Not only is Pushing Daisies' Bryan Fuller heading back to NBC's Heroes, but he's going in with the best sense of what's gone wrong with the show - and how to fix it.
In a new interview with Entertainment Weekly's Michael Ausiello, Fuller - who worked on the show in its first season before creating ABC's ill-fated (yet wonderful) series - not only confirms that he's returning to the troubled NBC series for the third season's nineteenth episode, but he spoils some of what we should expect from February's "Fugitives" storyline, and why things are going to be better from now on.
On What The Show Did Wrong:
It became too dense and fell into certain sci-fi trappings. For instance, in the “Villains” arc, when you talk about formulas and catalysts, it takes the face off the drama. And I think the goal for everybody is to put a face back on the drama. You have to save something with a face; otherwise you don’t understand what you’re caring about. I thought the "Villains" arc started out very interestingly, and then became sort of muddy and dense and I couldn't get my hooks into the characters to understand their motivations. I also started to feel confused about what people's abilities were. One of the great things about the first season is that the metaphor for their abilities was very clear. Those metaphors seem to have gotten complicated in the past two seasons.
On Dealing With The Size Of The Cast:
People will die. And some will return... We're also going to tell fewer stories per episode. We're going to limit it to three or four with one big one that you can wrap the stories around. We're altering the structure of the show so that there's a very clear A story that takes up a larger percentage of the show so that that story gets traction.
On Why The Future Of The Series Is More Buffy, Less X-Files:
We need to get back into a character place, because that's where this story started: Very clean, superhero metaphors to everyday life. That's the path that we're taking. But it is a big ship so it's going to take a little while to turn it... It's not necessarily a reboot as much as it is going back to the basic spirit of the show and pulling people back in. I don't think the issues with the show have been about the serialization as much as about the density of the stories that have been serialized.
Maybe this is my Pushing Daisies love speaking, but... that all sounds kind of good. Is it worth being optimistic, or are all of Fuller's good intentions going to be swallowed up by the weekly soap opera melodrama as soon as the scripts start coming in?