TV: Heroes

In New York, Peter (Milo Ventimiglia) is having recurring dreams of flight. In rural Texas, cheerleader Claire (Hayden Panettiere) throws herself from great heights and runs into raging fires, apparently indestructible. Tokyo office drone Hiro (Masi Oka) believes that he can bend space and time. And Vegas showgirl Niki (Ali Larter) doesn't know what is happening to her, or why she constantly feels like she's being watched.

None of this would come as a surprise to Mohinder Suresh (Sendhil Ramamurthy), a professor in Madras, India, who is continuing his father's mysterious research, which suggests that humanity may be on the brink of the next great evolutionary leap -- that there may already be people with extraordinary power among us.

Heroes is happy to unfold its secrets slowly; most of its principal characters are strangers to one another. That can make the narrative feel a little cluttered, as we leap from one story to the entirely separate story of another character, but the storytelling is done with enough skill and style that the multiple plot threads are never overwhelming. Surely, as the show goes on, at least some of our characters will be brought together, and the threads will be woven together. The show's opening narration -- an on-screen text crawl, Star Wars style -- tells us of an impending threat that these heroes will have to face.

The characters are appealing, and the actors are solid in their roles. It's nice to see Ventimiglia getting to play a nice guy for a change; he's tended to wind up in sleazy creep roles. As Hiro, Oka is the heart of the show, giddy with excitment over his new-found powers, in sharp contrast to the other characters, who are terrified and confused by what's happening to them.

The show's look has a comic-book flair to it, especially in Hiro's scenes, which are in Japanese, and feature subtitles that float around the screen depending on where the speaker is located. (That's the influence of Lost, which showed that American audiences are willing to put up with subtitles if the story's worthwhile.)

Judging from the first episode, the writers know how to drop their tidbits of information at just the right speed to keep us involved, and they have a great way with an episode-ending cliffhanger. I hope this show finds an audience beyond the obvious comic-book geek crowd; it's a show with lots of potential, and it deserves to stick around for a while.