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| Milo and the Heroes cast in the Emmy Magazine issue #2 (March/April) 2007
(Their clothes are credited from above cover photo as- Milo: short sleeved shirt, his own; T-shirt by Hanes; jeans by H&M; shoes, Air Force One by Nike; watch, his own.)
(Their clothes are credited from above photo as- Milo: long-sleeved shirt by Corpus; skinny jeans by J Brand; sneakers and watch, his own.)
Tower Of Powers
The stars of Heroes can read minds, walk through walls, even fly. But the show is a superpower, too. It's luring millions each week to TVs and PCs, taking NBC to new heights in the cross-platform world.
by Jenny Hontz
It's Monday morning on the set of NBC's Heroes, but the mood feels more like Friday-night happy hour than an early start to the workweek. Masi Oka, who plays Hiro, the adorable, time-travelling geek, jokes in Japanese with the show's interpreter between takes of a pivotal sword-stealing scene. Greg Grunberg, known to viewers as the telepathic cop Matt Parkman, embraces his old Felicity pal Ian Gomez, who is guest-starring. "This is not a gig, it's playtime," announces Leonard Roberts, whose character, D.L. Hawkins, walks through walls.
One can forgive this cast and crew for exuding so much cheer. Heroes, after all, is an overnight sensation. Its characters-- a plucky group of ordinary folks who discover they have extraordinay abilities-- are bent on saving the world. But the show itself may be the unlikely savior of NBC, if not the future of TV in the digital age.
That might sound like hyperbole, but consider the facts: With an average of 14.6 million viewers a week, Heroes is the season's number-one new series among adults eighteen to forty-nine, eighteen to thirty-four, twenty-five to fifty-four and total viewers. At press time, it was the fifth highest rated show on TV among the trendsetting eighteen to thirty-four demo, and it has lifted NBC's performance in its time period-- Mondays at 9 p.m. -- 68 percent compared to last year.
The network, which has struggled mightily the past few seasons, has a bona fide hit on its hands. "The show is sort of everything you'd want," says NBC Entertainment President Kevin Reilly. "It has a huge and loyal audience. It's reinvigorating young audiences, and it's bringing back young men. It's also driving our newmedia business, extending our shows and brand into new media."
Heroes, like Lost before it on ABC, is also a model of convergence, a harbinger of where the business is heading. It's one of the most downloaded shows on iTunes and on NBC.com, where the network started offering full-length streams of some shows last fall, Heroes episodes were viewed some 20 million times between October and January.
"It is hugely important to us on many fronts," says Angela Bromstad, president of NBC Universal Television Studio, which produces the show. "It's the perfect example of a show that can embrace new business and travel across platforms. And we couldn't do it without ownership.
Because fans seem so hungry for more, Heroes is at the forefront of NBC's efforts to create what it calls TV 360: digital extensions of its shows online, on mobile phones and in other new media. Creator and executive producer Tim Kring describes the show as "a kind of beta testing ground for NBC's foray into that world. This was designed early on to be a show that took advantage of multiple platforms. We're perfectly suited for that."
From the beginning, Kring and his team bet that Heroes would appeal to tech-savvy young guys interested in comic books and sci-fi. While NBC orchestrated a huge promotional push, it did so in a way that preserved a kind of ground-up "viral buzz," Kring says.
The show's creators gave a target audience a sneak peek of the Heroes pilot at the comic book covention Comic-Con three months before it hit the airwaves. There they also handed out thousands of comic books designed by respected artist Tim Sale, which were later incorporated into the plot of the show, as well as buttons directing people to 9thWonders.com, a fan site for the show that didn't appear to be connected to NBC.
"The point was to drive a fanatic core group to the internet, and it was very important that it not feel like it came from [NBC parent] GE," Kring says. "With that fan base, it had to have a viral feel. The website was designed by an outside group that does hipper, cooler stuff. That core group is very aware, and they get the smell of something corporately packaged."
While the early online endeavors were promotional, viewers who log onto NBC.com now are rewarded with all kinds of original content, including more than twenty online comic books created to accompany every episode of the series. "You don't have to read them to move ahead, but if you do, you have a deeper understanding of what you saw in the episode," says Kring.
Heroes also launched a new character, Hana Gitelman (Stana Katic), in one of the online comics before she appeared on air. As Kring says, it seemed like the perfect way to introduce someone who possesses "the classic, postmodern superpower: the ability to pull wireless information out of the ether."
Oka, arguably the heart and soul of the series, blogs in the voice of his character, Hiro, every week (blog.nbc.com/hiro_blog), detailing his thoughts and motivations, sometimes from scenes that were left on the cutting-room floor (see sidebar). Producers, meanwhile, are constantly adding new features.
The show recently launched a website for the fictional Primatech Paper Company, employer of the character called Horn-Rimmed Glasses (Jack Coleman), adoptive dad of cheerleader Claire (Hayden Panettiere). When NBC showed a closeup of a Primatech business card on air, "an extraordinary number of people logged on," Kring says. Their goal? To find secret files and hints to solving show mysteries.
"With this kind of serialized mythology, there's a tremedous number of clues and hidden story points that lends itself to a fan base that wants to know more," Kring says. "If you go online, you can learn more. It appeals to a fan base that's already on the internet and feeds itself by rewarding them.
Viewers are eating it up. "Fans just can't consume it enough," says Jeff Gaspin, NBC Universal's president of cable and digital content. In a recent survey, NBC found that 48 percent of the people streaming Heroes on NBC.com had already seen the episode on TV. Now the network is rewarding its most ardent multimedia-taskers -- those who watch the show online at the ame time they watch it on air -- by adding online content such as cast commentary that runs in sync with the broadcast, known as a two-screen interactive application.
"It's all very new," Gaspin says. "We have noticed on every one of our applications, they've increased week to week. We saw triple-digit growth on our two-screen application from the first to third week. People become more and more familiar and comfortable, and over time it becomes an expected part of the experience.
Perhaps the biggest accomplishment so far is that Heroes has managed to hold onto its geeky, cult-like fan base while appealing to a broader, more mainstream audience. None of the experiments in online streaming seem to be hurting the on-air ratings, either.
"Online viewing tends to bond an audience, and then there's no sign of diminished viewing," Reilly says. "This really is a seminal time, for better or worse. In five years, the vast majority of people will wonder, 'Why would I ever have to watch something Tuesday at 8?'"
So far, new viewers are using the online feed to sample the show and catch up on early episodes they missed. Many avid fans treat the online stream as a de facto DVR.
"It helps the audience stay up-to-date," Gaspin says. "With serialized dramas, in the past, we'd lose people because they fell too far behind."
NBC's strategy has been to put out as much of Heroes on as many screens as it can, as soon as it can. Flying in the face of old notions of protecting a show's on-air audience and preventing overexposure before a backend sale, "our strategy is to get it sampled, to go where there are eyeballs and get as many people as possible on as many platforms as possible," Gaspin says.
Will that turn into a profitable business model? No one really knows. At press time, NBC had twenty online advertisers and many more clamoring to join. Viewers have shown little resistance to watching "pre-roll" ads before an online episode stream, and Gaspin predicts $500 million in online revenues within a few years. Next season, NBC will experiment with early-DVD release windows.
But no one can be sure the money to be made in new media will rival the old money made from off-net sales. "Streaming, ancillary revenue, digital extensions -- it all has to be equal to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow," Reilly says.
Meanwhile, NBC is forging ahead with even more ambitious plans for Heroes for next season. Kring hopes to expand into video gaming, create an international online community and a "Heroes Foundation" with a mission involving "ordinary people doing extraordinary things, building community and saving the world."
Producers may also hold a fan video contest. Already, fans are posting clips of Heroes online, set to music -- something that might raise eyebrows among NBC U's copyright lawyers. But this is a brave new world of audience participation, and no one seems to want to quash the passion.
Grunberg notes that fans are transcribing Heroes episodes, even writing their own -- an encouraging development, given the discerning audience. "They are smart," he says, "and if you give them crap, they will not step in it."
Indeed, there's a downside to all the instantaneous feedback online, Grunberg points out. "There's an article I just read [online] -- my Dad Googled me -- and it said, 'If Parkman dies, we would not miss him.' Of course, that just tells me they want more of me on the show. The day they don't say anything about you, that's a dark day."
In fact, actors, writers and producers are all finding it hard at times to shut out the noise. "The internet has a lot of negativity," says coexecutive producer Jesse Alexander. "Even the most die-hard fan can say something you read as incredibly harsh.
Friends and family often can't resist keeping them informed. "My buddy sent me a Google link and prefaced it with, 'Now, I don't think you should worry...," actor Roberts says. "Well, what part of 'hate' should I not worry about?"
Hiro's blog typically generates hundreds of fan comments a week, and in the beginning, Oka read every post. "But it got to the point where people were making inappropriate comments or adding links to porn sites," he says. "These days, it's more like a diary post. I make it a point not to read the internet folks. They're very vocal in their opinions, pro and con, and I don't want it to affect my portrayal of the character."
Producers also have decided to never personally respond to online posts because "as soon as you expose yourself, it's a snowball. You can't extricate yourself," Alexander says.
"What you want to do with the internet chatter is look for general trends," Kring says. "Did the idea land, or was it regected terribly?"
Regardless, fans definately keep the show's writers honest. With viewers picking each episode apart and examining every nuance, they know they have to be careful not to drop any storylines or create inconsistancies.
"Because of the nature of the fan base, they are looking for everything, so everything takes on meaning, even stuff that's not intended to have meaning," Kring says. "The intelligence they attribute to every move is greater than the collective intelligence of the writing staff."
Even with pitfalls and unresolved questions, the new-media experiment is, for the most part, generating tremendous excitement. "It's been really fascinating to be faced with a whole new learning curve," Kring says. "There's a lot of trial and error, hit and miss. We'll look back at this as a period sort of like the beginning of TV in the '50s, one of those times we were just making it up as we were going along. It's fun. How often do you get to be at the forefront?"
SIDEBAR
Hiro Worship
Masi Oka puts the chic in geek. The Golden Globe-nominated actor not only represents the core Heroes viewer onscreen with his tech-nerd, fanboy character Hiro Nakamura, he actually is that guy -- which may prove to be beneficial behind the scenes, too.
"I wear glasses, and I'm short in real life," he says. "It's important that people celebrate the geek. Being a geek means being passionate about something."
Born in Tokyo, Oka, thirty-two, landed on the cover of Time at age twelve for being an Asian whiz kid. With a reported IQ of 180, he majored in math and computer science at Brown University and worked as a digital special effects artist for George Lucas's Industrial Light & Magic while pursuing an acting career. He still moonlights as a consultant.
"I spent four hours with George Lucas yesterday," he says. "He said he'd do a cameo [on Heroes] as long as he could play a villain."
Hiro is one of the show's most popular characters, in part because of his unbridled enthusiasm for his time-bending abilities, which Oka plays with comedic aplomb. "Hiro always kept that childlike wonder and spirit of adventure," Oka says. "I love playing him. He enjoys his powers. Everyone else is a little more emo." (That's emotional, for the older set.)
Creator-executive producer Tim Kring wanted viewers to put themselves in the shoes of the characters as they discovered their supernatural abilities.
"What would happen if it happened to you or me?" Kring asks. "The truth is, if we could hear people's thoughts, we'd go to a shrink. It would be terribly alarming. By playing it real, there's an overwhelming sense of angst. We needed a character that embraced his newfound abilities with enthusiasm and zeal. A geeky character who always wanted to be special.
Oka's character may add to the show's international appeal as well as to its popularity online. When Kring wrote the Hiro role, he wrote it in English, but put out a call for Japanese actors. Oka, however, surprised the producers and studio execs, by performing his entire audition in Japanese.
"We were all laughing," recalls Angela Bromstad, president of NBC Universal Television Studio. "After the studio audition, we thought, 'Can we let this guy go in [to the network] and audition in Japanese?' Well, he went in and did the same audition, and [NBC Entertainment President] Kevin Reilly said, 'Done. This is our guy'.
"I do not think Tim meant to use subtitles," Bromstad adds. Oka now translates his own dialogue, and Kring hopes the character will help the show crack the notoriously difficult Japanese TV market.
With hobbies that include writing romantic comedies, singing and playing piano, Japanese sword fighting and video gaming, Oka also likes to come up with ideas for Heroes games. "Recently I pitched a simple game, a sort of Hiro Pac-Man that gobbles up waffles."
He hopes the show will expand into MMORPGs (Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games), with users becoming superhero avatars in an "alternate universe based on the current state of the show."
Still, letting viewers influence what happens on the show -- a truly interactive experience -- is a long way off. "The idea of digital content is so young," Oka says. "The digital world is such an untrapped resource."
Spoken like a true geek. --J.H. __________________ -Kelly |