I just started re-watching Heroes on Netflix over the weekend – perhaps for the seventh time. A strange, almost bittersweet ritual, I keep on returning to a show I first watched growing up and have rediscovered over and over again for entirely different reasons at different stages in my life. When Tim Kring’s Heroes, first aired, it resonated with young viewers like me, because it took the fantasy of extraordinary powers and grounded it in very ordinary teenage and young-adult anxieties. Characters such as Claire Bennet with her ability to not die, Peter Petrelli with his empathy and Hiro Nakamura with his ability to bend time and space, too were outsiders trying to understand their identity, why they were different and what they were supposed to do. For young viewers like me, there was something deeply comforting about that. We could see our own insecurities, fears and confusion reflected in these supposedly superhuman characters.
