Photo: Courtesy of NBC

We had high hopes for the Create Your Own Hero tool on NBC's official Heroes Website, especially after Fox's Build Your Own Simpsons Character thing turned out to be several thousand times more entertaining than the movie it was designed to promote. But upon closer inspection, it looks more like the network is trying to get fans to write the show for them, or, at the very least, create new characters for its already unmanageably huge cast while Heroes' writers are on strike. The site asks us to "create" a character based on our specifications of gender, birthplace, body type, and level of attractiveness, but when we click through, all we get are some charts showing us how many people picked a given result. We wanted a fun new avatar, but we just ended up with demographic data. Gee, thanks for a good time, NBC.

Create Your Own Hero [NBC]