A group of us watched the first episode of Heroes and placed bets on whether it would last for three weeks or six. Surely, we all thought, such a portentous sprawling exercise in cliches couldn’t get any kind of audience, right? Well, now we know how wrong we were. And apparently this means that we’re in for dozens of copycat TV shows next season. Already, the CW has greenlit a new superhero show about two women whose powers only work when they’re together, from one of the producers of the awesome Veronica Mars. Meanwhile, Crown just paid a shitload of money for a novel about five friends who develop superpowers. (They describe it as “The Incredibles meets Kavalier and Clay,” which is literally a nonsensical statement. The Incredibles can’t meet Kavalier and Clay, because their strengths are mutually exclusive.)

I like superheroes, and superhero comics are a big guilty pleasure of mine. Occasionally, when a really gifted writer is handling them, superhero comics can even be great leeeterature. (To me, the gold standard remains Quantum and Woody.)

But I don’t really like superheroes outside of comics. I’m not sure why this is. It used to be simple to explain, because outside of comics, superheroes appeared in animated cartoons, seriously cheesy movies by people like Tim Burton, and tossed-off tie-in novels. It’s only fairly recently that people like Michael Chabon and Ang Lee are working on superhero movies, and the special effects have improved to the point where they don’t prevent you from telling a real story.

(Side note: it’s interesting how superhero TV shows have ditched some of the cheesier trappings of the comics, especially the costumes and capes. Compare Lois & Clark with Smallville, or Heroes with Birds of Prey.)

I think there are a few reasons why I dislike superhero movies, in particular. One is that even the best ones, like the first two X-men movies and Batman Begins, have a certain self-conscious stageyness about them. Also, screenwriters invariably try to make everything personal, so for example the villain of Batman Begins is the guy who trained Batman in the first place. It’s the story of their relationship, rather than the story of Batman becoming Batman and then encountering evil. Shows like Heroes and Smallville, meanwhile, take the “soap opera” thing from comics without bringing along enough of the themes of duty versus personal life which distinguish the soap opera in comics from the regular kind. (For example, Spider-Man constantly having to choose between his personal life and being heroic.)

The only TV show I can think of which really did justice to the superhero concept was Buffy. Power and responsibility? Check. In fact, Giles pretty much gave the “with great power comes great responsibility” speech in a dozen episodes. Personal life in conflict with heroism? Check. Confronting evil? Not just your former best friend who’s now gone off the rails, but evil that would have been there anyway? Check. Thinking about it, what Buffy had that a lot of these other shows and films feel as though they lack is actual heroism, and a serious examination of what heroism means. I don’t get that from Heroes, at least not so far. I get a lot of babble about evolution, and a lot of scenes where hot chicks kill guys but it’s not their fault, or the guys deserved it.

Has there been another TV show since Buffy which examined the themes it examined, particularly in its first few seasons? Has anybody even tried to?