Heroes Reborn to function as “tenth season” from dark future where Heroes didn’t get canceled

Heroes got a lot of traction out of sending its cast of superpowered individuals into various unpleasant futures, the better to show the consequences of failure or dispose of no-longer-necessary Irish girlfriends. But now, creator Tim Kring has revealed that the upcoming event series revival Heroes Reborn will take place in the darkest future of all: One where Heroes was never canceled by NBC.

Kring—whose name remains as weirdly pleasant to say as ever—revealed today at the Television Critics Association Press Tour that the new series will pick up five years after the end of its fourth season, the same amount of time that’s passed in the real world since the show was mercy killed in February of 2010. “This is not the fifth season,” Kring said, revealing that he’d always wanted to cover the events that took place several years after regenerating cheerleader Claire Bennet revealed her powers to the world, because he has a detailed, long-term plan for the show’s universe, and definitely always has. “We’re treating this as the 10th season—as if there were stories in between. I’d always wanted to tell the story of what happened in that time.”

Kring revealed earlier today that the new series—which stars Zachary Levi, alongside returning cast members Greg Grunberg, Masi Oka, Jack Coleman, and several others—would debut with a two-hour burst on September 24th. He hasn’t threatened—which is to say, hinted or announced—that a successful reception for Heroes Reborn might mean viewers will “get to” see the stories that took place in the intervening years, but in a world where Heroes can come back from the dead after half a decade, pretty much nothing is actually impossible anymore.