13 Is The Lucky Number For 'Heroes Reborn'

Even if you weren't particularly in the mood for a Heroes reboot, you're getting one. Well, sort of. It's not quite a reboot since technically Heroes is being reborn — literally and figuratively. Tim Kring's follow-up to his 2006-2010 series is even titled Heroes Reborn, and will start a brand new story sometime in the future for our evolved humans, or "evos," as they're known in the series. This isn't a spinoff, and it's not planned to last forever (at least, not right now). So just how many episodes is Heroes Reborn?

It's being billed as a "limited series," or an "event series," so you know what that means: a smaller episode order. Right now, Heroes Reborn stands at 13 episodes for the whole season. The Associated Press quoted Kring as saying, "'Heroes Reborn' was always talked about as an 'event series,' and the purity of that lets the audience know there's a clear beginning, middle and end." This is widely common nowadays for TV, from anthology series like True Detective or American Horror Story, or reboots like Heroes to simply test the waters. If these 13 episodes do well, I wouldn't be surprised if NBC ordered another season with its own story.

Kring has been coy about whether or not this Heroes story will continue on after these 13 episodes, but it certainly sounds like he's thinking about it. The first two episodes of the series screened at the Toronto International Film Festival last week, and when asked about more Heroes , he told the crowd, "The world always needs saving."

Kring also recognizes the fact that the original Heroes lost a lot of steam as the seasons went on (and if you watched all four seasons, you know this firsthand). As the AP reported, Kring explained, "An origin story is almost always the most interesting story, and once a character has learned ... what is happening to them ... those big questions end up being replaced by plot questions — which are not as powerful and exciting."

But now with Heroes Reborn, he's been given a reset button, letting him introduce new "origin" stories into an already existing world. And that means he could always do it again, and again, and again, each with a brand new set of characters all populating this evolved world. According to the AP, Kring would do another Heroes if he was able to finagle the right cast.

"It is a brand that I feel very comfortable doing another version of. And then? As with any series, it's comes down to casting," he said. "The Zeitgeist and fairy dust — if you can capture all of those, then you have success."

Image: Christos Kalohoridis/NBC