Bryan Fuller is one of those fertile TV minds you often feel sorry for. He clearly loves his craft and has dreamt up some of the more inventive and quirky fantasy-flavoured dramas to make it on to the goggle box. But while he’s had his successes – he got his start working for Deep Space Nine and Voyager – he’s also seen his telly creations suffocated by low ratings and narrow-minded networks. It can’t be easy being the man who saw Dead Like Me killed and Wonderfalls thrown over a waterfall in a rickety barrel…
Still, he’s in a happier place now – and has been talking to Comic Book Resources about working as a consulting producer on Heroes. It might sound like he occasionally drops into the writers’ offices to offer ideas, but as he explains, it’s a full-time job: “There are a lot of times where it's seven days a week and I'm only supposed to be here three days a week, but I love the show and I love the writing staff. It's been such a fantastic experience and the show seems like a juggernaut. It's great to be part of a show that is being supported by a network.”
And he’s clear about why he loves the series. ”It really isn't a superhero show. It's about regular people realising they have superpowers and it's about how they deal with it. What I was attracted to were the themes of destiny and fate and our individual roles in the universe. If you look at Dead Like Me, or Wonderfalls, you'll see that the characters ask those same types of questions. I really related to that. Each and every character had a metaphor on their journey, like the indestructible teenager, the single mother who is spread too thin and needs two of her, and the cop who can read people's minds. There are the big huge meta-questions and small questions like navigating the waters of being a cheerleader.
“The show is really Magnolia meets X-Men. I read the script and began to think where the stories could spin from there. The cheerleader character really hit home with me. Each of us takes a character and writes those stories, and then we combine that, so every writer works on every episode. I just took to Claire and really liked her journey.”
And if you’ve ever wondered just what goes into making an episode of a show like Heroes, Fuller is only to happy to explain: ”A normal day for me is sitting at my computer writing. We get into a rhythm of breaking the stories with different colour marker on different cards for different characters, and then we all go off on our own to write our individual scenes and then we take those scenes, put them together, read the script, give the episode's writer our notes and that is the process.”
For much more from Bryan Fuller, including the truth behind what happened to Wonderfalls and Dead Like Me, head to the full interview here .
Author: James White
Source: Comic Book Resources
