It starts with a falling man; before long we are looking at images of a fireball towering between the two iconic Manhattan skyscrapers still standing, the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building. Heroes, the much-praised American series, on show on BBC2, wears its post-9/11 anxieties on its sleeve. The eponymous heroes are ordinary men and women who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances. They rise to the occasion because they are special . We even have someone racing into a burning wreck to rescue a trapped man — the welcome twist is that instead of the rescuer being a burly, mustachioed firefighter, or Nicolas Cage, she’s a small, blonde cheerleader from Texas who’s discovered she’s apparently indestructible.

Heroes includes terrorism but never mentions 9/11, which functions like a kind of recurring dream, haunting its characters and images. Evasive about when it takes place, it seems to be set in some imaginative moment that is aware o f history without being trapped in it.

It’s a good way to set a fantasy loose. Heroes is geographically specific but temporally indistinct: we always know where we are, but not when. It also has a character who discovers he can bend the space-time continuum — ; just like the series he inhabits.

This is the kind of serial fantasy the U.S. does best, which blends allegory with mythopoeia. A nation that sprang more or less fully formed from a pilgrim’s forehead will by definition excel at mythmaking. It’s what we do, because it’s how we invented ourselves. It’s also how we try to reinvent ourselves, especially in times of crisis.

Mixing wish-fulfilment, self-justification, ideology, and entertainment, Heroes is so engaging in part because it is propelled by the U.S.’ most dynamic contradictions: to balance power and liberty, nationalism and globalism, individualism and plurality, exceptionalism and democracy.

Enamoured with superiority but worried about elitism, this is a story in which hitherto ordinary people discover that being special may not be all it’s cracked up to be. —

Guardian Newspapers Limited 2007

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