'Heroes' relaunches

A lot of "Heroes" fans have not been reluctant to express their displeasure with the way Season 2 turned out. But creator/executive producer Tim Kring would like them to know that they didn't see Season 2.

"The truth is what you were referring as Season 2 was not really our Season 2," Kring said in a teleconference with TV critics. "It turned out to be Season 2 because of the writers' strike.

"It was really sort of like watching a movie and having the projector break 40 minutes into it."

Because of the strike by the Writers Guild, "Heroes" produced only 11 episodes last season, reaching the end of one "volume" — the first of three that were planned for that season. And the end of the volume was changed because of the strike.

The plan for last season was to produce three separate volumes. The first was about the threat of a deadly virus being released; the second was to be about the outbreak of that virus.

"We re-jiggered literally the last couple minutes of that volume when we knew the strike was imminent and changed the ending so that that virus never broke out," Kring said. "The second volume of Season 2 was going to be an outbreak story that would last eight episodes, and it was all avoided by Peter Petrelli (Milo Ventimiglia) catching this vial of a virus and so it did not break."

Kring couldn't find much good to say about what happened to the show because of the strike, but a "silver lining" is that it allowed the producers and writers "some time away to reassess and think about what to do next."

And that resulted in "kind of reassessment of how to tell a story in a very adrenalized way," Kring said.

As was the case on Season 1, the plotting on Season 2 was a "slow build."

"In the first season, we took about eight or nine episodes before the characters even crossed paths with one another," Kring said. "And if you stuck with it, you were rewarded to see where that story went."

And if the "outbreak" had occurred, the slow build of the first 11 episodes would have paid off. But even assuming that all 25 episodes are produced this season, Kring and Co. aren't planning another slow start.

"I mean, clearly the audience is really not very interested in a slow build on this show. They want to hit the ground running," he said. "And so (the strike) gave us a little time to figure out just how to do that and in many ways how to tell a story without an Act 1 — to start, basically, in Act 2.