What makes the release of Heroes: Season 2 on DVD and Blu-ray Disc worth our time, attention, and dollars?

TIM KRING (creator/executive producer of Heroes): The value of bonus material like Generations: Alternate Ending, Inside the Alternate Ending of Generations, and Untold Stories can't be undersold. For a show that only got to do 11 episodes last season because of the writers' strike, it became an advantage for us to take that already-shot material and use it on the DVD and Blu-ray Discs to let people see where the show could have gone. Those are tremendous extras for fans, to be able to get footage that would never be seen in any other way.

I felt I got some real insight while watching some of the other extras, like Exploding Man and The Loft. In The Loft, [director] Allan Arkush talks about how he didn't have enough time to get the last shot he wanted, and then he walks us through exactly what it would have looked like had he got it. The more of that kind of material you can provide, the better DVD or Blu-ray releases you'll have.

KRING: I totally agree. We live in a world where you can find these episodes in other ways, formats, and media. To make it worth your hard-earned money, there should be an open access to the stories of how things were made, the decisions as to why they were made that way, and other things like that. For our particular fans, who are both obsessed and intrigued by what the real storyline is, they get to learn one more piece of the puzzle.

Have you talked about doing an "in the writer’s room" kind of extra, following script development from beginning to end?

JESSE ALEXANDER (co-executive producer/writer of Heroes): We've talked about doing that, absolutely. We've done that on other shows I've worked on, and that has a lot of value. It's certainly something to look at moving forward with Season 3 . . .

KRING: That's a great idea for Season 3.

Lost DVD releases have some breaking-the-story things like that, The Shield does it on some of their box sets, and Mad Men does it to some degree too. You get to see things like the big board that's mapped out with all the characters and their storylines and relationships. It sounds like a winner of an idea for Season 3 extras.

ALEXANDER: I agree.

KRING: The difficult part is not having people feel self-conscious while the camera is on them in that room. Nobody wants to come across as being stupid or a jerk. The idea is to put the camera in the corner or ceiling, like a security camera.

I also liked how you guys sat around and discussed and dissected the alternate ending to the season on camera for almost a half hour. Considering the depth of so many of the other extras here, anything less than that wouldn't have felt right at all.

ALEXANDER: Exactly. I'm obsessed with DVDs, and commentaries in particular — I even rip commentaries with HandBrake and listen to them on my iPod. Since I get so much out of them, it's become part of my approach to the Heroes supplemental material: making sure the stuff has additive educational value so that people can really get something out of it. Tim's approach to Heroes has always been one of openness, whereas other shows are very tight about how they expose their process and how things work internally. I'm optimistic that the documentaries we did for this release take that kind of vision of what's going on behind the scenes to a different level.

What elements do you need for a good commentary?

ALEXANDER: I go back to Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams, where [director] Robert Rodriguez set the benchmark for commentary tracks. I found it very inspiring how he talked about his process. He really gets the power of the medium. So do the guys who did Hot Fuzz, the British police spoof. They're clearly people who love movies, and they took it to the next level in terms of supplemental content. We need more releases done that way.

One thing that Masi [Oka, who plays Hiro Nakamura] mentioned during our cover shoot was that he'd like to see more interactive features. Jesse, you’ve mentioned this elsewhere in terms of dealing with the web vs. physical formats.

ALEXANDER: This is one of the reasons why we're excited by the potential of the interactivity in that format. One of the things we had generated for our dot.com was the video commentaries, and those were things that lent themselves perfectly to the Blu-ray Disc format.

I have to say here that I think the Blu-ray menus are great.

ALEXANDER: Thanks. Having worked on the Lost: Season 1 DVD, which I'm really proud of, I think that NBC and Universal really stepped it up to let us do something comparable to that in terms of the aesthetic. We also go to do something that has great functionality and usability, and we're looking forward to enhancing some of the features you mentioned earlier — the downloads — with this foray into Blu-ray.

Tim, how did Jesse’s previous gig help you when you started planning the Heroes DVD and Blu-ray releases?

KRING: Clearly, Jesse had more experience in putting together a high-end DVD release than I did. Thinking about that kind of thing as an inevitability for a start-up show is always a difficult thing. All you want to do is stay on the air for 13 episodes, and then try to make it for a full year. So to start putting the cart before the horse and being presumptuous that you'll sell a bunch of DVDs at the end of it is a hard stance to take at the beginning of a show. That said, Jesse pushed very hard for us to think boldly about content that could live on and be an additive for the fans.

ALEXANDER: Tim really had a vision for this show. While he’ll say he didn't know if he had a hit on his hands, he really had a mandate to make this show a hit. So in our DNA, the DNA of the show, we have what we call a transmedia approach to our storytelling. We've done so well on the web already, and to take that to the DVD format, and then incorporate the download and storage capabilities of Blu-ray, is something that we're all very excited about.

Here's an idea I threw at Masi. How about using BD-Live, the feature that connects Blu-ray Discs with the Internet? You pick a date where you have a live worldwide viewing, and all the fans watch, say, Episode 10 in real time, and then discuss it online, and maybe the star of the episode answers questions, also in real time as it's going on.

KRING: That’s a fabulous idea.

ALEXANDER: We actually have talked about doing something like that. There are a lot of challenges in what you've just described, and as this is a new technology, people are figuring out what to do with it. Moving forward, hopefully we can figure out a way to make that happen, because it's a great idea.

The Heroes box-set packaging is clearly deliberate in how it opens and unfolds, especially with the comic-book lettering for Season 1 and the overall aesthetic of Season 2. You must have a very deliberate sense of how you want it to be, even down to how the boxes look sitting next to each other on the shelves.

KRING: There are some very cool things that we're adding to the special editions for various retailers. One thing I really love is the scrapbook that has framed Tim Sale artwork — it’s fantastic. You get to see all the artwork and the corresponding film frames of the show, and see how they lived up to the idea — in other words, did the artwork come true? Because the paintings are actually premonitional moments, the viewer/fan really gets to study how well we lived up to [i.e., filmed] Tim’s vision.

Cool. Another good extra would be to follow all the threads in the map that was in Isaac's loft in the future sequences.

ALEXANDER: The string map. Yeah. There was a Lost menu/extra that really connected all their storylines, I think. [True; see the Lost: Season 2 DVD set—MM]

Certainly the QC in what we see is very high here. What Season 2 moments do you consider your best-looking scenes, ones that will stand out on DVD and Blu-ray?

KRING: [pauses] We aim so high for everything, it's kind of tough to choose. We have to withstand the scrutiny of our special effects, so it really lives and dies on that. We always put extra care in those moments so we don't get dragged down by expectations.

Understood. For me, and Masi as well, one of the most powerful moments is the cherry blossoms scene in “Lizards,” Episode 2 of Season 2. It's a beautiful-looking sequence.

KRING: That was a really spectacular one, I agree.

ALEXANDER: Me too. Everybody here is dedicated to making every moment of the show feature-level quality. Having come from serialized shows, for me, the DVD and Blu-ray formats are the best way to watch the show. You can watch it at your own pace and really get deep into the narrative. For people to experience a narrative at their own pace and get the visual and audio quality at the maximum theater-quality level is unparalleled in terms of what you're going to get, TV-boxsetwise.

In my mind, the three top network shows that are benchmarks for audio and visual quality are Heroes, Lost, and 24.

KRING: Thanks. We know we exist in a very competitive world, and we feel we also have to compete with the HBOs and the Showtimes — not just their regular series, but the fact that you can watch the latest $200 million blockbuster in high-def and on the same system that you’re watching us. We feel we have to compete at that level, especially when you enter the realm of special effects. Therefore, we spend a tremendous amount of time dealing with the post-production of this show — the color-timing, just getting everything dialed in. We have to.