Every new TV show wants to be The Show.

You know, the lucky series that elbows its way out of the crowded pack of wannabe hits and bona fide stinkers to become the must-see watercooler show everyone's buzzing about.

Once upon a time, that show was ER, a zippy medical drama that moved faster than a speeding ambulance. One year it was the gritty NYPD Blue, the envelope-shoving cop show that introduced the world to Dennis Franz's naked rear.

Years later, Lost, a trippy island drama, captured our imagination before it eventually started frustrating most of us. And those four suburb-dwelling gals on Desperate Housewives kept viewers riveted in the show's maverick first season.

This season, however, The Show has been Heroes, NBC's nifty superhero drama about a group of ordinary people who can suddenly do such way-cool things as fly, see the future, read minds and teleport across the globe.

Much like the Super Friends, this band of unlikely heroes - a stripper, a hospice nurse, a Japanese office drone, a Texas cheerleader - must unite to save the world and do battle with an evil, brain-slicing (and eating?) serial killer who has a markedly different agenda.

Like killing millions, nuking the Big Apple and eventually becoming a power-drunk commander-in-chief lording over a police state where people with special abilities are rounded up and detained like terrorists.

Sound familiar?

Since its September debut, Heroes, whose season finale airs tonight (9 p.m., WPTV-Channel 5), has averaged 13.6 million viewers. But there's more to the story than that. The show is a hit on the Internet where NBC has wisely promoted blogs, a graphic novel, a game and various other Heroes-related sites.

The result: The show's buzz-worthiness and cool factor are off the charts.

Tim Kring, the show's creator, isn't exactly sure why. "You never really know why things connect," he said late last year. "It's some combination of zeitgeist, fairy dust and luck. But there's a kind of hopefulness to our show's message.... While we are in a world that's complicated and confusing, our show posits the idea that there are people coming along who can do something about it."

Heroes is that rare comic book show that has been able to attract the nerdy comic book crowd and nab viewers who don't know the Silver Surfer from The Incredible Hulk.

Before Heroes burst on the TV scene like, well, some barrel-chested superhero, 24 and Lost were the gold-standard serialized dramas. But 24 lost its way this season (Jack saving Audrey from the Chinese - ugh!) and, at times, Lost has become harder to follow than driving directions written in hieroglyphics.

Heroes, however, doesn't take its sweet time telling its epic good-vs.-evil saga and it boasts TV's best jaw-dropping cliffhangers. The writers are well aware that viewers have itchy remote control fingers when it comes to shows with slow plots.

"We didn't want to frustrate our audience," says Kring.

But he definitely wants to surprise them. The body count on Heroes continues to rise as a host of main characters have met untimely deaths, including such heroes as Isaac (Santiago Cabrera), the smack-addicted artist who painted the future and D.L. (Leonard Roberts), the tough ex-con who could walk through walls.

"When you think you know what's going on, the next week you find out you're completely wrong," says Malcolm McDowell, who plays Mr. Linderman, a Las Vegas gangster who may or may not be dead after last week's episode.

The show has made some unknowns into stars. Hayden Panettiere, who plays Claire, the indestructible cheerleader and key character in the show's save-the-world storyline, says she gets recognized all the time. "I usually just get screamed at like a cheerleader," she says. "I almost got into a couple of car accidents because I'll be driving and people start screaming at me from their passing cars. I'm not quite used to it."

While the 17-year-old Panettiere doesn't shy away from being a role model (she does a lot of charity work in her spare time), she wants to remind fans that she's still a normal teenage girl.

Adrian Pasdar says he doesn't feel much pressure playing Nathan Petrelli, the shady politician. The veteran actor, still best remembered for his psycho corporate exec role in Fox's short-lived drama, Profit, loves how viewers find it difficult to get a good read on Nathan, a hero who can fly. "When you think he's bad, he does something that might be called heroic," Pasdar says. "If he does something that's good, he does something that's not so good."

Kring has promised that tonight's finale will be mind-blowing good like a big-budget action movie. Of course, he can't offer any details. At the end of the last episode, the brain-snatching Sylar (Zachary Quinto) was seen looking at New York's famed skyline in wild-eyed glee, excited about the prospect of blowing it all to smithereens.

So, what happens?

All Pasdar will say is: "Questions do get resolved in a big way. I have a big part in the last few moments of the finale. It's stunning the way it's all put together."

Does that mean we won't see Nathan next season?

"I'd like to stick around," says Pasdar. "But if and when it's time for me to go, I'll just be happy to have been part of a terrific season on TV."