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
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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