I thought it was established long ago that Tim Kring is something of an ass?
And having read the AV Club for a number of years, I can tell you that they only really turned on Heroes this season, mostly because of bad characterization (specifically, letting the story influencing the actions of the characters instead of the actions of the characters influencing the story) It's a tough love thing. I mentioned Twin Peaks before, and it's kind of the same deal - strong first season followed by progressively diminishing returns. People really like the first season of Heroes. I remember the first season finale, getting online and seeing how anticlimactic everyone thought it was. It didn't get any better after that. The Time blog is a different story, he's saying "fuck this show", which is his right, but the actual significant response is the AV Club's.
The thrust of Kring's statement is this -
"[Serialized storytelling] is a very flawed way of telling stories on network television right now, because of the advent of the DVR and online streaming."
Which isn't saying that it's harder to make a TV show in general because of those things - it is, definitely, because Nielsen can't track alternative means of viewing and advertising is a thornier issue with them (issues that the article addresses, actually). Kring is saying that The service that DVRs and online services provide, which is the ability to watch any show at any time, have specifically harmed shows with serial elements, which is an incredibly dissonant notion. If anything, DVRs have made serialized shows more viable than they were before. J J Abrams made his name through DVRs with Lost, and the tiny little details in that show that you could only sniff out with the pause function provided by a DVR, along with ARGs online, built the buzz that gave it its formidable cult (he's doing it once again with Fringe, which is constantly referencing past episodes, encouraging DVR hunts)
Kring is seeing the forest for the trees here. Yes, DVRs have lowered ratings all over television. But he seems to have this idea that the muddy storytelling he specializes in would be just as viable if that tech didn't exist, which is hard to imagine. If you're going to make dedicated viewership a requirement for your show you'd think you wouldn't want to have it such that if you miss a showing time, there isn't a way to catch up (aside from having the episode's events told to you, and fuck that) There's never been a better time to institute a season-long story arc in your show.
It's pretty obvious that I've given up on this show myself, and I might as well explain that. I lost interest when Sylar became "good". The stretch was too great for me, and it reminded me of the cartoons I used to watch as a kid, when I thought it was so badass when the hero and the villain teamed up to fight a greater villain. Part of my inner child still finds that appealing, but now that I'm 22, if you're going to have a psycho serial killer, I'm not going to accept that essentially what it takes to make that guy a troubled hero is the revelation that... he... has a real mother, with a super birth canal? And this makes him reconsider his life of murder and power theft? Really he just solemnly says "I'm trying to be good" and furrows his brow and that's his character development. I knew at that point that there were no real rules for how these characters could act. A lot of fiction writers run into problems when they put their characters in situations that they have trouble writing out, because "the character wouldn't do that". The writers of this show don't seem to meet any such resistance. More to the point it was the Hannibal effect. Sylar, a mysterious, badass character, gets explained away with pop psychology, and he finds out that all he really needs to give up his psychopathy is the knowledge that somebody wuvs him.