by Jean-Yves Le Moine, published on 25.11.2009

September 27^th 2009 was the airdate of the first episode of Heroes’ season 4. But Heroes is much more than a simple TV series. According to Jesse Alexander, its executive producer, as well as the producer of Alias and Lost: “Heroes was always conceived as a transmedia concept. This series is an integral part of the transmedia landscape and the scriptwriting techniques used are very close to that of videogames.”

Today, Heroes is not only a TV series, but also two ARGs, an interactive web version, comic books available in print or on iPhone, an official fan site and an unofficial one, a website around the mysterious company at the heart of the story: Pinehearst, and a site promoting the campaign and the senate run of Nathan Petrelli… and many other things developed by the many fans.

The concept of Heroes was initiated by its creator Tim Kring, who knew and succeeded in freely developing his ideas without any constraint on NBC’s behalf. The network gave into his enthusiasm, which was shared by his whole team. Heroes is written by a team of about 12 scriptwriters, it’s a real collective creation, each story, each episode, is written collaboratively. However, each character is developed by a defined author for several episodes and finalized in an iterative way. According to Heroes’ executive producers, this way of working is much more efficient for a series, than having one author for each episode, where each one would follow the bible of the series’ creator. This also allows for a lot of reactivity, which is very practical to avoid pitfalls that a “traditional” team often takes very long to overcome.

Another originality of series such as Heroes, but also Lost and Alias, is in its authors’ personality, Tim Kring or JJ Abrams. They never write for the largest possible audience. They never think of the “wide audience”, they are series fans and simply write for other fans!

Heroes is a real brand, it’s necessary to incarnate it in the transmedia spirit, to communicate it and transmit it to all the creators, whether they work on the TV series, the web series, the comics or the ARG. Within NBC, Heroes has its own transmedia department, which manages all those opportunities and guarantees the franchise across all the developments. This way of working is paramount both from the artistic and the economic perspective. When will French channels have a similar department for their series?

Heroes are ordinary people who get together to save the world. And there is a strong potential among the community of fans to interact and collectively solve new problems. The creators have plenty of material to work and invent from!