New Season Turns Heroes Into Victims

24 takes top honors, followed by Lost , Friends

(NEWSER) - Jack Bauer doesn't even have to torture you to keep you glued to your couch, reports the Daily Telegraph, scoring nearly a fifth of the votes for most addictive show in a survey of some 3000 couch potatoes. “Although crime doesn't pay, as our list reveals, it most certainly pulls in the viewers,” says a LOVEFiLM exec. The list:

1. 24, 19%
2. Lost, 17%
3. Friends, 10%
4. Heroes, 9%

A few good jokes, but show's aim seems off

(NEWSER) - The Goode Family, an animated series about an eco-obsessed, passionately politically correct family that airs tonight on ABC, is fairly funny, but leaves reviewers scratching their heads:

• It “feels aggressively off-kilter with the current mood, as if it had been incubated in the early to mid-’90s,” writes Ginia Bellafante in the New York Times. "Who really thinks of wind power—an allusion to which is a running visual gag in the show—as mindless, left-wing nonsense anymore?"

Critics, fans, brace for last episode tonight

(NEWSER) - After 15 seasons, viewers will make their final trip to County General Hospital tonight in the series finale of ER. Critics and fans are reflecting on the groundbreaking show:

• Mixing “medical triumph” with “personal angst,” ER “may have begun as a show about salvation, but it became a show about the near impossibility of salvation—a show less about healing than about damage,” writes Neal Gabler in the Los Angeles Times.

(NEWSER) - The "zeitgeist-tapping, blockbuster event" that was Heroes has fallen in both ratings and creative zeal, Jeff Jensen writes in Entertainment Weekly. Here's his five-point plan to fix it:

1. Hang up some tights: Telepathic policeman Matt Parkman, last seen wandering the African desert, must go. So too Suresh and his turn aping The Fly.

AMC will air final 16 episodes

(NEWSER) - AMC has picked up 16 final episodes of Breaking Bad, a last batch that could run as a single season or two shorter seasons, Entertainment Weekly reports. “It’s a funny irony—I’d hate to know the date of my own last day on earth, but I’m delighted to know what Walter White’s will be (episodically speaking),” said series creator Vince Gilligan. “This is a great gift to me and to my wonderful writers. It’s knowledge which will allow us to properly build our story to a satisfying conclusion.” More»