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"EW Article -- WARNING . . . Spoiler Alert!"

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Dunard2 15 desperate attention whore postings DAW Level: "Got Milk? Spokesperson"	11-04-06, 09:23 AM (EST)
"EW Article -- WARNING . . . Spoiler Alert!"
A great article from this week's Entertainment Weekly. The end of the article contains spoilers!! SPOILER ALERT! This story contains plot information about upcoming episodes of Heroes. Behold the bespectacled face of the hottest new star on television! He's young. He's geeky. He's Japanese. And when he uses his superpowers, he looks like he's trying to pass a supersize kidney stone. His name is Masi Oka, and here on the set of NBC's breakout hit Heroes, the cherubic Superman-in-training he plays with infectious comic aplomb is trying to score with a young waitress. It's a scene for the pivotal Nov. 27 installment, which reveals essential secrets about the show's broad assemblage of potential avengers, each inexplicably afflicted (or blessed, depending on their POV) with some acute form of X-Men mutantitis. Oka's Hiro Nakamura, for example, has the ability to stop time and travel through it; in this episode, he's jumped six months into the past to become a busboy at a Texas diner as part of a knight's errand too spoilerish to explain in detail. Hiro's romantic MO involves three gifts — a book, some flowers, and a gesture so elaborate that it requires him to muster his signature expression. So, Masi, what are you thinking about when you squish your eyes and clench your teeth? ''Going to the bathroom,'' jokes Oka. But then he reconsiders. ''Actually, I believe there's a fifth dimensional fact that allows for parallel universes to exist at the same time, in the same location,'' says the Brown-educated 31-year-old, who prior to becoming an actor (he had a recurring role as Franklyn the lab tech on Scrubs) was a full-time special-effects artist at George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic studio (he's especially proud of his work on The Perfect Storm). He also has a 180-plus IQ, so he knows what he's talking about when he uses terms like unique five-tuples to explain Hiro's reality-warping ways. ''Basically,'' he concludes, ''he puts himself in the sixth dimension and comes back into the current reality.'' A beat. ''But I haven't really thought about it too much.'' Like we said: geeky. But in the most appealing way possible, much like Heroes itself. This might be the most unabashedly fantastic enterprise on broadcast television, a sprawling, Smallville-times-10 saga about ordinary people who are mysteriously becoming extraordinary. New York artist Isaac Mendez (Empire's Santiago Cabrera) can paint the future when he's on a heroin high. Texas cheerleader Claire Bennet (The Book of Daniel's Hayden Panettiere) can survive any injury — or death. L.A. cop Matt Parkman (Alias' Greg Grunberg) can read minds. There are shady guys with seemingly sinister agendas and ominously cool code names, like Claire's smirking, hero-hunting father, ''Horn Rimmed Glasses'' (Dynasty's Jack Coleman), a.k.a. H.R.G., and the as-yet-unseen Sylar, a serial killer prone to freezing flesh and sawing skulls open. The whole thing's chockablock with comic-booky bits: apocalyptic prophecies, outrageous cliff-hangers, and deliciously ripe dialogue, like Hiro's catchphrase-spawning line ''Save the cheerleader, save the world!'' Heroes is proof positive that what was once considered cult pop is now mainstream, thanks to a decade defined by the Spider-Man and Harry Potter film sagas, to say nothing of Lost. Or maybe, with its propulsive, surprising, and emotionally charged storytelling, Heroes has discovered the decoder ring that can translate fringe fun into mass-appeal entertainment. In a season filled with highly touted (and mostly ignored) serialized dramas, no one was expecting this concept-driven series to be the one to break big. But that's just what it's done, attracting more than 14 million viewers each week, making it one of the few shows of any genre to pop this season. ''Right now, TV has to be spectacular,'' says Grunberg. ''People want escape. A grounded escape, but an escape nonetheless. The Nine, Friday Night Lights — they're great, but maybe they're too real, you know?'' Spend a week on the set and you see a show in a giddy state of new hitdom. Bounding off the stage after shooting a flashback in which Claire learns she can heal from cuts lickety-split, Panettiere — a multitasking 17-year-old who's been acting since age 5 and plans to release a pop-rock album next year — discloses that she celebrated Heroes' full-season pickup by buying herself a Porsche: ''I almost ran over Kanye West this morning!'' A little more grounded is Adrian Pasdar, who plays high-flying (literally) congressional candidate Nathan Petrelli. A critics' darling since starring in the 1996 cult series Profit, Pasdar typifies this cast composed of working actors–turned–stars of a hit show. ''When we were doing the photo shoot for this story,'' he says, ''we were all looking at each other like we were our own stand-ins. We kept waiting for the real stars to show up. I remember looking at Greg, and we gave each other this knowing nod, like he was thinking the same thing. Then again, he might have just had gas or something.'' Heroes is a story about transformation — on screen and off. Exhibit A: creator Tim Kring, best known for his NBC crime procedural Crossing Jordan. A 24-year TV vet, Kring was looking to ''reinvent'' himself in 2005 after four years of finding different ways to murder different people every week. In particular, he'd been dying to do one of those ''serialized sagas'' for years. Kring needed a novel premise that could hook a mass audience, and when he noticed the culture's conspicuous preponderance of superheroes, he began to wonder why these colorfully clad vigilantes always seem to experience a population boom during catastrophe-shaken times. You know, besides the billions of dollars in licensing and Happy Meals. A high-concept thought bubbled up: What if, in times of profound global duress, Mother Nature created new forms of life to deal with it? An epic conceit began coalescing, but Kring tried his damnedest to forget about it. ''It felt unproducible. Too big. Too out there,'' says Kring, a soft-spoken father of two who radiates a professorial vibe. ''I tried to kill it a few times, but it just kept rising up, partly because I didn't have another idea.'' So he consulted an inner circle of industry friends, like Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof. ''The first thing that hit me when I heard the idea was, 'F---. I wish I had thought of that,''' says Lindelof. ''What was so surprising was how simple the concept was, yet it was built upon a grander theme: the wish-fulfillment of ordinary people suddenly realizing they were meant for something much greater.'' However, Lindelof suggested that Kring might want to check out the similarly themed comic book Rising Stars by J. Michael Straczynski, who also created Babylon 5. So Kring picked up a copy, read the jacket summary, and put it right back down: ''I was like, 'This is the same idea! I'm not reading this!''' For his part, Straczynski says he's not ruffled: ''Everybody in comics...looks to what came before and builds upon it,'' says the writer, who's now — in a circuitous turn of events — shopping a Rising Stars TV series with director Sam Raimi. And what if the networks say, ''Sounds too much like Heroes''? ''Well, there's always seppuku,'' jokes Straczynski. To help him navigate this strange new world, Kring turned to one of the comic industry's leading scribes, Jeph Loeb, who's also written for Lost and Smallville. Loeb, who now serves as a coexecutive producer on Heroes, was charmed by Kring's naïveté: ''At one point, said, 'I think there should be a character who with a sweep of his hand lifts up a car and magnetically throws it across the street.' I said, 'Tim, that's Magneto.' But I think that's Tim's gift. He approaches this with an outsider's eye, as if this were all new, with a character-driven approach. He's not about battles. He's about what feels real.'' When Kring pitched Heroes to NBC last fall, he laid out an entire franchise specifically engineered for obsessive consumers who are deeply engaged with their favorite TV shows. ''It was pretty clear he hadn't just cooked it up on the car ride over,'' says NBC Entertainment president Kevin Reilly, who believes Heroes could be the ''seminal'' show that helps restore the flagging network. Ambitious plans to exploit the Heroes brand, like more original content on NBC.com and a comic-book series, are already being hatched, but Reilly hasn't asked for a spin-off or film version. Yet. ''If I suggested that right now, I think Tim's head would blow off. It's a big show to get off the ground.'' Finding their cast was a relative breeze — many of the actors who signed on were eager to prove they could do more than what their careers had previously allowed. ''The only thing I needed to hear was that Tim wanted to keep my character very complicated,'' says Ali Larter (Final Destination), whose Niki is complexity incarnate: She's a webcam stripper with an alternate personality. (That would be Jessica, who has superhuman strength and homicidal tendencies.) ''This is the first real woman that I've played.'' The most challenging role to fill was Nathan's younger brother Peter, who was originally supposed to be his aimless twin. ''Anyone old enough to be Nathan's age came off incredibly wimpy and pathetic,'' laughs Kring. ''You just wanted to say, 'Get over it!''' So he tapped 29-year-old Gilmore Girls star Milo Ventimiglia, who he believed had the right mix of dreaminess and spine. ''I'm happy to be on a show that's bridging that gap of, 'Okay, I'm not a teenager anymore, I'm a man,''' says Ventimiglia, who believes he's still being undermined by his character's boyishly long bangs. (There's a drinking game in here somewhere: Take a shot every time Peter brushes aside an errant lock!) Ventimiglia's even suggested a brain-surgery story for Peter so he can shave his head. Responds a bemused Kring: ''We have a disagreement over the hair, but we're moving toward , and it's really cool.'' He's presumably referring to one of the many twists planned for Heroes in November. (Warning: The next three paragraphs contain spoilers.) The episodes are headlined by the ''save the cheerleader'' story line, which culminates at Claire's homecoming dance on Nov. 20. It won't involve all of the series' scattered heroes, though; Kring says they won't team up until the season's final episodes. However homecoming turns out, it appears that Claire will soon hang up her pom-poms. ''Cheerleading high school get left behind,'' reveals Panettiere. ''Claire has to make a transition to a new life.'' Sweeps will bring more drama for Nathan as well: Rena Sofer joins as his wife on Nov. 6, when viewers will learn a surprising secret that sheds light on Nathan's dalliance with Niki. On another crucial front, genetics professor Mohinder Suresh (Sendhil Ramamurthy), one of the few characters with no superpowers — at least, not yet — makes some surprising discoveries about his murdered father's research into the mutant world and the helix-shaped symbol that keeps popping up. He's heading home to India, which means that Ramamurthy will finally shoot a scene outside the shadowy, clue-cluttered apartment belonging to Suresh's dead dad. Psyched? ''Like you wouldn't believe,'' says Ramamurthy with a laugh. ''I kept saying, 'I'm gonna die in this apartment and nobody's gonna know, because clearly I never leave.''' The first half of Heroes' season comes to a close on Dec. 4 (new episodes return in January), and by then, viewers will have learned how most of the characters discovered their superpowers, along with Sylar's identity. (Hint: The Scrabble value of the actor's name exceeds 10 points.) Everyone involved is predictably tight-lipped, though Pasdar does offer this teaser: ''Things get fairly dark in terms of who I might be. It's an amazing ending.'' It should be, because the one thing that Heroes has done better than most brand-new series is embrace the audience-pleasing values of plot-packed episodes and quickly moving story lines. ''We tried to learn from the pitfalls that other shows had fallen into,'' says Kring, citing Lost, 24, and Desperate Housewives. ''We sort of made a pact internally that we weren't going to be the show that made you wait for stuff.'' Of course, that does leave Heroes vulnerable to another potential pitfall: running out of story to tell. Kring says he has a general idea of where he's going — the latter half of the season will focus on Nathan's election, the pursuit of Sylar, and Hiro's efforts to avert the destruction of New York — but he and his writing staff relish the seat-of-the-pants ride. ''The idea is to have so many twists and turns and cliff-hangers that it generates more story,'' says Kring, who believes the series' simple conceit — that the world is popping with mutants — makes for an endless supply of freaky fun. ''There are others out there, and we will be meeting them.'' (Perhaps sooner rather than later: At press time, Kring was still weighing a request by NBC to extend Heroes' 22-episode season by two or three installments.) And because we know you're wondering, Kring says that the Grim Reaper will eventually strike; he teases that characters could get phased out as a result of losing their powers. But he also admits that the show's sudden success makes it hard for him to figure out whom to put on his hit list. ''This is the kind of show that has to kill some people off,'' he says. ''My plan was simply to kill the ones that weren't working. And now I don't know which ones to kill off! That's how well things are working right now.''
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Subject Author Message Date ID

RE: EW Article -- WARNING . . . Spo... Captain_Savem 11-06-06 1

RE: EW Article -- WARNING . . . Spo... syren 11-07-06 2

RE: EW Article -- WARNING . . . Spo... Bebo 11-07-06 3

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Captain_Savem 3731 desperate attention whore postings
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11-06-06, 01:46 PM (EST)

1. "RE: EW Article -- WARNING . . . Spoiler Alert!"

Great read! Thanks...

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syren 5418 desperate attention whore postings
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11-07-06, 09:58 AM (EST)

2. "RE: EW Article -- WARNING . . . Spoiler Alert!"

Thanks for that!!!

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Bebo 20880 desperate attention whore postings
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11-07-06, 11:30 AM (EST)

3. "RE: EW Article -- WARNING . . . Spoiler Alert!"

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