You gotta love 'Heroes'

At the risk of overkill, can I tell you once again how much I love "Heroes"?

The great thing about being a TV critic (well, one of the great things) is that sometimes a show like this comes along. A show that's so good that I can't wait until the next episode airs. (There's an episode tonight at 8 on Ch. 5!)

It's a show that DesMoNews film critic Jeff Vice and I talk about every Tuesday. A show my teenagers are excited about and talk about with their friends. A show my college-age daughter and her friends love. A show that my fortysomething sister calls her friends and screams about when an episode ends.

(She'll be screaming tonight. A character we've seen a lot of will die; the fate of another is very much in jeopardy; and there's a jaw-dropping revelation.)

It's pretty much impossible to plan for success. Grabbing an audience is, in many ways, a happy accident. But "Heroes" creator/executive producer Tim Kring was aware that there were viewers hungry for this show.

"There seems to be a big segment of the audience, especially younger audiences, that wants a show to be less spelled-out for them," he said. "They want to have questions, and they want to participate. They want to set their TiVo, or they want to talk to their friends the next day. They want to guess where it's going."

And Kring and his team of writers and producers have done a fantastic job of making that happen. They've been doling out information week by week so that, after each episode, we know a bit more than we did before — unlike the increasingly annoying "Lost," which seems incapable of divulging even tiny bits of intelligible information.

The "Heroes" team also hasn't given too much away, and hasn't resorted to the oh-so-aggravating one-step-forward, two-steps-back formula that eventually torpedoed "The X-Files."

Plus, this saga of people who suddenly acquire superpowers is populated with great characters played by well-cast, talented actors.

While "Heroes" is all sort of science-fictiony and comic-bookish, it's not so much so that it isn't easily accessible to viewers who aren't, for the most part, fans of those genres.

"I think there are certainly genre elements, and we're not denying that, or trying to run away from that," Kring said. "But because we're asking people to log on to these characters and invest in these characters, I see it much more as a very real character-based show."

As unusual as the situation is, it's not hard for us to imagine what it would be like to be these characters. It's relatable in addition to being addicting.

The only negative to "Heroes" at the moment is that, after tonight's episode, the next new installment isn't scheduled to air until Jan. 22.

Seven weeks without "Heroes"!?!?!?!? That will be a test of my patience.

And I have teenagers.

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E-mail: pierce@desnews.com