Is it just me, or:
* was the second season of Heroes lying in a heap of uninspired and all-over-the-pace shambles, with nonsense plot lines (virus) and boring new characters (this latino chica/chicko team), a miserable patchwork abruptly ended by the strike. For some reason beyond me, the makers decided to pretend this was a closed season instead of just having the breath for a 6 month break.
* was the last season of 24 (was it 6 or7?) fatally stuck to a concept that became so formulaic that even the impending death of millions was not able to create tension anymore, and the repetitive "crisis-resolution-more-crisis-more-resolution" pattern was used up for good, probably making the authors grateful for a strike that gave them another year of thinking time.
* should Jericho have ended after one (maybe slightly longer) season, because the effect of being cut off from a world about which you don’t know anything, struck by you don’t know what, could not hold forever. And once the post-Apocalyptic action sets in, the show loses a lot, because re-building an anarchic society is a completely different story, one which requires larger patterns and larger pictures – in both of which the Jericho production is not as good at as in the chamber drama of "Locked in our little town".
* did "Lost" modulate dangerously between fascinating and desperate efforts to make it to the show’s finale, with catastrophic blackouts such as the "I am paralysed by a spiderbite" episode last season, and with an eerie effort to get more things resolved within one episode. This is not necessarily benefincial to a drama that needs to pace towards its finale, and where every resolution along the way only takes away this pace.
The only real high-quality constants of the shows I watch have been CSI (I guess those guys are just too routined to get distracted by anything) and Battlestar Galactica, where there is hope that with the end in sight, there is no danger of losing faith and the path. But then again, we have not yet seen the start of the final season, and dammit, has that last season been long ago!
thomas4cinema 