'Heroes': Five Ways to Fix a Series In Crisis

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PROBLEM 3: OVERHEIGHTENED REALITY

SOLUTION: GET BACK TO THE HEROES' ROOTS

Kring once made a vow never to introduce characters with silly powers. That promise was officially obliterated on Oct. 13, when Heroes gave us a villain who could...create black holes? Maybe we're too nerdy for our own good, but that's jump-the-shark preposterous. Still, that's a quibble compared with the larger, more alarming paradigm shift that's taken place. Once, Heroes was a show that had at least one foot firmly on the ground. Claire was a high school cheerleader. Peter was a nurse struggling with finding his life's purpose. Niki/Jessica (Ali Larter) was a single mom making ends meet by webcam stripping. This quality always made Heroes relatable even when it got incredible. These days it seems everyone is working for some nefarious and shadowy agency, or stuck in a lab, or hanging with other freaks in exotic settings. Fortunately, Kring agrees that some sense of plausibility is essential to the series. ''There's a premise to the show that we are actually trying to get back to more and more — the idea that ordinary people have been chosen for something extraordinary,'' he told EW. ''It's what made the Harry Potter series so great, the idea that the most disenfranchised kid — the kid who lived under the crawl space of the stairs — could be chosen for greatness. That's an archetypal idea that has tremendous resonance.''

NEXT PAGE: Problem 4 — Stale storytelling