, and it was all avoided by Peter Petrelli catching this vile of a virus, so that it did not break. Therefore, it did not get out into the community. And, three episodes into that volume, we would have found out what happened to Caitlin, but as a result of the writers’ strike, that has been a lost part of the mythology of the show that may never return.

MediaBlvd> Were there any advantages to that long break?

Tim> Obviously, the break was very difficult for so many people. The crew, the cast and the writers were all out of work and unemployed, all that time, which was very difficult. It was also difficult for the audience to have a little more than half of the season truncated that way. But the silver lining was that it allowed us a little bit of a break from the creative day-to-day of the show, that had been pretty relentless for two years. With any creative endeavor, you absolutely need some time away to reassess, to think about what to do next, and to assess what you’ve done well and what you want to improve on.          

MediaBlvd> In abandoning what you were originally planning for Volume 3, what other opportunities opened up for you, and what, if anything, stayed intact for it, at the start of the season?

Tim> I don’t know that I’ve had a lot of time to really think about what opportunities it opened for us. We closed some doors that we would have obviously had to explore, and that’s always complicated. We had actually shot a fair amount of content already, and that lives on as DVD extras for the second season, so people can actually watch and see where we were planning to go in the next volume. What the truncated year did for us was allow us to do a reassessment of how to tell a story in a very adrenalized way. Clearly, the audience is really not very interested in a slow build on this show. They want to hit the ground running, and so, it gave us a little time to figure out just how to do that. We think that, with Volume 3, we figured out how to hit the ground running in a really quick way that has a tremendous amount of adrenalin. We had a lot of concern in Season 1. I actually went online just to see audience reaction in Season 1, about eight episodes in, and it was just very eye-opening. The audience was very frustrated with the show and had no idea where it was going, and no confidence in us to be able to figure it out. And then, when I logged on three or four episodes later, suddenly they were all hooked. We experienced that same thing in the second season as well. And so, this third season, we’ve figured out a way to hopefully avoid that initial frustration that the audience has. The first volume just happened to be one season long. The second season, the audience would have figured out that we air in these volumes. They would’ve been very familiar with it by the time the season ended. This year, they will hopefully really catch on with that. It’s a very important thing for us to do because we want to figure out a way to not get caught in a lot of the problems that most serialized storytelling has, where you become impenetrable to the audience after years and years of one continuous story. We’ve created this paradigm where you can create a volume, answer 95% of questions in that volume, and move on to another storyline for the audience, so that we can keep energizing the story and potentially get new viewers.

MediaBlvd> With the helix, the eclipse and the double helix being introduced in Volume 3, how much of that is going to be explained and explored?

Tim> Some of these symbols morph their meaning a little bit, as we go. The helix is an example of that and clearly it’s been revealed now as part of the double helix of a DNA strand, which plays into the themes of the show and was always intended to be revealed as that. But, there are deeper meanings to both the symbols of the eclipse and the helix that we have plans to reveal, along the way. It’s one of the very few things that we wanted to have as question marks that carried through the series. We set out to be a show that answered questions along the way, in a very regular and quick way, but we always wanted to have a few mysteries that carried through the length of the series that would change and morph just enough to keep you guessing, as to what the new meanings would be. Both the eclipse and the helix are the two real major examples of that.

MediaBlvd> Tim, the fans at Comic-Con had concerns that Volume 3 seemed a bit of a doppelganger in premise to The X-Men. What are some of the parallels that this storyline seems to have with The X-Men?

Tim> I can’t say because I don’t really know anything about The X-Men. I have no real knowledge of that world. I don’t read X-Men comics, so I’m not really familiar with it. From my standpoint, there’s clearly a reinvention of the wheel that happens in this kind of storytelling, when you’re dealing with really archetypical storytelling of good and evil, and characters that have powers. I don’t know that there’s any way to avoid things that have been done before. There’s such a vast amount of material in the comic book world that has actually dealt with these stories. When I first came up with Heroes, I pitched it to my friend, Jeph Loeb, to ask him what territory I was  entering into, and he said, “Every territory that’s ever been done.” I was faced with the decision, “Does that mean that I should not do it, or do I just plow forward and continue to tell the story that I want to tell?” So, to the extent that there are similarities, it’s not by design. It’s just telling an archetypical story that has characters facing big, epic battles between good and evil, and trying to live normal lives, at the same time.

MediaBlvd> When Heroes started, everybody was a protagonist. At what point did you realize that you needed a continuing antagonist like Sylar, and that it would be a good idea for Sylar to carry through, instead of having an arc and then disappearing?

Tim> Sylar was always designed to stay around. We knew that you really can’t have heroes without villains, so that was built into the premise, along with this idea that these are ordinary people that make decisions that are based on who they are and what circumstances they find themselves in. That determines whether they will be good or evil. If you are predisposed to be good and you have a superpower, then you’ll use it for something good. If you’re predisposed to be bad, then you will use it for something evil. It was always built into the premise that our core group of people would be tempted by the circumstances they were in.

MediaBlvd> Viewers have gotten some of Sylar’s background as Gabriel Grey. How much more of his past would you be interested in learning about, and how much darker and more evil would you like to see Sylar get?

Zachary> I’d certainly be interested in learning as much about his background as the writers see fit. We do go there again this year. At a certain point, you’ll revisit that character and the shades of that character, as you first saw him. As far as how evil I’d want him to get, I feel like Sylar’s evil is rooted in a great humanity, and in a lot of smallness and a feeling of emptiness. I don’t really look at it as how evil he could possibly get. I look at it like this is what he has in front of him and it’s a result of the choices that he makes, in order to seize his opportunities. He’s constantly wrestling with the desire to feel special, the desire to feel valid and the desire to feel viable. Those are the ways that I come at it, more than the level of evil that he achieves, because those are really just a means to an end.

Tim> You can’t do a character that’s as deep and complex as Sylar without having an actor who can play those colors and that depth. Zach has provided us with the ability to explore this character in really, really deep ways. I see Sylar as someone who is on a very deep, existential quest to find out the meaning of his own existence, where he came from and what is driving him. We will continue to peel the layers off of that onion, as long as this character exists on the show.

MediaBlvd> The audience is clearly meant to identify with Sylar, even though he’s clearly a villain. Are you going to continue to make him even more sympathetic? Is he going to get friends, or maybe even go so far as have a love interest?

Tim> To be really honest, the quest with this character is to continue to play off of the duality of good and evil, which has been at the core of a lot of characters in the show, and will certainly become more and more thematic in the show, in this volume. So many of our characters will be faced with these choices of who they really are and what their basic nature is. In this particular volume, we are going to places with Sylar that will cause the audience to be really torn about how they feel about this guy. They know he is capable of tremendous evil, and yet he has a depth of pathos that makes you question your own sense of what’s right and wrong. He’ll have a series of very human relationships.

 MediaBlvd> Tim, are you going to feature any characters more prominently than others this season?

Tim> This season, we are not really introducing any new characters that have their own storylines. We are concentrating very much on the core characters that we’ve had for two seasons now. We have a certain style of storytelling that really is a pastiche of storytelling, where there are multiple characters and multiple stories going on, at the same time. The difference in this volume is that they are all feeding one big, giant story. We’re not really planning on featuring anybody anymore than anybody else. The audience may feel that way, at times. In the aggregate, when they see it put together, certain episodes may lean a little more heavily on one character or another, but by the end, it’ll balance out.

Zachary> I’ll add onto that by saying that I think our show does a remarkable job of tracking all the characters, and then bringing them back around to one another and dove-tailing the stories into each other. For a cast as large as ours, all of my fellow actors would agree that each of us get a significant amount, in all the episodes that we’re in, to chew on. There’s never a feeling that one storyline is suffering, in favor of another.

MediaBlvd> Do you see any danger in losing a “normal” viewpoint by giving Dr. Suresh (Sendhil Ramamurthy) superpowers? Are you in danger of losing that humanity?

Tim> I would say yes and no. One of the great challenges of doing a serialized story is to try to keep the audience guessing, and to keep things fresh. What we’ve always prided ourselves on is the ability to have the audience not be able to predict where we’re going. Hopefully, with Sylar, just when you think that you have figured out what his role is for the rest of the series, he’ll change again and will reinvent where that character is. But, somebody needs to be able to play the role of the outsider on this show, so I would just stay tuned to see who that is. It will be someone you know already.

MediaBlvd> With family having been an ongoing theme in the first two seasons, how important is family this season?

Tim> The truth is that it’s all about family. At the core of this particular volume, we’re exploring the nature of dysfunction among family. There are two families that are at the core of this show, the Bennett family and the Petrelli family, and both of them will be tested and tugged in ways that you haven’t seen so far.

MediaBlvd> During Season 2 you introduced the group of 12 and, in one episode, Hiro’s dad (George Takei) said there were 8 of them left. And then, a couple episodes later, Matt (Greg Grunberg) said that they were all dead. So, are we going to see any more of group of 12, or are they all dead?

Tim> You actually will see a few of them. That comment was referring to the idea of the previous generation. The second volume of the show was called Generations, and it explored the idea that there was a whole series of people who came before our characters. It’s basically the idea of the sins of the parents had been visited upon their children. We will see that some of those people survive in very interesting and curious ways, in Volume 3. There’s still some remnants of that previous generation.                   

MediaBlvd> Tim, how involved will Kristen Bell be in the storyline this season?

Tim> She is integral and plays a very large part in the entire volume. You’ll see plenty of Kristen. One of the fun things of doing this kind of show, with this big of a cast, is that the audience will be really surprised at how many pairings up of people that will be new. Characters that have never really even crossed paths with one another will cross. We will actually have some very unique pairings of characters. For the cast, it was really a lot of fun because while they all know one another, get along with one another and enjoy one another, there are several of the actors on the show that have literally never been in scenes with one another. Finding those combinations keeps it really fresh, not only behind the scenes, but for the audience as well.

MediaBlvd> Zachary, how much did you and Kristen enjoy shooting your big battle?

Zachary> I just love Kristen, all around. I love working with her. I love hanging out with her. I think she has a really great energy, and she is a novel actress, so any time I get to work with her is a good time. It was a pretty epic battle. Some things go down. There were definitely some special effects elements to it, and some stunt elements to it. It’s both personal and epic.

MediaBlvd> Tim, do you have any plans to bring any other famous faces on for an episode or two?

Tim> As of right now, this particular volume really does focus very much on the core characters. It’s really not about bringing in a stunt-casting idea. The show has never really been about that. With people like George Takei and Nichelle Nichols, they genuinely were the right person for the part and it was really never about a stunt-casting idea. Kristen Bell was sort of a stunt-casting thing, but there was a series of events that led to her coming on the show. She was available, and she was friends with several of the cast members on the show. It was really not a matter of us trying to go out to find that. In an odd way, it came to us.

                                                                                               

MediaBlvd> What are the benefits for you to be willing to kill off any of your characters, in terms of dramatic possibilities? Do you regret killing anyone off?

Tim> The truth is, when you do a story that has any stakes involved, like the stakes of life and death, you absolutely have to have some casualties along the way, otherwise the audience begins to become very suspicious of whether you ever really mean it when you raise these stakes. So, fortunately or unfortunately, we exist in a world where we actually have to do that, in order to maintain some authenticity. The good thing about Heroes is that nobody is ever really as dead as they seem to be on our show because of the ability to time travel and the flashback nature of the show. We’ve been able to have characters return in interesting and new ways. And so, in terms of people that you regret killing off, when we have regretted it, we have found ways to bring those characters back. I don’t know that it’s regret, but some of it was just planned, or was the result of an actor’s availability. We loved working with Malcolm McDowell, and found a way to figure out how to have that character return in an interesting way this season.

MediaBlvd> Zach, this is a big year for you, with Star Trek, your first big movie coming out. What’s been your career plan? Are you using Heroes to get movie roles? And, how did you choose Star Trek as your first hiatus movie project?

Zachary> I hardly chose it, so to speak. This whole year, for me, has been such a blur of good fortune, but very little of it was by design. I feel like my experience on Heroes, and the world in which it’s rooted, lends itself to the attention that led me to be a part of that movie. I don’t really think of it in terms of how I’ll use Heroes to get movie roles, or other jobs. I remain as grateful to be on Heroes now, as I did when I first started. It’s so fulfilling, creatively and professionally. You can’t get ahead of yourself because no amount of success, exposure or opportunity is going to really matter, or be ultimately fulfilling, unless you can be totally present in what you’re doing right now. That’s the way that I’ve gone from one thing to another. That movie happened during the writers’ strike, and there were so many fortuitous elements that lined up, almost in a magical way. You could never even begin to conceive of that unless it was happening to you, so I feel like I couldn’t be in a better spot. I couldn’t be happier to be where I am. And, I have faith in the fact that that alone will lead me to whatever the next experience I’m meant to have is.

Tim> I don’t think I’m speaking out of school to say this, but Hollywood is a small community, in many ways. There’s a real lineage of relationships between me and the people who do the television show Lost, and the people who did Lost are the ones who ended up doing Star Trek. They’re fans of my work, and I’m fans of their work, and we speak all the time. And so, Zach’s name came up, and conversations were had about making that possible. It happened on a very human level, with friendships behind-the-scenes.

MediaBlvd> Did you always think that you would have a place in sci-fi movies and TV shows, or was this just something that came about?

Zachary> I never imagined that my experience would lead me as deeply into the comic book and science fiction world as it has, but it’s something that I’m incredibly grateful for. And, it makes sense when you look at it from the perspective of my training because there’s something very theatrical about those worlds. Obviously, the world of Heroes is incredibly heightened and there’s something very theatrical about it. So, while I never really expected it, it doesn’t necessarily surprise me, now that I’m ensconced in it. And, it’s a really exciting group of fans, so I feel like that’s something else that is an added bonus to the whole thing. It’s probably the most ardent group of people that you could ever be working for, in terms of their enthusiasm for the stories that you’re telling, so I’m happy to be here. I definitely look forward to exploring other areas of storytelling, but I’m so grateful that this one has brought me to a point where I’ll be able to do that.                                                                                            

MediaBlvd> There’s some commonality with Sylar and Spock, in that they were both originally part of an ensemble and then broke out as big fan favorites. But, superficially, they’re so diametrically opposed. Spock is this clean-shaven, good guy, and Sylar is just an open sore. What was it like to go from one extreme to another?

Zachary> There are elements of the characters that echo each other, but they echo each other from very different, opposite ends of the spectrum. Each of the characters employ a stillness and a rich internal point of view that informs the way that they behave and the way that they relate to the people around them. And, it’s great fun to have characters that are rich, and that are full of challenges and rewards. Both of these characters are clearly that. As an actor, I don’t really approach a character as to whether or not they’re good or bad. I just approach a character as to where it lives in me. For numerous reasons, both of these characters find life in me.

MediaBlvd> Was it a relief to get back to that freedom of letting loose in Sylar, after playing Spock?

Zachary> Both of these characters are very contained and very controlled, so it’s letting loose, more in the sense of engaging in or indulging in these instincts or impulses to murder. For me, it was more like coming home, when I went back to work on the show, after going away on a new and uncharted excursion with the movie. There was a tremendous sense of completion when I finished the film, and a tremendous sense of familiarity when I came back to work on the show.

MediaBlvd> Tim, did a lot of the ideas for this season come out of having to work around Zachary Quinto for his Star Trek shoot?

Tim> The truth is, we would’ve had to lose the character of Sylar for the better part of the season had the strike not hit. And so, one of the upsides of it is that there will be a real sense of continuity for the audience, when they pick up the show. They won’t have that sense that one of the major character dropped away for awhile. So, in that respect, it was a huge advantage to have had the strike fall where it did.

MediaBlvd> Did it change your storytelling at all, in terms of what he’s doing this season, or was this the story you always wanted to tell?

Tim> Oh, no, this was the story that we wanted to tell. This particular volume was going to originally be the third volume of the second season and we were going to be able to fold Sylar’s character in. We would’ve found a way to have incorporated Zach. Because of the modular way that we shoot the show, we’re able to drop a certain character’s storyline in, afterwards. In other words, we can shoot all of someone like Zach’s scenes for multiple episodes, and then drop them in. It’s one of the advantages of shooting a big, multi-storyline show.

MediaBlvd> Of the episodes you have shot so far this season, how have you seen Sylar further grow and develop, and what are some of the acting challenges that have presented themselves?

Zachary> This is the longest time I’ve ever spent playing one character on a show, and there are unique challenges that come along with the idea of being on a show and playing a character in an open-ended way, especially in the serialized nature of the way that we tell our stories. For me, this character grows and evolves in so many ways this season. Primarily, he’s put in situations and he is, in some ways, manipulated to employ a restraint against his instincts and impulses that we’ve never seen him have to employ before. That’s been a fascinating journey for me that is equally challenging. When you come to settle into a character, and there are certain aspects of that character that particular people respond to, people come to expect things. There are a lot of unexpected turns this year for my character. Every time I open a script, there’s just a different kind of challenge, whether it’s a physical challenge, in terms of a fight sequence or stunt sequence that we’re doing, or a special effects sequence, or an emotional challenge, in terms of what he’s coming up against in himself, or what he’s coming up against outside of himself with the people that he’s interacting with. The tapestry of that has been incredibly rich this year for my character, in particular. It’s been a ride, for sure.

MediaBlvd> Could you ever see Sylar becoming a good guy? Would that be any fun for you? What do you think would have to happen for that to occur?

Zachary> I don’t really look at him as absolutely good or bad. He is constantly walking a line of ambiguity within himself, and he has uncertainty within himself that defines the way he acts and behaves. There are colors of this character that are maybe a little less violent and a little less dark than we’ve seen in the past. As long as it’s rooted in a connection to the character’s psychology, then that’s what’s fun for me. I have nothing but faith in the fact that that will always be the case, no matter where this character is taken on the show. And, that’s certainly held true so far this season.

MediaBlvd> Since there are so many ways to get feedback from fans these days, how much do you pay attention to what fans are saying, and does it ever affect what you do on the show?

Tim> I would love to be able to say that it does affect us, but the truth is that, by the time the first episode airs, we will already be shooting Episode 13, which is the finale of this volume. So, we’re so far ahead that there really is nothing that we can do about it. Unfortunately, the audience is very, very far behind where we are, creatively, on the show.

Zachary> That’s a double-edged sword, in a lot of ways, because we are creating in a vacuum, and relying on each other and our instincts, creatively, as actors, as well as writers. From myself and my castmates being at Comic-Con and sharing that experience, for the first time, with the volume of people in that hall, it was incredibly exhilarating to be a part of their response and reaction to it because we all really do value that aspect of it. We do what we do because people are responding as adamantly as those fans did.

Tim> As the writers, producers and actors of this show, we come at it as real fans of this particular genre and this show, so we have to use our own internal critics to let us know where we’re going. We very often have made course changes, mid-way through, when we’ve looked at episodes and tried to feel what the audience would feel. We’ve said, “You know what? I think we need to go this direction now. We’ve used this device too many times. Let’s start doing this instead.” And so, we very much are our own fan base while we’re making the show.

MediaBlvd> This show was so embraced by critics and fans in the first season. Do you think it was judged too harshly in Season 2? And, is that something that you worry about, moving forward? Are you always going to be held to a higher standard just because it was such a hit, early on?

Tim> That is always the nature of something that hits in a big, very zeitgeist way. It’s very hard to be shiny and new all the time. That’s something that always concerns us, but there’s not a whole lot we can do. We just make the story that we make. As for how the season was judged, the fans that really stuck with the show saw what ended up being the second half of that volume finally come together in the way that the first season did. In the first season, we took about eight or nine episodes before the characters even crossed paths with one another. If you stuck with it, you were rewarded to see where that story went. In the second season, there were 13 episodes that will never be seen, so it was obviously very hard to judge it as a whole without literally over half of it never having been seen.

MediaBlvd> What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced, in making the third season?

Tim> There’s a continuum on this show, for us, that the audience doesn’t experience. The audience experiences it in seasons, but we haven’t. We have experienced it as one long production. We’re making a very big, logistically complicated show. By all accounts, it may be the biggest, most complicated show that there is, so the challenges are many fold. For me, as a writer, the challenge is keeping it fresh, keeping the bar high for the audience, and meeting their expectations of surprise and unpredictable storytelling. We raise the bar ourselves. We’ll do an episode that is filled with twists and turns, and we’ll really blow people away. And then, the next week, we have to find some way to top ourselves. It’s a very challenging game to play, to keep topping yourself. Sometimes, you get in a situation where you simply can’t  top an episode from the week before.

MediaBlvd> Most of your fans are pretty hardcore and love the extended content. What are the tie-ins with the graphic novel?

Tim> The whole idea of the online extensions of the show was always to be an additive to the show. In other words, if you just watched the show, you could have a terrific experience and not really need to find out more. But, if you are inclined to dig a little deeper into the mythology of the show, we have all of these various ways that you can do that on NBC.com. It’s literally just the one, or two, or three, or four more things that you will know, that someone else may not know, and it just deepens your experience and your sense of fandom of the show. This year, we have many of the same ideas that we’ve had for the last couple years, in terms of the comic book and various online extras, but we are adding a very exciting new element of these, which is a web series that’s going to run concurrently with the show. We’ve done three of them so far. I believe we have another pod of six that are going to come up in the fall, and then another pod of six or seven in the spring. They will be storylines that run concurrently with these volumes, that we’ll add to and fill out the whole idea of the mythology and everything feeding the cannon of the show. It’s a very exciting way for you to add to your experience, as a fan. We made a very exciting compilation of the comics from the first volume, with terrific cover art by Jim Lee and Alex Roth. That turned out to be a huge success in the comic book world, so we’re planning the second volume of that to be released in the fall.