Why Tim Kring wishes Heroes could have been more like Walking Dead

Remember when Heroes was once celebrated—in its first season, at least—as a wonderful, innovative show that was the darling of both critics and fans? But then the writers' strike came along and everything went downhill. Tim Kring's one wish? That Heroes could have been more like The Walking Dead.
In an interview with Metro, Kring candidly spoke about AMC's The Walking Dead, basing the popular zombie survival series' success not only on quality, but also the series' short episode run:

A zombie series called The Walking Dead just launched here, which was a huge success because it was good quality—but also because it was only six episodes long. People knew it wasn't a huge time commitment. It gave it more of a sense of an event rather than a series that would go on for years and years.

It's clear that for Tim Kring, shorter seasons for a TV series can definitely improve its chances of success:

It's hard to sustain something that's a zeitgeist phenomenon. Things burn bright and short these days. We did an awful lot of episodes—24 a season—which is difficult to do. A little less of it might have gone a longer way. People talked about the first season because it was new. Once the initial premise has been explored and the characters come to terms with what's happening to them, once those questions have been answered, the questions that are asked after that are less interesting.

Then the Heroes creator went on to talk about those series that ask for a long-term viewing commitment from the TV viewers:

The last series of Lost was panned and FlashForward didn't last long ... There are so many different things to watch that to invest in a show that asks a million questions and doesn't deliver many answers for an extended period of time is a lot to ask for.

He adds:

The TV screen on your wall has a $200 million movie on one channel and a $2million episode of a show on the next—so the pressure is on the $2 million episode to excel at what it does. With Heroes we put a tremendous amount in one episode and raised the bar for what came afterwards. It becomes hard to blow people away week after week. We hinged on: 'I didn't see that coming,' moments but after a while audiences see those things happening. We had a rocky road with the writers' strike. Coming back after ten months off the air on a serialised show is hard.

So what do you think of all this? Would we all be better off with LESS of our favorite shows?
(via Digital Spy)