Twenty years ago today, NBC put on a show about ordinary people who wake up able to do impossible things. More than 14 million people watched.
Five words from it outlived the show. “Save the cheerleader, save the world.”
Hayden Panettiere was the cheerleader.
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Heroes creator Tim Kring was casting ten leads on a budget that wouldn’t stretch to stars. He wanted faces people half-recognized. Then Panettiere walked in.
“We did not look very far, we saw her, and that was it,” Kring recently shared in an interview for the show’s 20th anniversary. “She just embodied that girl-next-door quality, and then her range was exceptional. So it was just pure talent that walked in the door.”
He had a specific note for the part. “I described her as the cheerleader who you had the crush on, not the one that everybody else had the crush on,” he said. “So not the golden girl, but slightly quirky, with something offbeat about her.”
For other roles he can still name the actors who came close. For Claire Bennet there weren’t any. “There’s nobody in my head that we saw other than her.”
The Tagline Was an Accident
“Save the cheerleader, save the world” started as shorthand in the writers’ room while they mapped the season on a board. Somebody liked how it sounded, and they handed it to Hiro Nakamura, played by Masi Oka, as a line of dialogue.
The network turned it into the whole marketing campaign.
“It was one of those happy accidents where one line of dialogue distills down to the essence of what the story was all about,” Kring said.
It Beat the Superhero Boom by Years
Heroes premiered in September 2006, before the Marvel machine reached television and before the CW spent a decade building a network out of comic books. Its first season took eight Emmy nominations.
“The thought of doing superhero stuff on network television, it was felt that that audience was too fringe and small,” Kring said. “But it was a sleeping giant.”
The fall was faster than the rise. The 2007 writers’ strike cut season 2 fifteen episodes short and left a cliffhanger hanging for ten months.
The ratings didn’t come back. The show ended after four seasons.
Panettiere Died in August
She was found unresponsive in a Greenville, South Carolina, apartment on Aug. 16 and pronounced dead at 36. On Tuesday the county coroner ruled it an accident, caused by the toxic effects of fentanyl and other drugs.
Her Heroes castmates gathered to celebrate her life days after she died. Courteney Cox, who worked with her on Scream, wrote her own tribute. Viola Davis called her “so gifted.”
The tagline went back into circulation after she died, passed around by people who had not thought about the show in years. Kring, asked about that, went back to what the line had meant in the room.
“There was also this almost irony, like, wouldn’t it be great if it were so simple that all you had to do is save one person to save the entire world?”
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