Telling stories and making myths are how we reinvent ourselves, especially in times of crisis and Heroes is one of the best tales doing the rounds, writes Sarah Churchwell

It starts with a falling man; before long, we are looking at images of a fireball towering between the two iconic Manhattan skyscrapers still standing, the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building. Heroes, the much-praised American series, which recently concluded its first series on Channel 6 and began on BBC2 last week, wears its post-9/11 anxieties on its sleeve.

The eponymous heroes are ordinary men and women who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances. They rise to the occasion because they are special. We even have someone racing into a burning wreck to rescue a trapped man - the welcome twist is that instead of the rescuer being a burly, mustachioed firefighter, or Nicolas Cage, she's a small, blond cheerleader from Texas who's discovered she's apparently indestructible.

Heroes includes terrorism but never mentions 9/11, which functions like a kind of recurring dream, haunting its characters and images. Evasive about when it takes place, it seems to be set in some imaginative moment that is aware of history without being trapped in it.It's a good way to set a fantasy loose. Heroes is geographically specific but temporally indistinct: we always know where we are, but not when. It also has a character who discovers he can bend the space-time continuum - just like the series he inhabits.

This is the kind of serial fantasy the US does best, which blends allegory with mythopoeia. A nation that sprang more or less fully formed from a pilgrim's forehead will by definition excel at mythmaking. It's what we do, because it's how we invented ourselves. It's also how we try to reinvent ourselves, especially in times of crisis. Mixing wish-fulfilment, self-justification, ideology and entertainment, Heroes is so engaging in part because it is propelled by the US's most dynamic contradictions: to balance power and liberty, nationalism and globalism, individualism and plurality, exceptionalism and democracy. Enamoured with superiority but worried about elitism, this is a story in which hitherto ordinary people discover that being special may not be all it's cracked up to be.

Naturally, no one involved in the series really believes this - of course it's better to be fabulous. We even have a character called Hiro (geddit?), who spends much of the early episodes with both arms up in endearing triumph, shouting "I did it!" and "Yahoo!". It is quite an instance of projection to displace this American capacity to revel at full volume in one's own successes on to a Japanese worker.

This is why myth and ideology are so closely allied with false consciousness: telling people soothing stories about their destinies is a good way to keep them from rioting.

Heroes signals its mythopoeic intentions from the outset: the first episode is titled "Genesis: Chapter One". It begins in medias res, with an opening voiceover about "life's mysteries" and the soul, speeches about personal destiny, and a heavy dose of prophetic doom.

Our narrator turns out to be the son of a geneticist with a "romantic take on evolution", which makes the whole thing start to sound rather like intelligent design. More concerned with arrival and apotheosis than with origins and development, however, Heroes is more New Testament than Old; when it comes to messianic figures, it is spoiled for choice.

It is a myth about the uses and abuses of power, made by and for the most powerful country in the world while it is in the midst of an enormous identity crisis about the status of that power: its moral status - are we good or bad? - and its instrumental status - are we still powerful? I haven't made it to the end yet, so perhaps it has some surprises in store, but so far the answer to both questions seems to be positive: we are powerful and we are good. When all else fails, there's always wishful thinking.

Heroes is on BBC2 on Wednesdays at 9pm