After last season's awful performance and utterly risible execution, NBC's tragic misfire Heroes has finally been put out of its misery. The network has been hinting since late this past winter that the show was on thin ice and as the spring slaughterhouse of series cancellations has come into full swing there was a lot of talk about the future of Heroes. As late as last week there were rumors that Heroes would be getting a truncated 13-episode season, but over the weekend NBC announced that the show wouldn't see the embrace of primetime ever again. But for the few of you who, out of sick fascination or a genuine love few will ever understand, would like to see some more Heroes, there's a distinct possibility of the plot getting a wrap-up miniseries some time in 2011.

Heroes will likely go down in history as a show that should have been one of the best things on TV but choked spectacularly just as it was getting famous. I, like many viewers, genuinely enjoyed the first season of Heroes but was deeply disappointed by the season finale. At the time we could dismiss that iconic non-fight with Sylar as a mere stumbling point for an otherwise enjoyable pulp series. As the seasons progressed it became increasingly apparent that the showdown in Times Square was the status quo. At a certain point, Heroes grew downright insulting. It was a show about people with super powers they almost never used and rarely ever used intelligently. It was rife with unnecessary melodrama, characters who didn't so much act like people as clunky dialogue delivery devices, and some of the worst acting on network television.

Yet I found myself morbidly fascinated with the slow-motion trainwreck that was Heroes. When fans started abandoning the sinking ship that was the second season, I became a defender of its quixotic quest to be the worst show on television. The pointless, aimless excess of Heroes echoed the fall of NBC from the heights it achieved in the 90's. Today the network has little to offer outside of a decent comedy lineup on Thursday and Chuck, which is constantly an inch from cancellation itself. In NBC's glory days it had something excellent on every day of the week. In the past decade, NBC dipped a few too many times in the stupid bin. It adopted brainless reality programming and mostly forgot about supporting respectable scripted shows, eventually aiming so low that potentially smart, exciting series like Heroes suffered from a complete lack of faith in the intelligence of viewers.

One thing Heroes did do well was supplemental content online. If the televised show had been even half as good as the tight, compelling webisodes or as delightfully geeky as the 9th Wonders digital comics, perhaps Heroes would have been the cultural phenomenon it always wanted to be. That in mind, ABC should probably apply the same multimedia model to its upcoming series No Ordinary Family, a drama starring Michael Chiklis and Julie Benz as the heads of a super-powered suburbanite family. With some good writers and a considerably stronger, smaller cast, No Ordinary Family might just succeed in every way Heroes failed. Then again, Heroes started out with Bryan Fuller as the creative lead and decided to give him the boot just in time to ruin any hope of making the show work. As Heroes perfectly demonstrated, a good start does not a good series make.