Save the cheerleader again, save the world.. again?
Deadline reported on April 10 that creator Tim Kring, Universal Television and Kring’s manager Jordan Cerf are taking a new sequel series to Heroes titled Heroes: Eclipsed to potential buyers. With a story written by Tim Kring, the new show is set years after the events of the original series as new evos are being awakened and discovering powers that will change their lives. The use of the term “evos” implies that the events of the first sequel series, Heroes Reborn, will not be ignored. The description continues to note that familiar villains and new enemies will once again be attempting to suppress this next step in human evolution, and it will be up to this new group of heroes to save the world.
Heroes was a worldwide phenomenon when it premiered on NBC in 2006, with awards coming in and even a spinoff planned after its successful first season. However, a writers’ strike that derailed Season 2 killed the show’s momentum and despite some decent episodes in the later seasons, it never quite returned to the glory of that first year. Heroes Reborn came in 2016 and sadly missed a lot of the characters and situations that made the original series work, even breaking the original series’ cardinal rule by not saving the cheerleader. Several original series cast members still made appearances on the revival, including Jack Coleman, Sendhil Ramamurthy, Cristine Rose, Greg Grunberg, Masi Oka, Jimmy Jean-Louis, and Noah Gray-Cabey.
“I’ve always felt that the brand was elastic enough and a broad enough premise,” Tim Kring said at the Television Critics Association Press Tour the year that Heroes Reborn was premiering. “It’s a show about ordinary people with extraordinary powers. It’s an indeterminate [amount of] people around the world and then they have to save the world. I feel confident that we can find more story to tell with some returning characters and new ones.”
According to Deadline, the show has been pitched to NBC as well as some streaming networks. NBC, of course, recently ended two well-received reboots – Quantum Leap and Magnum P.I. – so it will be interesting to see if they get bitten by the Heroes bug once again.
