Call it the ‘Heroes’ effect. All of a sudden perfectly normal people, not just comic book geeks, are getting excited about superheroes. And superheroes are getting more like perfectly normal people: With movies like this summer’s Dark Knight and the keenly anticipated Watchmen scriptwriters are increasingly grounding the caped avengers in a real world that we can all recognise.

No Heroics is part of that trend, but is a good deal less serious than its peers: ITV2’s first original sitcom is edgier than ‘My Hero’ though – closer perhaps to cult favourite ‘Mystery Men’. It features Nicholas (Nathan Barley) Burns and James (just about everything else) Lance as slacker supermen who would have a perfectly pleasant time wasting their lives in The Fortress, a superhero pub, were it not for the constant annoyance of tiresomely perfect hero Excelsior, played by The Office’s Patrick Baladi who never missies an opportunity to remind everyone how completely Super he is.

Creator Drew Pearce has been a comic book fan from childhood, and brings his borderline obssessive knowledge of cult classics like Zenith and The Authority to bear in the show's detailed sets and mythology. The show has been in development for nearly four years, and there's also talk of a spin-off graphic novel that could take the inept heroes of the show to more exotic locations than a TV sitcom budget might allow.

Episodes one and two might be a slow burn, establishing the No Heroics universe in the same way that the early Friends episodes worked to acclimatise us to the improbably perfect world of six Gotham singletons. By the third instalment though, the hapless heroes are established as a superior sitcom characters that deserve a spot in the pantheon of loveable loser comedy that stretches from Tony Hancock to David Brent.

Packed with in-jokes for the fanboys, and perfectly normal jokes for the rest of us, No Heroics looks like a superior sitcom that will keep the long autumn nights safe for Truth, Justice, and the Comedy Way.

Watch a 'No Heroics' trailer

'No Heroics' starts on ITV2, Thursday 18 September, at 10.30pm

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