Dick Cheney's least favorite TV show?

May 30, 2007 | NBC's hit series "Heroes" was the most-watched new show on network television this year despite its demanding plot lines and stretches of subtitled Japanese. Its season finale, which aired May 21, dominated the 9 p.m. time slot. What explains the show's popularity, especially with younger viewers? I think it is that, like the Fox thriller "24," "Heroes" is a response to Sept. 11 and the rise of international terrorism. But while "24" skews to the right politically, "Heroes" seems like a left-wing response to those events. In fact, it functions as a thoughtful critique of Vice President Dick Cheney's doctrine on counterterrorism.

In Bush and Cheney's "war on terror," the evildoers are external and are clearly discernible. In "Heroes," each person agonizes over the evil within, a point of view more common on the political left than on the right. Each of the flawed characters is capable of both nobility and iniquity. In Bush's vision, the main threat remains rival states (Saddam's Iraq, Ahmadinejad's Iran). States are absent from "Heroes," as though irrelevant. "Heroes" makes terrorism a universal and psychological issue rather than one attached to a clash of civilizations or to a particular race.

In its commentary on terror, "Heroes" thus avoids the caffeinated Islamophobia of "24." And at a time when "24," a favorite of older Republicans, is fading in the ratings, "Heroes" may also be a better guide to where the thinking of the young, post-Bush generation is heading when it comes to terror. It's certainly where their eyes are going. NBC's "Heroes" runs opposite Fox's "24" on Monday nights and snags a higher total of younger viewers, while the median age of "24" viewers keeps rising. As "Heroes" star Adrian Pasdar, who plays politician Nathan Petrelli, explained in an interview before this season's finale, "On Monday nights we own the demographics." He was referring to winning the ratings battle among the all-important 18-49 age group that advertisers love.

"Heroes" posits a world in which a small number of persons have been born with extraordinary powers drawn from the standard science fiction repertory. The powers include levitating objects, mind reading, flying, miraculous healing, bursting into flames and, as with the painter Isaac Mendez (Santiago Cabrera), prophesying the future. The plot that drives the first season has to do with a prophetic painting by Mendez that shows New York City being blown up. The bomb is not mechanical but is a human being, a mutant, who cannot control his powers and will ultimately explode in the midst of the city if not stopped. For much of the season the mutants do not know exactly who will explode or when, but they know it will happen unless they prevent it.

The prospect of a walking bomb blowing up New York sets in motion at least three distinct reactions. The first, spearheaded by the middle-aged Noah Bennet (Jack Coleman) of Odessa, Texas, aims at mobilizing the mutants to become the "Heroes" of the show's title and stop the explosion. A second effort is that of a Japanese computer programmer who daydreams of being a samurai warrior. Hiro Nakamura (Masi Oka) can sometimes bend space and time, depending on his strength of will, and has seen the destruction of New York during a journey to the future. He is accompanied on his quest to save New York by his friend Ando Masahashi (James Kyson Lee).

Dogging the "Heroes" is evil mutant and serial killer Sylar. He wants to kill Noah Bennet's adopted daughter, the otherwise virtually indestructible cheerleader Claire (Hayden Panettiere). For reasons that are too complicated to explain quickly, her survival is key to thwarting the explosion (hence the slogan, "Save the cheerleader, save the world.")

Meanwhile, a third camp of wealthy and powerful figures, clearly on the political right, decide that the explosion cannot be avoided and must therefore be exploited to instill new spine and discipline into the soft American public. This clique, led by a Las Vegas mobster named Linderman (Malcolm McDowell), includes Angela Petrelli, the mother of Nathan and Peter Petrelli, both mutants. The Linderman faction strives to put Nathan Petrelli into office as a New York congressman by rigging the election, convinced that he will be in a position to lead America as a strong man after Gotham's immolation.

Some bloggers have detected overtones of Sept. 11 conspiracy theorizing in this plot element. A fringe among the American public has become convinced that the Bush administration either knew about the Sept. 11 attacks beforehand and deliberately declined to stop them because it saw a political opportunity to regiment the country in the aftermath -- or that it actively conspired to bring down the twin towers.

The plot of "Heroes," however, does not really echo these conspiracy theories. Though the right-wingers on "Heroes" do use fear to their political advantage, there is little indication that Linderman and Mrs. Petrelli are involved in a plot to blow New York up or even actively desire that outcome, and they in any case are not the U.S. government. They seem simply to be convinced that the prophesied event is unpreventable and that the best should be made of it. As they define "the best," it is positioning Nathan Petrelli to play populist politics, perhaps of the Mussolini sort. (Admittedly, in the last episode this season, Claire Bennet accuses Angela Petrelli of interfering with attempts to forestall the explosion, but this motif remains ambiguous).

I think it is more helpful to see "Heroes" as a broader philosophical critique of the Bush and Cheney approach to the war on terror. The Bush administration sees the world as polarized between white hats and black turbans. Convinced that terrorist groups are gunning for the United States, and that another major attack will be hard to avoid, Bush and Cheney have responded in two ways.

At home, they have taken away key American civil liberties and created a more authoritarian society. Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer famously said after Sept. 11 and the firing of (insufficiently nationalist) comedian Bill Maher by ABC that such controversies are "reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do. This is not a time for remarks like that; there never is." That astonishing pronouncement presaged the gutting of key constitutional liberties in Bush's misnamed Patriot Act.

Abroad, the administration has imposed Cheney's "1 percent doctrine," which, according to journalist Ron Suskind, holds that if there is even a 1 percent chance that terrorists will, for instance, acquire nuclear weapons, then the U.S. government must act as though it is a certainty. This doctrine underpinned the invasion and occupation of Iraq, which turned out to be free of both WMDs and a nuclear weapons program. Bush and Cheney unleashed a rogue's gallery of Torquemadas, mercenaries, kidnappers and hit men against their enemies, throwing the rule of law to the winds and hatching such scandals as Abu Ghraib. Salon's Gary Kamiya called this doctrine a "license to lie."

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