The announcement was made by the network yesterday afternoon, with insiders acknowledging that the move is likely, in part, a way to save money, but also suggesting that the decision to restructure was also made to give the show a more dramatic launchpad, with the possibility that Day One could then spin out into a regular series afterwards, a la Battlestar Galactica's launch on Syfy. We asked Alexander for his take on the decision, and he told us,

I worked very closely with NBC on this decision. We decided a more targeted, shock and awe approach was the best way to expose a great Day One story to a massive audience. Airing four hours over two nights is much more exciting to me than rolling out just one hour per week... I didn't want to suffer the same fate as many first year shows and be moved to another time slot mid story, or worse, not be able to air the final episodes. This way, the fans get a kick ass story, and the show gets the best chance to succeed.

The first two hours of Day One have already been shot; Alexander is reworking the next two to bring plots to a climax, as well as create potential spin-offs for a follow-on season.

NBC opts to air 'Day One' as miniseries [Variety]

You've worked on Lost, Alias, Heroes and now Day One. Have you been typecast as a science fiction and fantasy writer? Is there a great Grey's Anatomy script inside of you, waiting for the chance to come out?

I actually quite love my genre, the science fiction genre, and fantasy, and action adventure, really. It's what I grew up on. Growing up as a kid in the 1970s, I grew up on Star Wars and Ray Harryhausen and the Atari 2600 and Apple 2 and D&D and Doctor Who betamax bootlegs from England and all that stuff is really what I love. What drives me to be creative is coming up with new worlds and fun characters and extraordinary events and all that wonderful, fun stuff that so inspired me as a kid.

I think that I've been very lucky, incredibly lucky, to be able to work in the film and entertainment business doing what I love. Before I got into television, I did a little bit of writing in video games, which was very fun, and then I wrote feature screenplays for a number of years - None of which got produced, but they were all assignments and spec sales to Hollywood studios. My niche really was writing these big science-fiction adventure films, and videogames come to life. One of the first things that I sold was a modern-day Jason and the Argonauts, I sold that to Dreamworks, and I wrote a new take on Flash Gordon for Sony back in the day. I adapted the Berzerker novels for Alex Proyas as New Line, and made my bread and butter in the genre that I loved, and I've been lucky to continue to be able to do that.

So do you harbor secret wishes of going back and making that Flash Gordon movie? Do you want to go and work on a Star Wars project, now that you've made your name? Day One is your own creation, are you happier working on something that you've created, or do you want to make your mark on these worlds that meant so much to you?

I love creating my own worlds, it's something I'm very into. I think that now, with so many different platforms available to me as a storyteller, that I can really build out my own story. Day One is going to have many forms, it's going to have the version that is in prime time on NBC and then I'm going to be able to expand it into different arenas like comic books, novelizations and some really cool web stuff that we're going to be doing as well. So I love doing my own thing, creating my own intellectual properties and being able to build out my own little worlds.

So much of it for me is really about escaping to those worlds and being able to immerse myself in them, and explore more adventurous places and experiences that I'm not able to have in my daily life. I'm certainly open to working on other narratives and fictions, but there's something so special about creating something from scratch and then expanding it.

You're talking about what you've called on your blog "Transmedia Storytelling"; that there's going to be Day One the television show, but that there's also going to be Day One the web presence, and comic books as well... Is that how you see storytelling in general now? Multiple platforms for one story?

I certainly do see storytelling as going across multiple platforms now, but that really has a lot to do with how I grew up as a kid. As I always say, everything I learned about everything comes from Star Wars. For me, those movies were so impactful on me, such a consuming reaction. But it was also playing with the action figures, reading the comics, reading the books, playing the games, making Star Wars movies of my own... All that stuff just imprinted itself in my head. So when I think about the worlds that I create, I just automatically imagine the expanded universe component and get excited about using the different platforms to tell the story in new ways.

I'm very lucky that transmedia storytelling, crossplatform narrative, is so important right now in the entertainment business, in all facets of it, whether it's a video game or a movie or a TV show, it's important to be able to extend your story across platforms to be able to reach the fractured audiences that are experiencing the stories in so many different places and in so many different ways. I'm lucky to be able to think about that stuff naturally.

That's touching on something I wanted to ask. You have NBC behind you on this?

Absolutely, NBC were such amazing and supportive partners in Heroes expanding their brand across the web and into different arenas, and I really made some great friends in our dotcom and licensing divisions who understood what I wanted to do and were really excited in having a show creator reach out to them and treat them like collaborators and partners. So I've been very lucky in having support from NBC.

I want to make sure that people understand that it's not about 'exploiting the brand,' it really is for me about having more toys to play with. I very much designed Day One, and that world, so that it would organically and authentically exist on those other platforms without being exploitative and ancillary. That every piece of the Day One brand that exists on whatever platform is incredibly valuable and canon for the mythology and important and valuable to the people who are looking at it.

So how established is the Day One mythology at this point? Do you have a clear idea of where everything is going, or at least a firm enough idea of the backstory so that other people can elaborate on it without contradicting what you want to do on the show?

Absolutely. Look, because I'm a psychopath and really into stories and a total D&D nut, I can't help but think about where everything is going and where everything came from, and who people are and why they're doing the things that they are. It comes very naturally to me to think about a massive arc for what's essentially a space opera. Again, it comes back to Star Wars: That's what George Lucas did! He sat down, and thought about it, and certainly Tolkein did as well. That's very much the school that I come from.

For Day One, I very much have a long term plan that's broken into, for the series, these different events. NBC, and rightly so, is very committed to making sure that, when Day One is on the air that it's very special, and doesn't overstay its welcome, and that every episode is important.

We're going to try some interesting things about a limited run. We're going to be on for twelve weeks in a row, starting in March. We're really trying to have the first season feel like a solid event that has a real sense of closure, and if it's successful, there are ways to continue the story. As I've been building Day One, I kind of think of it like I'm creating a D&D campaign, just to keep referencing D&D [laughs]. I feel like I'm designing a campaign, a ruleset, a world, and modules, and then my writing staff, or my partners in the publishing space or online are really the players. It's up to me to build space where they can be creative, and create stories that are fun for them to create and for other people to experience, and be integrated as canon into the Day One mythology.

How do you feel about the awareness of Day One? When it was first announced, a lot of people thought it was going to be something like Jericho, but here, you're talking about it being a space opera...

I can only hope that people will be surprised and excited about Day One. It's natural for people to compare it to other franchises or movies or stories, I certainly don't blame anybody for reading NBC's press release or looking at some images and comparing it with something that they're more familiar with. I'm totally okay with that, and I certainly do that all the time when imagining what Avatar's going to be like or some other movie that I'm really excited about. But I'm hoping that I'm being creative enough, and have hired amazing writers and collaborators to help me, to build out stories and a world that absolutely have familiar elements that people will see the influences, but they're going to be so fast and furious and thick that I think we're going to come up with something that's ultimately original. That's certainly my goal.

Do you have a finite ending in mind for the series? Are you heading towards a particular endpoint, or are you preparing to be Gene Roddenberry and have Day One still going in thirty years?

I certainly have a plan for the stories. Again, I am a product of sci-fi, fantasy and everything I grew up with in the seventies. I absolutely have a finite version of one of the Day One stories, but there are also ways that those stories can continue on television and in other places, as well. I don't necessarily need to be the guy in charge completely, it's important for a creator to have a firm hand on the tiller of their story, to believe in it and love it, but also be willing to bring on people who can collaborate in making those stories the best that they can possibly be. Certainly, Roddeberry was at the helm of Trek, but he certainly wasn't at the helm of The Next Generation, which was so great, or Wrath of Khan, or JJ's Trek. He established the culture and spirit with which Star Trek stories are told.

Lucas and Star Wars is another interesting example. He created an amazing universe and some fantastic movies, and there were periods in the development of the expanded universe where some amazing collaborators came in and were allowed to expand on it. I think some of the novels are such an amazing extentions of the Star Wars universe, as were some of the games. I think Knights of The Old Republic was such a great Star Wars adventure, and I can't wait to see what BioWare and Lucasarts come up with for the new MMO. And, you know, there were some good things about the prequels and there were some things that weren't so good. I'd love to see KOTOR the movie. Or Neill Blomkamp's adaptation of Republic Commando.

It's important, as an entertainer, a commercial artist really, to understand the value of having other voices in your process, to help make the work better and give it a longer shelf life.

If you had your chance to be part of the writing staff of any SF television show of the past, what would it be?

Well, I did just write about Space: Above and Beyond, and certainly Battlestar did some amazing things. Growing up with Star Wars was huge for me so being able to work on the new TV show that Lucas is doing would be really interesting as well. I'm completely obsessed with the Russel T. Davies and David Tenant years of Dr. Who. That would've been something magnificent to be part of. I can't wait to see how Steven Moffat tops Blink! But, really, At the end of the day, anything with spaceships in it is something that I would be all over. I just love spaceships. I hate to geek out like that, but that's what makes me more of sci-fi guy than a syfy guy. Know what I'm saying? it was so awesome to have Star Trek come out this summer and go and see a movie with space battles. It'd have to be something with some tech and some hardware. And you can bet your ass that, somewhere down the line, Day One will have it's fair share of that as well.

You know, the monetary cost of producing a science fiction film for theatrical release. Someone like myself who makes a good living in the entertainment business probably shouldn't be discussing such things in public, but this summer we've had our Terminator 4, Transformers 2, GI Joe, Star Trek and Harry Potter all in the two hundred million dollar budget range, and Moon costing somewhere around five million dollars. So does that mean the only science fiction movies getting a theatrical release are at the opposite ends of the budget spectrum? District 9 is reported to have cost somewhere around thirty million bucks to produce, but I wonder if Weta Digitia; would've billed the same number of hours if Peter Jackson hadn't been the movie's producer. I dunno. Still — let's say that one's in the middle, and I think it's really the best of the lot. Neill Blomkamp is the mega shizz in my opinion.

Hmmm... I wonder if those sixteen minutes of Avatar cost the same as District 9. Maybe. They certainly cost more than Moon. Reports have Avatar costing somewhere north of three hundred million bucks, and it looks seriously and completely awesome: I think that blue Legolas guy looks cool! So don't get me wrong, I'm very happy that science fiction has become such a popular form of global entertainment that financial investments of the aforementioned magnitude make sense to somebody. But one thing does kind of suck about it. Most of that money is spent on CGI. Maybe Avatar will be the game changer, but for me — CGI jeopardy isn't usually that compelling. Are you still blown away by green screen vistas and pixel generated monsters? Are you still terrified by tidal waves and explosions that took rocket scientists months to render?

I like that stuff. I like it a lot in fact. I read Cinefex every month. But CGI just doesn't freak me out or put me on the edge of my seat like it once did. I think one of the great things about science fiction movies that don't have a gazillion dollars to spend is that they need to make choices. They need to come up with ways to use filmmaking techniques and practical effects to adjust for the fact that they can't afford 1000+ CGI shots. They've gotta build suspense the old fashioned way: Hide the creature for a while. Shoot on location. Blow stuff up. Crash a car. Pay a stuntman to do a full body burn. That's the stuff I miss. I miss movies like Star Wars, Escape From New York, Alien, Aliens, Outland and Predator. Movies where a big part of my suspension of disbelief came from recognizing a world where physics could be painful and not everything was in focus all the time.

Lost and BSG have been kicking ass with this approach on the small screen. And with Blomkamp's District 9 and his amazing short films, I have hope that we could be on the verge of a new crop of middle budget sci-fi flicks coming to theaters; movies that can transport me to a different reality by taking a world that I recognize and making it extraordinary through traditional movie making techniques and state of the art CGI. Gamer looks like it might do this. Neveldine and Taylor's gonzo Crank flicks give me hope that it's gonna viscerally rock. But I hear it cost around sixty million, so I wonder how much of that they spent on CGI?

Oh well — see you in line for Avatar.

Jesse Alexander is creator and executive producer of NBC's Day One, and has worked on Alias, Lost and Heroes.

Though S:AB only ran for one season on the then fledgling FOX network, its impact on me was significant and profound. I often think about those 24 episodes, as both a fan compelled by its fiction, and a show creator challenged by the vision and talent of its craft.

When S:AB debuted, I watched the pilot with mixed emotions. Much of the story felt sampled from Full Metal Jacket, even using R. Lee Ermey in the role of drill instructor. The emotional hook of the show was a romance between immature colonists that I found difficult to connect with... But those Hammerhead spaceships sure looked awesome, and the way they maneuvered, spinning around in zero-g was something I hadn't seen before. The attractive cast seemed committed to what they were doing. And, back in '95, you were as likely to reel in a coelacanth while fishing off the Santa Monica Pier as find a science fiction show on television. So WTF, I kept watching.

I was rewarded with twenty-four compelling episodes about relatable, almost ordinary characters overcoming extraordinary challenges through teamwork and sacrifice. I watched a TV show find itself. Discovering what it was good at. Finding a way to balance action packed episodic narrative with serialized arcs long before Alias, 24, and Lost.

S:AB was also one of the first shows to treat high quality visual effects as just another narrative tool, not something to be lingered on 'til the pixelated jaggies shatters one's suspension of disbelief (Firefly, BSG, and District 9 have since iterated on this conceit). I watched an ensemble of young actors grow confident in their roles. Kristen Cloke's turn as Capt. Shane Vanson was particularly inspired; she was a strong woman with a traumatic past, constantly pushing herself toward excellence while struggling to keep her squadron mates alive. Cloke's dramatic chops sold rich emotions and heroic complexities amidst starfighter jargon and TV budget sets - I still get choked up as I think about her character's fate in the series finale. Rodney Rowland's portrayal of a vat-grown outsider trying to fit in, delivered on the poignancy of that premise with a commitment akin to Rutger Hauer's Roy Batty. Before the silence of Buffy's Hush episode, Rowland's Cooper Hawks was silently prowling the grass of an alien world in "Who Monitors The Birds?".

Gender and Ethnic diversity was another arena where S:AB broke television ground; The Space Marines of the show were strong women and sensitive men fighting side by side long before the war in Iraq made such things commonplace. Morgan Weisser's Lt. Nathan West arc'd over the season from immature boy into battle tested veteran – without losing his emo side. The show's African American leaders could also show they had a softer side. Lanei Chapman's Lt. Damphousse and Tucker Smallwood's CDRE Glen Van Ross were created sans stereotypes in all the best ways. Joel de la Fuente's Lt. Paul Wang was an Asian American hero who didn't always do the right thing – and proved all the more compelling for it.

Clearly I could wax on and on about Space: Above and Beyond. The more I think about the show, the more I realize how insanely great it was. Had it been created in this era of cable channels and websites dedicated to science fiction, I wonder if it would have run for a hundred episodes. In this fractured media landscape, where a genre show can survive with only a few million viewers – would S:AB have found enough fans to protest its cancellation with decks of playing cards sent to the homes of Fox executives? We'll never know.

Part of me is glad S:AB wasn't renewed. Rather than adjust their tone or premise in a desperate beg for expanded viewership, creators Glen Morgan and James Wong ended the series on their own terms. I'm still haunted by that last episode, by the heart-breaking emotion and narrative ambiguity that demonstrated just how far the series had come from its pilot. Space: Above and Beyond went down with its passion blazing and its middle finger raised. We should all be so brave.

Semper Fi, Wildcards.

Jesse Alexander is creator and executive producer of NBC's Day One, and has worked on Alias, Lost and Heroes.

Here's a bit more about our guests.

Before helming Sarah Connor Chronicles, Josh Friedman wrote the screenplays for Brian DePalma's film The Black Dahlia, and for the Steven Spielberg version of War of the Worlds. Weird fact: He is also the guy responsible for starting the "Snakes on a Plane" meme frenzy on the internet, by posting about the script in his blog and suggesting the line "snakes on a motherfucking plane."

Jesse Alexander is currently working on the forthcoming NBC apocalypse show Day One, which he created. He was a co-exective producer on Heroes, Lost, and Alias.

Look for their posts starting later today!

Zack Adamski's Sargasso Planet fansite looks, at first glance, like the kind of thing the internet is full of, except for a show that no-one but Zack remembers, but then you realize that the weird introduction includes a very particular link:

If you are a SARGASSO PLANET fan or merely curious — friend me on FACEBOOK, follow me on TWITTER, checkout my FLICKR feed, etc. Like I said this is only DAY ONE and you never know what kind of random blah-blah-blather I might post.

Adamski is, as a Google search will tell you, one of the characters from Jesse Alexander's new NBC show Day One, and the Flickr link includes an image of Liberty Park signage... that being the apartment complex that houses all of the leads for the show. Which makes us wonder what other Easter Eggs are available on the site: are the Sargasso Planet prototype toys early glimpses of Day One's aliens? Is the countdown clock on the front of the site to the show's launch, or something else entirely? And, really, what the hell is going on in this postcard?

Day One launches on NBC next year. Zack's site is available now to be picked apart and studied.

[Sargasso Planet]

During an interview with John Siuntres on the WordBalloon podcast, Heroes and Lost alum Alexander explained the set-up and tone of the new NBC series:

Day One follows a group of people who live in a small apartment building... They're all strangers, they're all living their own lives, and then this earth-shattering event takes place that really changes the way the whole world has to move forward, and we follow this group of people as they become a community, a community of strangers, very much in the same way that the plane crash in Lost brought that group of people together... and they're all quite surprised to learn that they all have key roles to play in the upcoming new world order they are facing...I'm being a little cagey there, kind of hiding the big reveal, but, you know... It's a big event series, and the kind of story you see in a summer blockbuster... I love the idea of bringing a massive high production value entertaining story that people can get for free. I always loved that idea, that "Let's just make something so massive that people can get in their house for free and they're so compelled by it." That's what I'm trying to do with the show... The spirit of Day One really is entertainment, and optimism, and really cool characters working together to push through some challenges. I think the tone of the show is going to be fun and exciting and inspiring in a way that I really like in my genre entertainment. It's going to be interesting to see if that spirit works for people, and if it doesn't, it's my fault... because NBC has been so great and so supportive and encouraging for letting me do what I want to do on this thing.

With NBC's original description of the pilot playing up the post-apocalyptic aspects of the show, a lot of people wrote the series off as a Jericho clone, but Alexander feels that the actual show is something entirely different:

If people are looking to compare this show to other things, they're going to be building a very long list. The influences that are in Day One really come from so many different places [and] all the entertainment that had shaped me over the years, that I'm obsessed with. I'm such a fanboy nerd at the end of the day... There's a lot of Star Wars and Star Trek and all sorts of other elements. There's some Doctor Who elements, some Battlestar elements... You can see where I'm sort of trending with those references, they're different from any Jericho references.

Something else to look forward to when the show debuts in March next year is a format that balances story-arc with individual episodes, apparently:

That balance between episodic and serialized television is something that a lot of people are trying to figure out these days, and I've worked on crazy serials like Alias, and then on Lost, we kind of iterated on that a little bit by bringing in the flashbacks to try and give the folks something they could hang their hats on on a weekly basis potentially, and then on Heroes, we messed around with the format. And again, I'm really trying to figure out a way I can tell compelling stories every week. My taste in story is... I like a lot of story, I like a lot of stuff happening, you know? I like to keep it entertaining and compelling, and that's what I'm going to try and do with Day One... Sci-Fi really is the genre that I love, and I'm obsessed with trying to figure out a way to bring that genre to a mainstream TV audience. We're on NBC, we're on a broadcast network where the rubric for success is pretty high. We need to have a lot of people watching the show for it to stay on the air, and I've really been trying to figure out a way to do that. Hopefully, I've come up with something that will be fun to watch.

Day One premieres March 2010 on NBC.

Jesse Alexander On NBC's Day One & Sgt Fury [WordBalloon]

Show creator Jesse Alexander twittered the other day:

Just hired Javier Grillo-Marxuach, Erik Oleson, and Angela Kang as writers on DAY ONE! More announcements soon!

And Grillo-Marxuach just confirmed on his Facebook page that he's joining the show as co-executive producer.

Day One, from former Heroes producer Jesse Alexander, will be premiering in 2010 on NBC. Day One set photos by Deergus, more at the link.

The announcement of Graves' involvement shows not only the faith that NBC have in the show's success, but also almost guarantees a season pick-up for the show. As the Hollywood Reporter notes, Graves - whose resume includes episodes of Fringe, Journeyman and The West Wing as both director and producer - has gathered a bit of a reputation when it comes to directing pilots:

Last season, Graves directed and exec produced Fox's two-hour, $10 million pilot for "Fringe." The helmer is on a hot streak, with three consecutive pilots he directed — "Fringe," NBC's "Journeyman" and ABC's "The Nine" — going to series.

So how does Day One's creator feel about this choice? We asked him, and this is what he had to say:

Alex Graves is a brilliant filmmaker. An artist and a craftsman. Like me — he walked into a movie theater in May of 1977 and fell in love with making movies. I'm the luckiest guy ever to have Alex directing Day One.

We have to admit it; Fringe's director working on a script from Lost and Heroes's writer? We're kind of excited about this one.

Four pilots land directors [Hollywood Reporter]

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Alexander's pilot will focus on what happens after a "global event hat devastates the world's infrastructures," as a group of survivors not only try to rebuild society but also find out what happened in the first place. While the trade paper points out similarities to next fall's ABC show Flash Forward, the description makes us think that Alexander may have been reading Brian K. Vaughan's Y The Last Man or watching old episodes of Jericho, since leaving Heroes last year.

NBC orders 'Day One' pilot [Hollywood Reporter]

With the Hollywood Reporter suggesting that Knight Rider is headed for the chopping block and Chuck fans so nervous about the show that they've pre-emptively created an online petition in support of a third season in case one is needed, it's no surprise that we're worried about the future of science fiction on the network. But, according to Variety, that's just part of a larger problem for the network... Namely, that no-one knows what NBC means anymore:

In its "Must See" days, the Peacock's brand was pretty clear, while ABC was all over the map. These days, the Alphabet web has a handle on its brand — it's the home of female-driven series like "Grey's Anatomy" and "The Bachelor" — while CBS (crime drama and broad comedy) and Fox ("American Idol" and male-driven skeins) are also easy to identify.

NBC's solution? Bring in the branding guys. The network's president of entertainment marketing, Adam Stotsky (who'd previously dealt with a similar problem at the SciFi Channel), has spearheaded a new initiative that has brought in outside consultants Naked Communications to decide what kind of channel NBC will become. And they're not just talking about advertising, as Stotsky explains:

There's an inextricable link between marketing and programming... These two things define the brand. We're all aligned against the same goals.

Specifically, Stotsky went on to say, what Naked defines as the NBC brand will help executives decide on what pilots and series to greenlight for next fall and beyond... So if anyone has any idea how to sway Naked into telling NBC that they should be a network that's very SF friendly, and also the kind of channel that lets talented creators (like, say, Ron Moore or Heroes and Lost alum Jesse Alexander, who has a pilot in with the network right now) do whatever they want without kowtowing to ratings or advertisers, that'd be great. Otherwise things could look very bleak at the Peacock in future.

NBC's turn for an extreme makeover [Variety]

We reported the departure of Loeb and Alexander yesterday morning, with the news breaking Sunday evening; with the exception of Alexander posting the news on his blog ("I write this with a heavy heart. As of today I am no longer a writer/producer on HEROES.") and a short, generic comment from Loeb to Comic Book Resources, neither have yet commented publicly on their removal, nor have NBC or show creator Tim Kring, leaving a lot of people wondering what's going on over there. Many people inside and outside of the TV industry are pointing to Entertainment Weekly's cover story about the show's third season troubles as the final straw that forced NBC into action, but the question still remains - was firing Loeb and Alexander the right action?

I think that it's definitely a step in the right direction; Loeb and Alexander were often credited with being in charge of the writers' room at the show, and many of the problems that EW (and us, as well, but at least we didn't get anyone fired) were story-based - but without Loeb and Alexander there, who is in charge of the writing of the show? EW's own report of the firings said that it "was unclear" if the two producers would be replaced (although subsequent reports are now suggesting otherwise), which leaves it equally unclear who'll step in to provide the show's direction, storywise, from now on.

The careers of both Loeb and Alexander can also be used to identify some of the show's problems in terms of writing - The sudden reveal of Sylar's Petrelli heritage, his nonsensical turn towards being a good guy, the return of the previously dead Arthur Petrelli and overall uneven juggling of a far too large cast seem reminiscent of Loeb's past as an Marvel Comics writer from the 1990s - although the show lacked the stupid fun of his more current work like Hulk or Superman/Batman - and the never-ending plots and unconvincing personal traumas of the characters harkened back to Alexander's beginnings on Alias.

The obvious suggestion would be creator Tim Kring himself; after all, he appeared to be aware enough to identify and own up to the problems of the show's second season last year - problems that, tellingly, Loeb denied existed in interviews - but that's doesn't necessarily mean that he has the time, availability or even the ability to turn around the show's current creative direction; look at the ways that the third season has gone overboard in the opposite direction (and, at the same time, returned to old and tired themes and plots) in trying to course-correct from last year. There are many other producers on the show, but none of them have the writing experience - or the geek chops - of the axed duo, which doesn't necessarily bode well.

Axing some more of those producers - including Kring - is, of course, still an option for NBC, who are said to be unhappy about the show running over budget currently. Were Loeb and Alexander really in charge of the purse strings? It seems unlikely. Kring is apparently already under pressure from NBC to simplify the show, showing that the network isn't relying on the removal of Loeb and Alexander to save the show alone.

Also a problem, at least in terms of perception, is the nature of the move; NBC axing executive producers of an underperforming, high-profile, show brings to mind memories of last year's perpetually-endangered Bionic Women relaunch, where the (admittedly low) quality of the show eventually became irrelevant because the real story became the behind-the-scenes problems... Problems that NBC were never really shown to be able to fix (BW went through, what, three creative teams on eight episodes of that show?) - leading to an impression that the network couldn't fix its own problems... which won't help with this situation.
The best case scenario for both NBC and Heroes as a series, is getting new producers in place who can revitalize the writing of the show, bring a new discipline to the series that will silence critics, and have some level of nerd cred to reassure the hardcore fans that it won't become ER Plus Flying Dudes. E!Online is claiming that NBC want Bryan Fuller to return to the show post-Pushing Daisies cancellation (although that isn't necessarily a done deal yet), and Meredith's already suggested Steven DeKnight as another alternative, but I'm thinking of a couple of people a little more unexpected (and a little more employed): Drew Goddard and Brian K. Vaughan, both currently at Lost. Goddard's experience on Lost, Alias, Angel, Buffy (not to mention Cloverfield) show that he's good with the fantastical, multi-character, labyrinthine nature of a show like Heroes - and also that he's able to pare back a lot of the growth to get to the core of the stories, emotions and concepts necessary to make said series work - while Vaughan brings a similiar comic book experience of superpowers, superhero teams and longform storytelling to Loeb, but with the addition of better (or, at least, more subtle) character work and a fresher eye towards how to deal with the stereotypes of the genre.

Whatever happens next, however, one thing's for sure - Sunday's firings has taken Heroes from being a troubled show to a symbol of NBC's problems as a network; their stepping in to try and fix the show in such a public way has meant that it's going to become a priority for the people in charge - and one that they can't afford to mess up. Save the Cheerleader Show, Save the Network.