Written by: Michael Hickerson (SoSF Assistant Editor)
Fans of NBC’s Heroes should pencil an appointment on their calendars for 7-11 p.m. EST on Monday, September 15. That evening, the third season of hit series return to NBC with the third chapter of the saga, “Villains.”
The evening will kick-off at 7 p.m. EST with an hour-long recap show. Then fans will get a two-hour premiere to begin the third volume/season of the hit show.
But you may have noticed we told you to pencil the time and date on your calendar. That’s because a potential strike by the Screen Actor’s Guild could disrupt this plan. The current contract between the SAG and studios expires on July 31st. If an agreement isn’t reached, the actors could go on strike which could lead to another production shutdown.
If that happens, Sendhil Ramamurthy, who stars as Mohinder on Heroes, believes that could have a negative impact on the show and essentially kill the series.
“Hopefully producers and SAG will get together and sort something out,” he told fans at a recent Eclipse event in the UK. “My last scene [on Heroes] was filmed on Oct. 23 so I’m hoping we’ll get something together cause I’d really like to get back to work.”
If the SAG strike does happen, it could make Heroes one of the biggest losers. While the show has been renewed for a third-season and appears on NBC’s schedule, the franchise has taken some hits. Heroes was one of the first shows to go off the air when the strike began and creator Tim Kring was force to compress a lot of the storyline in order to complete the second season storyline before the writers strike shut down production.
The series lost approximately half a season of episodes and its proposed spin-off, Origins. Origins would have introduced a new person with powers each week, some of whom would join the main show. The series was set to include the talents of Kevin Smith, Eli Roth Michael Dougherty and John August in the director’s chair. But when the writers’ strike came, Origins was one of the first shows on the chopping block at NBC and it isn’t included on NBC’s new year-round schedule announced earlier this week.
“We were taxing our creative team to do too much around that,” Ben Silverman, co-chairman of NBC Entertainment and Universal Media Studios, said during the network’s upfront presentation to advertisers in New York. “We wanted 35 Heroes [episodes] and 12 Heroes: Origins, each of which was supposed to be a mini-movie and backdoor pilot. We reached far and challenged our people, and we decided it was better to focus on keeping the Heroes mothership as strong as possible.”
Why 7-11? With a one-hour recap, and a two-hour premiere, wouldn’t it be 7-10?