Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.

What - more about Superman? Give us a break, why dontcha? It's a comic book, for crying out loud, and a comic book read by kids, not by the law-school-bound collegiate recovering nerds who follow the baroque intricacies of serious comic book stuff like Peter Milligan's Shade: The Changing Man or Garth Ennis's Hellblazer or - a true and emerging work of high art - Neil Gaiman's Sandman.

But Superman? Even the name, after all these years, sounds camp. We don't really like to use it without an ironic cock of the eyebrow, now do we? And thereby, I suggest, hangs a large part of the psychic history of America in the fifty years since the Big Guy in the Blue Suit with the Red Skivvies first made his appearance.

By the way. This is a piece about the ABC series, "Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman," which has just wound up its first season and which is, no kidding, one of the best things - smart and poignant - you can watch on the Tube.

Siegel and Shuster, the scrawny teens form Cleveland who invented the Superman mythos in 1938, probably had no idea that they were conjuring with a Name that played a central role in the visionary system of the great Nietzsche, and that, defaced and perverted, was playing an even greater role in the formation of the Third Reich. The boys from Cleveland just wanted to sell their idea for a comic book: and so they did. But Names, as any real adept will tell you, are delicate, dangerous things to play around with. Be careful what you call: it may come.

The timing could not have been more perfect. Just as the battalions of the Nazi Ubermenschen, "splendid blonde beasts" in the classic and nauseating phrase, arose from Berlin to Munich, on the other side of the Atlantic emerged an absurd, crudely-drawn, quite embarrassingly adolescent fantasy of omnipotence disguised as wimpiness which, to Dr. Goebbels, say, would have been just one more proof of the essential sickliness of permissive, Jew-infested America. (Never mind that as Superman he was about as goyische as you could get: when he put on those horn-rims and became insecure, fidgety Clark Kent he was - the name notwithstanding - pure Yeshiva-bucher.)

The funny thing is - and I'm quite serious about this - I think Superman may have been an essential part of the war effort (at least our part of it - let's not forget that Russia had at least a 60-percent share of the agony of defeat and the thrill of victory). The comic began in 1939, so it's a safe bet that a lot of the kids - and they were kids - who went off to fight on other planets like Anzio and Bastogne and Guadalcanal had stored, somewhere in their imaginations, the myth of the just-ordinary guy who, when danger threatened, emerged from the cocoon of the quotidian as the invincible defender of the right. Watch any of the numerous propaganda movies made during the war and notice how the plot, though "Superman" is never mentioned, follows the rhythm of the myth: every G.I. is a Clark Kent, with a Kal-El inside him screaming to get out. In fact, the best movie ever made about World War 11, William Wyler's 1946 The Best Years of Our Lives, becomes even more plangent when you think of its story of three returning veterans as the plight of Kal-El forced to hang up the cape and for the rest of his life be just - well - good old Clark.

Of course, by 1946 we were Superman. We had the Bomb. The country that had invented the strongest man on earth was now the strongest country on earth. And the nation would come to find its omnipotence quite as difficult to live with as did its secret self-image, the man in the red cape. What's worse than being only Clark, you ask? Well, being only Superman: for sure.

Global Policeman, Guardian of the New World Order (George Bush's witless phrase), or Defender of Truth, Justice, and the American Way: the formulas, geopolitical and comic book, have an uncanny internal resonance one with the other. For almost a half-century, I suggest, America has suffered from the cold-war disease, which can also be called "Supermanism": the overwrought anxiety to use great power for a great good, and the unending frustration of never finding a clear great good. For fifty years we haven't taken off the red cape: no wonder our room is a mess and our nerves are frazzled.

Which is why "Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman" is such a joy. I don't really think that the writers and producers sat down to create a "Superman" for the world-rhythms of the nineties; but I do believe that sometimes the right stories get themselves told for the right age: and "Lois and Clark" is that.

Two significant things about the title (besides, of course, the terrific fifth-grade pun on the seekers of the Northwest Passage): Lois (Lane, if you're a visiting Martian) comes first; and, maybe more significant, it's Clark, not Clark's demideity alter-ego, who's featured - not just in the main title, but in the unfolding of the episodes themselves. This Superman wants to make it without the red cape and the blue body-stocking. In fact, a running gag in the series is that "Superman" appears remarkably infrequently: in most episodes, whatever the problem du jour happens to be, Lois and Clark (that's Clark as Clark) will have mainly sorted things out to the point that Supe's requisite appearance is almost inessential. The classic Superman scenario - and the classic American foreign policy scenario - is that of the last-minute rescue: Into the phone booth! Change! Cap the volcano! Stroll back on the set with your hornrims on. But here Clark often does quite as well as Clark as he does as you-know-who.

Chesterton, who I think knew nearly everything about nearly everything, once said that the test of a really good religion was that you could make jokes about it. Maybe what I find so inspiriting about "Lois and Clark" is that it is a joke, and a gentle and affectionate one, about the megalomania of the Superman ethos. But like all really good jokes, it does not diminish its object as much as it humanizes it.

Clark/Superman is played by Dean Cain, who has none of the granite-statuary handsomeness of Christopher Reeve, but an irrepressible smartass grin, in or out of the supersuit: he's already, in other words, more Clark than Clark's other, and capable of smiling wryly at both incarnations. Lois is Teri Hatcher - about whom, in the immortal words of Roy Orbison, "rrrrowwrrr!" - and who, for the first time in any version of the tale, is at least as smart as the mild-mannered reporter who is her partner. This Lois and this Clark really like one another, and are constantly fencing, with equal wit on both sides, about the fact that sooner or later they are going to tumble into the sack, and not because she's going to find out that he's really Superman. Lane Smith is Perry White, who refreshingly swears, instead of "Great Caesar's Ghost!" "Great Shades of Elvis!" And Superman's archenemy, Lex Luthor, is played with perfect Donald Trump-reptilian arrogance by the veteran John Shea.

It's wonderful ensemble acting, and even when the individual episodes are dumb - we're not talking Anna Karenina here - there's a sense of high fun that, even on the Tube, can't be faked.

But it's also, as we surf into the next century, the demythologization of a myth. It's the assertion that Clark - the Clark in all of us - matters more than the Superman in all of us: that it's less important for us to be the strongest than it is for us to be the most human: that the quotidian - the cities, the hungry, the ordinary - is not just the husk of the divine, but its heart. In its small but shining way, "Lois and Clark" plays with one of our central determining myths, and tells us that, in this age and the world, it's time to stop worrying about our superpowers, hang the red cape for a while, and start cleaning our room.

There may be better series on TV. I doubt very much if there is one more quirkily relevant to the state of the nation.