Heroes,? which aired at 9 p.m., is the lousy hit. ?Friday Night Lights,? which aired at 10 p.m., is the terrific flop. This week, NBC shifted the high-school football drama from Tuesday nights to a one-off Monday tryout in a last-ditch effort to save the show by giving it a chance to draft off of ?Heroes"'s enormous audience. It didn?t work. ?Friday Night Lights? picked up some viewers, but probably not enough to earn a stay of execution. That?s too bad. Back when I was plumbing through all of the fall season?s network pilots, ?Friday Night Lights? was the only one that earned a full-season pass on my overstuffed TiVo. And ?Heroes?? I shut off the pilot at the three-quarter mark. Couldn?t stand it anymore. (Once the show emerged as a hit, I did go back and watch three more episodes. Still terrible.)

Alas, Ali Larter, the buxom blonde star of ?Heroes,? cannot. That should?ve been obvious to anyone who saw ?Final Destination 2,? but give the girl some credit?she?s got a heck of an agent. Larter embodies everything that?s wrong with the cast of ?Heroes?: a pretty cardboard face that gets less interesting the longer you look at it. Her male counterpart on the show is Milo Ventimiglia of ?Gilmore Girls? fame, who evidently graduated from the Keanu Reeves School of Whoa.

The characters are paper-thin cliches, particularly the artist played by Santiago Cabrera, a hipster-scruffy, heroin-addicted jerk who paints?very, very badly?with a rug draped over his topless, chiseled torso (because, duh, he?s deep). Even the characters? superpowers feel tired. Flying? Reading minds? Stopping time? Healing instantaneously? Can?t the most creative minds in television come up with even one superpower we haven?t seen a million times before?