Once upon a time in Hollywood, I was invited to a closed-door Writer's Guild event with Tim Kring. The finale of Season 1 of Heroes had just aired, and he was talking about it. I got to get him aside at one point and ask several questions - when did they know this? What made them think of that? What about this other thing?

If you haven't watched Heroes, you don't know that the first season is an impeccably-tightly-plotted little mystery with a whole bunch of interesting things flying about. It lands... not great but better than 90% of the shows on TV at the time. Really, it's an impressive little bit of writing.

But after that?

Thing is? Kring & Co stumbled into Season 1. They thought HRG and The Cheerleader were minor characters. They envisioned the whole of the show as Peter Petrelli vs. Sylar. But what they discovered is that their backup characters were more interesting, had more stuff going on, could have a more fleshed-out backstory, and could generally take things in a more interesting direction.

But they didn't have that direction so they started Season 2 with a whole new set of characters that everyone hated. Kring later said they were lucky in that the Writer's Strike brought things to a premature close, allowing them to back up and start over again with the characters the audience actually cared about. Not that they did a great job. HRG and the Cheerleader are interesting for a season. They drag the fuck on for seven.

My theory with The Expanse is Abraham and Frank had a really cool story idea around a gumshoe and a rich girl that ends with the discovery of a new alien life form on Venus. And they did so well with it they went "we can do anything" rather than "we wrote a closed-loop story with two interesting characters in it that we just killed off and now we need to make Holden and Naomi interesting for as long as we can, despite the fact that their principle character traits are whininess and petulance." It's like trying to write the Jack Reacher series after you've killed Jack in Book 1.