IN THE NEW Netflix drama Supacell, a group of young Black men and women from South London discover that they have superpowers. One is now strong enough to smash open a cash machine with his bare hands, while another can run from London to Edinburgh in only a few seconds. But even though the speedster compares his newfound gifts to those of the Flash, the show that Supacell most reminded me of wasn’t any of the retired Arrow-verse series from the CW, nor anything the Marvel Cinematic Universe has put out over the last five years.
Instead, the most obvious analogue is Heroes, the mid-Aughts NBC drama about a group of people from around the world who developed unusual “abilities.”
Several Supacell characters have identical power sets to prominent Heroes figures, like time travel and teleportation, or the power to duplicate other people’s powers. Both shows offers glimpse of an apocalyptic future that only its protagonists can stop, both feature intentionally bland government agents trying to capture and control the supers, and both have a largely self-serious tone offset by one lighthearted character, and at first both are primarily interested in what a normal person would do if they discovered they had godlike gifts.
Of course, Heroes didn’t invent any of those ideas. But in 2006, it had the superhero TV lane almost entirely to itself. The young Clark Kent adventure Smallville was still around, and a Blade series had just concluded its first (and only) season only days before Heroes debuted, but these were niche products on less-watched channels. In those years after the early Spider-Man and X-Men movies, but before the MCU completely reshaped pop culture, there was an obvious demand that had mostly gone unfilled on the small screen. Heroes became an instant smash as much for what it was about as for how it actually told its stories; the underwhelming first season finale made clear that the show wasn’t so great at the latter, and it soon went from phenomenon to punchline.
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