Huffington Magazine Issue 76-77 | Page 68

Exit Hollywood has always been about the bottom line, Kring said, and shows that come bearing a social message — well, they don’t always draw the audience, or the dollars. Still, Kring recalls, he had an itch to do something more — to use his talents for storytelling in a way that could actually help people. For Kring, 56, the turning point came on the day after 9/11 — 12 years ago. At the time, he was in production with the first season of Crossing Jordan, a show about a group of misfits who work in a morgue. Production on the show halted on the day of the attacks. “But we were asked to go back to work the very next day,” he recounted. “We had one single day to absorb this tragedy. So we stumbled back to work in a fog, and I remember being struck by the sudden contrast of creating what felt like meaningless fiction when the world was plunged into such stark reality,” he said. “It was just hard to care about an episode of TV, with actors pretending to be people they weren’t,” he recalled, “dealing in emotions that were only make believe, when so many people THE THIRD METRIC HUFFINGTON 11.24-12.01.13 were facing the devastating truth of human suffering.” Kring knew that as a soughtafter Hollywood producer, he carried a large megaphone. “But I didn’t want to preach,” he said. “I had no particular cause or political statement I wanted to make. I just had a need to say something — to respond somehow to the tragedy of 9/11 in some way.” He sat down and wrote an episode I remember being struck by the sudden contrast of creating what felt like meaningless fiction when the world was plunged into such stark reality.” of the show called “Miracles and Wonders.” It was about a daisy chain of events that connected a group of people’s lives in ways that appeared to be random, but weren’t random at all. The episode became his writing blueprint for the next dozen years. “I had stumbled onto the one theme that I wanted to talk about — our interconnectivity,” he explained. “This sense that we are