Interview: Heroes' Tim Kring and Kristen Bell
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Ran across a transcribed conference call for the media with Heroes showrunner Tim Kring, and new season 2 entrant Kristen Bell. I was going to publish this about an hour ago, but there were a couple of comments under the blog post where I found this to site where you supposedly could watch every episode of Heros online for free. The link not pointing to NBC.com made me more than just a little bit curious, so I followed it to find a site that is nothing but a shell that has a bunch of Google AdSense ads on it and lots of embedded video from Divx.com's video hosting site.Every single video was a full length episode of Heroes, sure enough, brazenly illegal in violation of United States copyright law (this guy according to his domain records lives in New York and so is certainly reachable by the law) and Google's AdSense policy. Unfortunately, neither Google nor NBC have a dedicated address where you can point out things such as this unless you're the actual owner of the material in question.
Divx.com ignores any tips you send unless you send a DMCA, which you can't do if you don't own the stuff. For all the noise the big media companies make over piracy, they don't do a very good job creating a system where citizens who actually do care about this stuff can complain.
Anyway, probably one of the biggest concerns anyone has for Heroes this year is the cast overload. It's already causing core characters from the first season to be ignored for entire episodes while the newbies get some air time, and all it does is make me resent having to deal with them at all. Says Kring on the matter, "..on a show like this you have to be able to fold people in and fold people out. The audience should fully expect to see characters leaving."
That's great, so long as it's the boring newbies that get shoved out of the airlock, and not the others we've spent a whole season becoming emotionally invested in already. I'm definitely not ready to give them up in favor of some of these weird newbies.
The conference apparently was held mostly to pump up the press about the addition of Bell, which I think is going to be much less of an event that most media types think it will be. People who watch Heroes don't know who Bell is, probably haven't seen Veronica Mars, and just don't care because there are so many other new faces that regardless of how pretty she is, she'll have one hell of a time standing out amongst the new characters.
It'll be even worse trying to stand out amongst the old guard.
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