By Amanda Yesilbas and Charlie Jane Anders. We all live in fear of the day when Game of Thrones starts to suck. We've lived through this trauma before — many great television shows went astray, often due to one highly questionable decision. Here 10 once-terrific shows, and the exact moment they started to suck.

Yes, Heroes is coming back, at least if MSN has its way. The Microsoft Network, which is trying to create original programming for Xbox Live, is in talks with NBC to bring back the superhero show, which had one good season and three godawful seasons that were horrific punishments from a cruel and uncaring god.

Eight episodes in, Arrow is officially a mega-hit, at least by The CW's standards. And not only that, but Arrow is actually... pretty decent. The Christopher Nolan-inspired "gritty" superhero soap opera manages to be addictive fun, blending some solid action with the kind of relationship drama that makes Vampire Diaries…

Syfy's great success story remains Battlestar Galactica, the cheeseball 1970s space opera show that Ronald D. Moore brought back as a gritty, more serious look at the remnants of humanity trying to survive after a robot massacre. So now that Syfy is apparently picking up Blake's 7, the 1970s British space opera, can…

We often tend to think that the best era for trash culture was sometime in the middle of the Twentieth Century. An era where there were a lot of 25 cent paperbacks with gun-toting lesbians on their covers, plus drive-in movies, stag films, cheap comics and weird burlesque shows. And so on. But actually, the pinnacle of …

With every passing election year, the statistical likelihood increases that we'll elect a U.S. president who's really a robot, or an alien. Or maybe a charismatic plant, grown in some kind of tank. How will you recognize a non-human candidate for president when one comes along? And more importantly, which non-human…

Science fiction scientists have been responsible for numerous fictional disasters. They've reanimated corpses that have come back to kill them. They've cloned dinosaurs only to utterly lose control of them. They've shrunk their kids and turned themselves into flies. But one researcher is calling for more fictional…

Last night, Fox aired a preview of its new series Touch, which kicks off properly in March. What we saw was a just barely decent show about connectivity, fate, lost cellphones, and the mysterious, mystical powers of numbers.

Television shows are like sports teams: Sometimes they just have an off season. (And sometimes they just dive down a terrible hole and get trapped forever.) When a science fiction or fantasy show has a terrible no-good year, it's especially noticeable, because the fantastical plot devices get dumber and the…

We are, most people would agree, in the midst of a Golden Age of Television. Since the late-1990s, the programming that's been pumped into our homes has been as good as it's ever been — and, in many respects, better than the movies that have long sat atop the Pop Cultural Quality Pile. But why aren't we also in a…