The AV Club's Steve Heisler has a really good interview with Heroes' showrunner Tim Kring, discussing some of the show's continuing problems, with a few admissions and interesting defences from Kring. I think it's clear that Heroes' writers understand and appreciate the problems inherent with their show, and would perhaps have done a better job had the workload not been so heavy, and the original plan to replace most of the cast every year had gone ahead. Anyway, I still think Kring's team shot themselves in the foot several times, rather needlessly, but he makes some valid points along the way:
"It's always hard. For us, the seasons aren't really seasons. We took about four days off between season one and two -- we never stopped writing. Same directors, same actors, same everything. So when someone says they don't like season two, it's like, 'Well, that was yesterday.' We don’t have a sense that the seasons are divided by ideas or timeframes; it's just this big long continuum. I think the first season can be divided into two places. We took a seven-week break, and the audience never came back after that. The first 16 episodes was the part everybody talks about." Continue reading...