A heroic pitcher

“HEROES” creator Tim Kring grew up in the “other” California -- where “they drive by at 70 miles an hour on the 101.” Now, he works on “Heroes” -- its season finale airs Monday -- at the Sunset Gower Studios. He was also the creator and executive producer of “Crossing Jordan,” whose series finale aired Wednesday.

Tell me about your early TV experiences.

I don’t remember a lot of early TV watching. We had black-and-white TV till I was in high school. I remember watching, you know, things like “Get Smart” and “The Jackie Gleason Show” when I was a kid. “Twilight Zone,” definitely. “Outer Limits.” In terms of serialized shows, you remember the British series “The Prisoner”? That was very cool. But I wasn’t ... I don’t think I was a big TV watcher.

Do you have clear memories of the past, or are you a forgetter?

I’m a forgetter, for the most part. I have a dreamer kind of quality in my head. I don’t know how anchored in reality I am half the time. I think it makes for not the most lucid memory. I joke that I sorta remember my freshman year in college, but nothing before that.

It’s an assumption that you like television. For all we know, your true love is the ballet.

I got interested in film through the idea of cinematography and photography. I was a camera operator and a gaffer and pulled cable and worked on low-budget things, documentaries, music videos. It wasn’t until I had an opportunity to get into the union that I saw the fork in the road. I went off and wrote a spec feature script, got an agent and went out on meetings. After I got my first job as a writer I never looked back.

It sounds easy in retrospect!

Well, I’m collapsing a lot of years into sentences. I think I went on 50 pitch meetings before I sold my first thing. I was pulling cable in between. Finally, my first job was an episode for the show “Knight Rider” in 1985.

A fine show.

Yes, exactly. It was way, way late in the series, its sixth year or whatever it was. It was late in their run, so they’d kind of do anything.

So that’s how you honed your famous cliffhanger pitch to NBC for “Heroes.”

I don’t know what it’s famous for, but I pitched; I worked as a freelance writer for many years before I got a job as a writer on a staff. They were as varied as you could possibly imagine -- one job a thriller, a teen comedy, a melodrama, a horror film. I think a lot of the tone of “Heroes” is reflected in my early years of having a short attention span. I was tired of doing the same thing over and over again -- particularly procedural shows. They’re literally the same -- that’s what makes them appealing to people.

Are there pitfalls to the multiple writers/different plotlines approach that y’all have worked out? Is there ever panic in the writing room?

Since you blow through secrets, you’d think you get boxed into certain corners. But the truth is, it’s a very interesting, dynamic type of storytelling. Rather than being like a tank of gas, where the more you use the lower the tank gets, or the more empty, it’s kind of the opposite. The more twists, the more turns, the more reveals, the more the story generates itself. So actually, no! I admit there’s some sleight of hand -- if you are in a natural stall in one story, there’s another story that’s found a place where it’s at a natural cliffhanger or big reveal. So there is some three-card monte involved.

The trouble with serial stories is that some of the audience is hypersensitive to not getting their narrative fulfillment. Since “Twin Peaks,” we’re terrified about being left in the lurch.

I think that’s true. The number of serialized shows that fail is a testament to that. People are gun shy about what to commit their precious viewing hours. So we committed ourselves fairly early on to answering questions quickly for people -- giving a reassurance that this was a show that the barrier of entry was not so high that you couldn’t join along the way and that your frustration level would be held to a minimum in delivering on answers at a fair rate.

You did a lot of that in the last six episodes.

We’ve done it all along -- no secret is so precious that you can’t deliver the answer to it. We learned from the mistakes of audiences being frustrated with other shows. When you hold onto a secret for so long, almost any answer you give won’t be satisfying. You get yourself in this endless loop of needing to hold onto the answer because you know you’ll disappoint.