Just Super

If you haven’t been keeping up with Heroes, now is the time to hit up iTunes for back episodes and get with the program. The show lacks any of the grimy moral ambiguity of Battlestar Galactica or The Wire, and it can’t touch 24 in terms of deliriously souped-up action thrills. But it’s genuinely got something that none of those shows, and, as far as I know, no other show on television, has right now: heart.

The show takes recent trends in superhero films and expands on them. The new crop of superhero movies has succeeded largely due to its willingness to focus on the heroes as ordinary folks with ordinary problems. One one hand, they provide an opportunity to witness the special effects extravaganzas that we demand from our monster movie hits, but they also promise us a decent human core story about a guy with girl problems, a hard childhood, or trouble fitting in. The heroes in those films are involved in epic struggles to save the world, but, like all of us, they’re also just trying to get along in it and be happy.

Heroes expands on that idea by shifting the emphasis almost entirely to the ordinary and the everyday. And though it doesn’t have BSG’s depth (or Lost’s illusion of it), it’s got a solidly engaging story arc and, most importantly, tremendously endearing characters. They are, for lack of a better word, cute—and yet not a bit cloying, not a bit irritating. They react as you might expect both to the strange and ordinary events in their lives, alternately incredulous and accepting, and, most importantly, they share information consistently and sensibly.

And unlike so many of the long-form narratives in our current television landscape, there’s very little overt cynicism to the show. Oh sure, bad things happen, and there’s distrust and deceit and painful decisions (this is drama, after all), but the show wants to showcase and celebrate decency and good-heartedness rather than negativity and dysfunction.

Yes, the show has problems—its chance meetings between characters occasionally seem arbitrary, and there’s an ill-defined but undeniable glossy soap feel to some of it (creator Tim Kring's previous show was Crossing Jordan). But it’s really a fun, determinedly good-spirited take on what it might actually be like to just suddenly sprout superpowers in the midst of a very ordinary life.