Metacritic.com's most acclaimed TV series of 2006

Metacritic is probably the premier resource for collecting critical judgments about various media. For the end of the year, they've collected a great deal of critics' top-ten lists for both film and TV. For their film coverage, they've included a histogram showing how many top-ten lists each film pops up on. But there's no such summary for their TV page, so I thought I'd rectify the omission. A histogram, however, isn't a great way to show what the most acclaimed works really were, since it gives the same weight to a first-place vote as it does to a tenth-place. So I took a cue from baseball MVP voting, giving 14 points to a first-place finish, 9 points to a second, 8 points for third place, and so on. For lists that are arranged alphabetically, each show gets 5.5 points. Here are the point leaders for 2006:

1. The Wire             132
2. 24                    81
3. Friday Night Lights   78.5
4. The Office            61.5
5. Battlestar Galactica  58.5
6. Dexter                55
7T. Heroes               52
7T. Ugly Betty           52
9. The Sopranos          45.5
10. Rescue Me            37

And, in comparison, here are the leaders for 2005:

1. Lost                 119
2. Arrested Development  71
3. Veronica Mars         52
4. Battlestar Galactica  48
5. My Name Is Earl       44
6. House M.D.            42
7. The Shield            40
8. Rescue Me             38
9T. The Colbert Report   36
9T. Entourage            36

I think the comparison sort of indicates how fickle critics can be, with only two shows (Battlestar Galactica and Rescue Me) appearing on both lists. I mean, the third season of Lost has been a little subpar so far, true, but (especially considering how strong the second half of season 2 was) enough so to drop it from being by far the most acclaimed show on the air into a tie for fourteenth?