DIG: Heroes’ Tim Kring Talks About His New USA Series

While we all anxiously await the launch of NBC’s Heroes Reborn, the show’s creator, Tim Kring, has another project that we can watch first – and it premieres this week… March 5, to be exact.

DIG airs on the USA Network starting this Thursday and stars Jason Isaacs, Anne Heche, Lauren Ambrose, Regina Taylor and a host of big names. We spoke with Kring, the show’s co-creator (with Homeland’s Gideon Raff), about what we have to look forward to. This is the first of several reports you’ll find from the set of DIG here on KSiteTV, so be sure to keep coming back.

“The show is a 10-part event series centered around a murder mystery in the old city of Jerusalem, specifically around the idea of a young archaeologist. Peter Connelly, who is an agent with the FBI stationed in a Jerusalem, gets on to this case, and through the mystery of trying to solve this murder, he uncovers a very deep and ancient conspiracy. As he uncovers the truth about the murder, he begins to uncover the truth of this ancient conspiracy that seems to be coming to life at this particular time,” Kring detailed.

A project like DIG – an “event series” for USA, with a set beginning, middle, and end for its first season – is certainly a different experience from past Kring projects such as Heroes and Touch. Kring also spoke a bit about those differences.

“Without getting too technical about the business end of it, the truth is it is a very different animal, in that you write the episodes beforehand, as opposed to the assembly line quality that you do when you’re in production. One of the drawbacks is that you don’t have as much of a staff – you have the staff up front when you’re writing, but when you’re in production you don’t have a lot of the usual people that are doing the day-to-day stuff. It’s different in that respect,” he explained. “This particular one, because it is a serialized show, and because we are shooting in different parts of the world, we’re block-shooting. So we’re shooting a piece here, and a piece there, and a piece here, and different episodes’ worth of stuff will be shot on any given day, and then you piece it together. In essence, it’s more like doing a big, giant movie than it is doing a television series. On television series, you have a set director for each episode, and when you’re done with that episode, the next one starts, and that assembly line happens. This one was really more boarded as a big, giant movie, and Gideon is directing a tremendous amount of it. He’ll end up directing close to three quarters of the entire project.”

You can see some video of our group interview below, where Kring also talks about getting the leads Jason Isaacs and Anne Heche, as well as the talented pool of actors that make up the rest of the series cast. He also talks about working with co-creator Gideon Raff, and the college studies that may have helped him in this experience. Enjoy: