It's true enough that there's plenty wrong with Gatsby Le Magnifique, as the French are calling the latest from director Baz Luhrmann. But what better film could there have been to open the sensory onslaught that is the Cannes Film Festival than one orchestrated by that patron saint of overstimulation?

It's not just that you might see four films a day at Cannes, from directors as different as plainspoken American satirist Alexander Payne (here with heartland father-son drama Nebraska) and hyperliterate French maximalist Arnaud Desplechin (who has enlisted Benicio Del Toro for the wonderfully titled Jimmy P. — Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian).

It's the chaos outside the theater on the French Riviera, with women on roller skates swooping at you to hawk trade magazines, and red-carpet photo calls set to Daft Punk. Crowds scrambling for a glimpse of stars, even if it's only through the smartphone camera screens held up by everyone up front.

With the right party invitations, Cannes is not unlike Gatsby's unhinged introduction scene for Leo DiCaprio, where the star smiles wide as the Gershwin swells behind booming fireworks: Even if it's all a little tacky, you're still stunned by the ridiculous grandeur and glamour of it all.

Without the right invitations (read: if you're me), on the other hand, the Gatsby resonance comes from the time spent staring at lights on distant piers, scenes of parties much classier than whatever you've hustled your way into — though you'll find enough cheap booze for a bootlegger either way.

The overheated atmosphere has a way of inducing delusions of grandeur in everyone here, including film critics. Indeed, the history of media coverage at Cannes is full of examples of exaggerated, oversimplified pans and ill-considered snap judgments — especially post-Twitter. (My favorite historical example, just to prove that antisocial media were hardly paragons, might be the now-shuttered British Daily Herald, reporting on the prize awarded to Federico Fellini's classic La Dolce Vita: "ORGY FILM WINS TOP AWARD."*)

It's enough to make it clear why Ingmar Bergman, upon learning that The Virgin Spring was playing at Cannes, wrote that he "hate[s] that place of meat market[s] and mental humiliation. At a festival you can really despair of the motion picture as an art." (That he ended up winning a prize that year did not change his view.)

In any case, a good critic does what she can to keep an even keel. But it's hard for a certain kind of film fan to not get giddy when the lineup features new work from the Coen brothers, Steven Soderbergh, Jim Jarmusch, Roman Polanski, Nicolas Winding Refn (director of Drive) and Asghar Farhadi (director of the phenomenal Oscar-winner A Separation).

Festival head Thierry Fremaux has also taken steps this year to address one common complaint that has dogged the festival — the underrepresentation of female directors, though he's done it in a way that raises issues of its own. There are eight female directors in the official competition categories (compared with three last year), but seven of them, including art-cinema heavyweights like Sofia Coppola and Claire Denis, have been relegated to the secondary Un Certain Regard category.

Fremaux has shrugged off criticism about this strange disparity by saying that Un Certain Regard is just as important as the flagship competition, but few people here really believe that. (Just look at the name! It's like a half-step above the "I Guess It's OK" awards.)

And for anyone who'd suggest that it's a matter of those films being less accomplished, Coppola's The Bling Ring is at least one terrific counterexample, having already outclassed some of the competition films in the first two days here. The film is based on the titular gang of real-life teens who used gossip rags and Twitter feeds to find out when celebrities like Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan would be out of town, then ransacked their homes. It helped that those gleaming glass edifices on L.A. mountainsides were usually unlocked — when celebrity culture has made the rest of these lives transparent, is it a big surprise that their homes weren't any different?

Barriers of any kind are a foreign concept for gang ringleaders Nicki, Rebecca, and Marc (Emma Watson, Katie Chang and Israel Broussard), whom Coppola portrays here in an ultra-specific satirical snapshot. Designer brand names and Kanye West lyrics are their native tongue, and "The Secret" — that method of attaining all your desires through the power of positive thinking — is the equivalent of their morning prayers; they prefer entitlement to enlightenment. (Watson in particular has a blast putting on a Valley-girl accent and yammering about "expanding as a spiritual human being," though Coppola has actually toned down the ridiculousness of her real-life inspiration).

Bored with even the excess of nightclub visits and house parties, these kids decide to try on the lifestyles of their heroes as if they were so many Prada heels. At first, it's by taking their things and partying in their homes, but soon they follow the imitation to its logical conclusion — carefully chosen court-date outfits and lawyer-scripted apologies in the manner of their DUI-charged idols.

And why wouldn't they, when the consequences of their actions seem to be nonexistent? Or they are for the kids with the right lawyers, at least. Like the similarly themed Spring Breakers, this is partially a story about class and social-climbing, in which the inevitable hammer comes down hardest on the least fortunate. For the others, life is but a shopping spree.

Arrested Development returning via Netflix? Just another old-media brand reviving itself on new media.

The TV show, which originally ran on Fox from 2003 to 2006 and unveils new episodes on Netflix next weekend, finds itself in splendid company. Radiohead, Louis C.K., Veronica Mars — all found their audiences with promotion and distribution from big studios and networks. Radiohead was signed to a major music label. Louis C.K. enjoyed HBO specials and TV shows. And Veronica Mars ran on two TV networks for three years.

But Radiohead defied industry norms in 2006 by selling its album In Rainbows directly to fans for whatever price they chose — and the band made millions. Louis C.K. took a similarly successful route with a comedy special in 2011, charging viewers five dollars to download the special online. And Veronica Mars fans contributed more than $5.7 million on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter — almost three times the stated goal — to pay for a movie adaptation.

Author Grady Hendrix says these models aren't exactly replicable. These are mid-list, old-media artists, not blockbuster celebrities. But their fan bases and name recognition furnishes them with a new-media edge that won't be shared, he says, "[by] some band from Cleveland that has a small following looking for Kickstarter funds for their album."

Inevitably, some old-media brands still manage to do it wrong. The blandly impersonal Kickstarter page of actress Melissa Joan Hart might as well have been written by a publicist's intern. The former star of Sabrina The Teenage Witch is soliciting funds for a new romantic comedy, but as Hendrix points out, with the slightest of smirks, "It's raised $50,000, and it's doing really badly."

On the other hand, a Kickstarter campaign from actor Zach Braff simply oozes kinship with fans. And they've rallied, giving more than $2.7 million to support a follow-up to his 2004 movie Garden State and surpassing his goal by hundreds of thousands of dollars. "There are shots of him and his brother and all these behind-the-scenes things," Hendrix notes," And you feel like, 'Hey, Zach Braff is going to answer my emails!'"

A sense of ownership and connection leads people to donate money to movies ultimately benefiting the major studios that make them. But it's important to recognize that Warner Brothers will still invest many millions in producing, distributing and promoting a Veronica Mars movie, even with Kickstarter's help.

And there could be more to come. Michael Pachter of Wedbush Securities points out that rumors have swirled that late show Heroes might be resurrected by Microsoft as an Xbox exclusive. "And the only way you'll be able to watch," he says, "is on Xbox."

Giving still-grieving fans hope for new Xbox or Netflix episodes of their canceled darlings such as Caprica, Chuck or Firefly.

[Caution: contains pretty abundant spoilers about the Star Trek universe, but only fairly nonspecific ones about the new film.]

Star Trek, director J.J. Abrams' 2009 reboot of the ever-optimistic LBJ-era science fiction franchise, somehow walked the flaming tightrope of pleasing Trekkies and civilians alike. Brilliantly recasting the beloved and ancient-or-dead crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise with an likable company of actors in their twenties and thirties, and on a budget befitting a would-be blockbuster for the first time since 1979's bloated and unloved Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Abrams' hyperactive movie talked fast and walked fast — when it wasn't at a dead run. Indeed, in its breakneck pace and its camera-flare and whip-pan-loving photography, Star Trek '09 often felt like Star Trek '66 projected in fast forward. It had a relationship with the series' existing stories that was both loving and restless, centered on the film with the greatest continuing resonance for fans: 1982's Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan.

Trek '09 showed us an event first referred to as a part of Captain Kirk's reckless past in Khan. Back when he was a brash, young-and-dumb space cadet, Kirk reprogrammed Starfleet Academy's famed Kobayashi Maru simulator — an unwinnable scenario intended to test how prospective starship captains face impending death — so that it was possible to complete the mission (rescuing the souls aboard a disabled spacecraft in the no-fly Neutral Zone) and survive.

"He cheated," Kirk's child says of his deadbeat dad in Wrath of Khan.

"I altered the conditions of the test," Kirk protests.

Abrams' new reboot-sequel Star Trek Into Darkness is even more consciously beholden to Khan than its 2009 predecessor. Trek '09 established, to its credit, that this clean-slate telling of the Star Trek mythos would not necessarily hew to the version we know. It selectively contradicted established continuity — destroying Spock's homeworld of Vulcan, to name just one example that has significant repercussions in the sequel. Star Trek Into Darkness carries even further the making of sacred cows into burgers, warping way past fan service into something more like fan baiting.

Screenwriters Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman and Damon Lindelof bring back Khan, the villain introduced in the 1967 original series episode "Space Seed" before being ultimately immortalized in the film named after his temper and featuring his debut as a now-iconic scream of anguish that has its own noisy web site.

Embodied with scenery-chewing brio by the great Ricardo Montalban, Khan was a merciless, genetically engineered, 20th-century warlord who had much of Earth under his iron rule by the year, er, 1996. Eventually, he and his crew were defeated and fled into deep space, sleeping in their cryo-tubes though the ensuing centuries, during which humankind supposedly grew more compassionate and civilized. And in Into Darkness, a part of Khan's story is restaged, but with a substantial alteration.

While messing with Khan risks upsetting fans, and while it feels wrong to wrap up a Star Trek joint as Abrams has this one (with a humdrum earthbound foot chase), Abrams' speed-lined approach is probably the swift kick in the warp nacelles the franchise needed. Like its close contemporary, the James Bond franchise, Star Trek must be saved from itself every generation or so.

Abrams, who was born just a few months before the first episode of Star Trek aired in 1966, has said that Trek was always too talky and philosophical for him. He never liked it until he started working on it.

We have heard this story before — the story of a man who isn't sure he buys into the Star Trek universe as it's been done but builds something from it anyway. He directed The Wrath Of Khan.

Nicholas Meyer was mostly known as the bestselling novelist of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, a smart revival of Sherlock Holmes, when he was hired in 1981 to direct the second theatrical Star Trek film. In Meyer's fine memoir The View From The Bridge: Memories Of Star Trek And A Life in Hollywood, he also claims to have written the script, cobbling it together from the salvageable pieces of five drafts by other writers, for no money and no credit, in a single, sleepless, 12-day period. The various quotes and allusions to A Tale of Two Cities and Moby-Dick that pepper the movie, says Meyer, all came from him.

Gene Roddenberry, the World War II bomber pilot-tuned Pan Am pilot-turned Los Angeles police officer-turned screenwriter who'd created the TV series, had been forced out of the Trek film biz for the time being after the runaway production of The Motion Picture.

Meyer had directed only one prior film, an adaptation of the light sci-fi novel Time After Time. He had no love of Star Trek, but he wanted a career as a filmmaker, and here was Paramount Pictures inviting him to direct a high-profile film — albeit for a mere 25 percent of Star Trek: The Motion Picture's budget. Meyer took the gig, on the condition that he be allowed to do Star Trek in a way that made sense to him, which meant departing substantially from the what we might call the founder's intent.

Meyer wrote in his memoir that Roddenberry envisioned Starfleet as not a military organization but a patrolling one — a notion he considered "manifestly absurd." For him, Kirk was heading up "a species of gunboat diplomacy wherein the Federation (read America, read the Anglo-Saxons) was right right and aliens were — in Kipling's queasy phrase — 'lesser breeds.'"

Starfleet as a military organization was something Meyer could work with. Outer space had never excited him as a boy, but he'd loved C.S. Forester's adventure novels about the British sea captain Horatio Hornblower, set during the Napoleonic Wars. (Years later, he would learn Hornblower had been Rodenberry's inspiration for Kirk, too.) So he set about remaking Starfleet as something more explicitly like the U.S. Navy in space.

He redressed the Enterprise to make it look more cramped and dangerous than in prior voyages; less like a Hilton, more like a submarine. Suddenly, there were ladders all over the ship. (The producers drew the line when Meyer tried to hang a "NO SMOKING" sign prominently on the bulkhead of the Enterprise's bridge.) He replaced the uniforms he called "Dr. Denton's" with military-styled dark-red tunics, with insignia denoting rank and function.

His cosmetic and attitudinal changes would remain a part of the Trek-iverse until the original cast signed off with 1991's Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, also co-written (for credit, this time) and directed by Meyer.

What didn't stick was Meyer's killing off of Star Trek's most popular character.

In his book, Meyer professes not to know for certain exactly when or by whom Spock's death warrant was signed, though he repeats the oft-told rumor that Leonard Nimoy himself wanted out. But killing Spock was, in Meyer's view, a key objective of the mission he'd accepted. He was determined to give Spock a tragic, self-sacrificing, ship-saving demise worthy of the noble character, and he did that.

And then Paramount un-did it.

The resuscitation of Spock was done later, over Meyer's screaming objections. The scene that plants the seed for Spock's resurrection was shot by a producer and added in post-production, after Meyer refused.

Whether in spite or because of its mushy stance on Spock's expiration, Khan was the hit the franchise needed. Janet Maslin's New York Times review began, "Well, this is more like it."

But there was at least one person who did not love the movie: Roddenberry. Perhaps that was to be expected, given that Paramount Pictures had ripped his baby away from him and handed it over to some novelist who by his own admission didn't know Mr. Spock from Mr. Peanut. Years later, when Roddenberry learned that Meyer's screenplay for The Undiscovered Country was an end-of-the-Cold War allegory, wherein hawkish factions within both the Federation and the Klingon Empire conspire to sabotage the peace treaty being negotiated between the galactic superpowers, he hit the roof. Meyer's screenplay depicted some members of Starfleet — not the least of them Kirk, whose son had been executed by a Klingon — as harboring racial prejudice against the Klingons. This made perfect sense to Meyer, who'd never bought into Roddenberry's utopian ideas about the perfectability of humankind (and of other species, too), but for Rodenberry, it was too much.

Intentionally or not, Star Trek into Darkness takes this generation-old backstage battle for the franchise's soul and puts its back on the screen. The movie's big allegorical payload concerns Starfleet's gathering hawkishness, a sad but predictable response to the genocidal obliteration of Vulcan.

The audience I saw Star Trek Into Darkness with groaned when the end credits included a dedication to post-9/11 veterans. But it may be more appropriate a reference than those groans indicated. Science fiction and general, and Star Trek in particular, has always been a delivery system for social allegory. Star Trek Into Darkness may alienate casual viewers with its sermonizing, and may alienate diehards with its almost gleeful strip-mining and rejiggering of the Wrath of Khan's grandest moments. It goes where other, better films have gone before. But it goes there unusually — what's the word? — boldly.

Into Darkness operates even more explicitly as a post-9/11 allegory than The Dark Knight did five years earlier: Spock tells Kirk that mission he has accepted to, in essence, drone-strike Khan rather than capture him for trial, is "morally wrong." And Scotty, the Enterprise's chief engineer, resigns his commission after Kirk orders him to bring a cargo of mysterious new long-range weapons aboard the ship.

"We're supposed to be explorers!" Scotty objects, capturing the Rodenberry-Meyer divide, decades later, in a photon torpedo casing — er, nutshell.

Consider what goes on in your brain when you, for instance, you watch an episode of Mad Men.

First, you have a reaction. "That's weird" is a reaction. So is "yuck." So is "wow." "This doesn't make sense" is a reaction, "that's a great dress" is a reaction, and "WHAT?" is a reaction.

Next, you might choose to push on your reaction until it matures into a thought. "I didn't buy that conflict because I don't think Joan would take that position on this issue, based on past events" is a thought. Or "in the context of this story, that amount of violence seems gratuitous."

And finally, if you like, you wrap up all your thoughts and try to come up with a conclusion: "This season is going downhill." "They don't write well for this character." "That was a brilliantly written episode."

The great thing about communal viewing with the assistance of social media is sharing reactions. Sunday nights — when Game Of Thrones and Mad Men air, and when at other times of year Girls and The Good Wife and Breaking Bad air — are reaction avalanches. The bad thing about it is ... the same thing. Twitter, in particular, is a fantastic reaction bucket. If you want a place to put all those "I'm so tired of this story" moments, Twitter will do the job, and it can be absolutely fascinating when people react the same way you do and even more fascinating when they don't. It's also fun, and often very funny. But Twitter can also magnify and elevate initial reactions so much that they're mistaken for thoughts — or, worse, for conclusions.

When something is unusually opaque on first viewing, as Sunday night's Mad Men was, there tend to be a lot of reactions very quickly, all of which are valid, few of which are especially enlightening and none of which should be mistaken for actual thoughts. There's really nothing wrong with that in and of itself, and you can't argue much with how a scene hits another person — it's like arguing about whether something smells good or not.

Before TV viewing got so social, you would probably only be exposed to a handful of reactions to a show or a movie during the time when you were trying to process it. Now, you can choose to be absolutely saturated with reactions. And when enough people have the same reaction — in the case of last night's Mad Men, it was perhaps "Whuh?" — it can start to look like a conclusion. Everybody was confused, therefore it was baffling, therefore it was bad.

But that's wrong. Maybe it was bad and maybe it wasn't, but everybody saying "Whuh?" is still just the big reaction bucket, no matter how many people are throwing into it. And if we're thinking about Mad Men as art and not pure diversion, most of the value of reactions to art of any kind comes from interrogating them enough that you can progress to a thought or two. The fact that a reaction is widely shared doesn't make it more than it is. Coming up with thoughts sometimes takes a little time, especially if disorientation is part of what happens initially. I had lots of reactions to that Mad Men episode, and I stand by them (it struck me as kind of self-indulgent, and I'm generally very bored by stories about characters on drugs), but I'm still not sure what I'll wind up thinking about it.

Some things, after all, improve the more you shift from the gut to the more contemplative mind, while others suffer. I enjoyed Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby when I first saw it, but the more I thought about it, the more it fell apart for me. The entire value of good writing, when I'm acting as a reader, is that good writers take their reactions as a starting point and work forward. Or backward. Or up, down, the point is to go somewhere.

There's a constant public conversation about whether Twitter and "everybody has an opinion" means there's no future for writing about culture, but that misses the point. Social media has affected the reaction market enormously, but the critical thought market much less. Reacting publicly and being seen by a lot of people is easier than it's ever been, but doing something interesting with those reactions still takes work and thought. Social media has helped lower the barriers to entry for people who are terrific writers, certainly, who can now be found everywhere. But a thousand context-less thumbs up or down don't replace the act of moving down that line from reaction to thought to conclusion, whether it's being done by a professional or an amateur, in print or in a comment section.

One of the things that made Roger Ebert such a hugely influential writer was that he could make transparent the way he processed his own reactions, and he understood that interrogating them meant acknowledging that they exist and that they're the beginning, not the end, of a conversation. And that's always what reactions are, even when millions of people have them at the same time.

There's a lot of lamenting of the culture of quick reactions, given the way a cascade of negativity (or positivity) can harden into something that seems to defy further examination except by contrarians. That culture is not going away, but it doesn't have to be a menace if we can all agree that there's more to life than the 140 characters that you can put together at 11:04 on a Sunday night.

When actress Geena Davis was watching children's shows with her daughter a few years ago, she became so troubled by the lack of female representation, she started a think tank on gender in the media. The Geena Davis Institute recently partnered with University of Southern California professors to conduct a study analyzing gender roles and jobs on screen.

The good news? Prime-time television's pretty decent at depicting women with careers.

"We looked at something like 11,000-plus speaking characters," Davis tells NPR. The study showed that 44.3 percent of female characters in prime-time television are gainfully employed. That's respectably close to the real-life figure of 46.7 percent. And it's vastly better than children's entertainment — meaning shows and family films — in which a grossly disproportionate 81 percent of the jobs are held by men.

Television today teems with female characters holding jobs of the sort a young girl — or boy — might aspire to. Think of all the female lawyers, doctors and detectives on procedurals, like Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. Or the wisecracking female neurobiologist on The Big Bang Theory. Or Leslie Knope, the earnest small-town city councilwoman on Parks And Recreation, whose political ambitions lie short of nothing but the presidency.

As it happens, Geena Davis actually played the president of the United States on the short-lived 2005 ABC series Commander in Chief. These are the sort of female characters Davis hopes girls will see on TV and aspire, eventually, to be.

But there's one problem, says Jennifer Newsom, who directed the 2011 documentary Miss Representation about women in the media. She points out that almost none of those characters have children. Nor do the career-obsessed heroines of her two favorite shows, Homeland and Scandal.

"Let's just forget the working mother," Newsom grouses. "Despite the fact that, of working women, 60 percent are working mothers." As part of her research, Newsom asked a Hollywood executive about this vexing absence of working moms on TV. The response, she says, was along the lines of, "Well, you know, our focus study group, they weren't comfortable with the mother [character] working so hard and blah, blah, blah."

Truth be told, it can be uncomfortable to watch a character like Nurse Jackie, a working mom over 40, struggle on her series to hold her life, job and family together. Newsom says Nurse Jackie is even more of an outlier.

"Forty and older are actually 47 percent of our population here in the U.S., yet only 26 percent of women on TV," she observes. Of course, 40 and older in the real world tends to describe the ages of CEOs, high-level politicians and people who've poured decades into building distinguished careers.

According to the Geena Davis Institute, prime-time programs show women running companies 14 percent of the time. In real life, it's 25 percent. Glenn Close played such a character in Damages, a TV show about a woman in charge of her own high-powered law firm. Damages originally aired on FX. Its president, John Landgraf, admits the channel is mainly known for its compelling male anti-heroes.

"Frankly, the reason I mistakenly passed on Breaking Bad was that at the time, we had The Shield, Nip/Tuck and Rescue Me," he says. "And I was like, 'Well, are we going to have four shows with white male anti-heroes on the air? Is that really the whole of our brand?' "

Landgraf wanted powerful female anti-heroes anchoring their own shows. So not only did he greenlight Damages, but he also gave the go to Dirt, a short-lived series starring Courtney Cox as the editor-in-chief of a sleazy tabloid. Neither show exactly found a Breaking Bad-like fan following.

"And it's fascinating to me," Landgraf adds, "that we just have really different, and I think, a more rigorous set of standards for female characters than we do for male characters in this society. It's much harder to buy acceptance of a female anti-hero."

Tell it to showrunner Janet Tamaro. She created Rizzoli and Isles on TNT, about a female detective and a female medical examiner that starts its fourth season in June. "I got a lot of a resistance when I wanted to write a scene with the two women in conflict," she recalls. "From both male and female executives, and everyone was squeamish about it — 'Oh no, no, no, we don't want to see women fight.' "

But Tamaro prevailed, and she scripted a spirited argument between her two leads that lasts until a colleague refers to their "cat fight," prompting them to turn on him. "Did you really just call a disagreement between two female colleagues a cat fight?" Rizzoli demands.

There's another place to look on television for strong depictions of working women, according to Geena Davis. "The most gender-balanced sector of television shows is reality shows," she says.

Look past the parade of housewives, bachelorettes and dance moms, and you'll see women flipping houses on HGTV, designing high-end suits on Project Runway, or running restaurants like Robbie Montgomery on Welcome to Sweetie Pie's. The success of reality programs like these proves that showing women working really works. For everyone.

To mark network upfronts week, we talk in this episode about the cancellation of shows, including the ones that came and went that we honestly can hardly remember as well as the ones — like ABC's delightful, hilarious Happy Endings — that break our hearts. We cover the issue of disappointed fans, consider the possibility of shows resurfacing elsewhere, and hear an absolutely amazing story from Glen that you would not believe if I attempted to summarize it. (He mentions an IMDB page that you really have to see in order to see how funny that part of the story is.)

And then we delve into a topic brought to us by a listener on our Facebook page: the etiquette of viewing and listening and attending. Are you allowed to talk to someone while watching TV with him? Are you allowed to text at the movies? What is the etiquette of being tall at concerts? How about saving seats?

If you think this all sounds like it would make for some hot debates, you would be right.

As always, we close the show with what's making us happy this week. Stephen is happy about this site (which is wonderful and welcome) returning after a long hiatus, as well as an art piece and an album he loved. Trey is happy about a welcome retreat and a welcome return to the public consciousness for a perhaps underappreciated figure. Glen is happy about one of the same things he's so frequently happy about, but also about a podcast that he hasn't ever talked about before (believe it or not). I am happy about an intriguing trailer for a fall show as well as a wonderful new TV site (and this feature, and this one) about which I am not objective at all. (But I am right.)

Find us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter: me, Stephen, Glen, Trey, Jess, and our esteemed producer emeritus and music director, Mike Katzif.

If you watch Scandal, you know that there, Fitzgerald Grant is the President of the United States, and that he goes by "Fitz." Now "Fitz," let's face it, is already a pretty punchable name, given that combined with his personality, it makes him sound like somebody with a beanie and a lot of polo shirts grew up, got even richer, had a son, and taught him how to give swirlies to the math team. Fitz is involved, on and off (currently off, or possibly on, but maybe off) (maybe half-off, like end-of-the-season shoes), with Olivia Pope.

Olivia is the protagonist of Scandal, and even though she is a terrible person*, she probably deserves better than Fitz.

(Did I mention this contains spoilers? It contains spoilers.)

Anyway, why does Olivia deserve better than Fitz? Because we all deserve better than Fitz. Did you hear me, O Women Of The World? If you are reading these words, you deserve better than Fitz. Unless, that is, you are Mellie, Fitz's wife, who exactly deserves Fitz, which is part of what makes the show's central romantic mythology kind of hard to give a hoot about. If Olivia had a lick of sense, she would make the "that's that" motion with her hands like she's smacking the dust off, say "ptooey," and go have sex with someone more worthwhile. Meaning: anyone.

And Fitz and Mellie would go off and have a whole bunch of evil babies and tour the world like the Von Trapp Family Singers, only they would be a troupe of lying, well-dressed hypocrites who would cry and complain instead of singing "So Long, Farewell."

Because honestly, Fitz is the worst. He is the absolute worst. In case you don't believe me, I am prepared to present my list of reasons.

1. Personally murdered an old lady with cancer to save his own neck.

2. Cheated on his wife and managed to blame both the wife and the cheatrix. (I just made that word up; I think we need it.) (Especially for this show.)

3. Found out he became president fraudulently, and instead of setting anything right, looked at everyone who fraudulently made him president and was like, "HOW COULD YOU? I AM THE SADDEST BOY IN ALL THE LAND."

4. Borrowed from the military a fellow named Jake, whose task was to stalk and spy on Olivia.

5. Possibly maybe directly or indirectly responsible for getting Jake thrown in The Big Box O'Jail, a terrible tiny hole in a cement floor where nobody has fun.

6. Somehow managed to feel betrayed when he found out that while he remained with his wife in the office he corruptly obtained, his cheatrix slept with the guy he hired to stalk her. WOE IS FITZ!

7. When sad, makes a face like he's trying to pass a kidney stone made of love and anguish.

8. Threatened his wife that if she didn't go away quietly and leave him and Olivia to restart their lives together, he would ruin her possible political future by falsely telling everyone she was a racist who only objected to his relationship with Olivia because Olivia is African-American.**

9. Oh, wait — that was after he bragged to his wife about how his relationship with Olivia was going to be a boon to race relations in America.

10. Clearly believes his simpering self-pity is his father's fault, because he can't even take responsibility for his unwillingness to take responsibility for anything.

11. Clearly believes the problems in his relationship with Olivia are more the result of the fact that she doesn't understand him and nobody understands him and WOE IS FITZ and less the result of the fact that he is a married corrupt sniveling jerkface weasel.

12. Who PERSONALLY MURDERED AN OLD LADY WITH CANCER TO SAVE HIS OWN NECK.

Olivia should dump Fitz. Mellie should dump Fitz. Everybody should dump Fitz. People who have never met Fitz should dump Fitz. White House tour groups should be brought through his office for the sole purpose of dumping him at the end of the visit. Strangers should be encouraged to queue up to dump him in more and more interesting and violent ways, like the "Calm down, get a hold of yourself!" line in Airplane!

Because Fitz is absolutely the worst.

*Helped fix an election, encouraged tormented employee to resume life as torturer, falsely set up only nice person in Washington to look like abusive boyfriend to save lover's behind, picked wrong guy as dangerous mole, doesn't know enough to keep her undies on when in the Oval Office.

** Olivia's idea.***

***Because Olivia is a terrible person.

This has not been a good season, ratings-wise, for American Idol. Despite new faces on the judging panel including Nicki Minaj, Keith Urban, and Mariah Carey, there's been a great big yawn from the crowd. On a recent Thursday night, it lost not only lost to The Big Bang Theory, but over the course of the evening, got fewer viewers than Scandal and Grey's Anatomy as well.

Yesterday at Vulture, writer Dave Holmes gave Idol 10 pieces of advice, all of which are excellent. None of them, you'll notice, are that they need better singers. At certain moments in Idol history, that absolutely would have been part of the advice. There have been times when the show has spent way too much time on the untalented, they unreliable, or the just plain uninteresting.

But this season, whatever is ailing the show, it's not the talent level of the contestants. I give you Candice Glover.

Candice not only had the most natural talent on the show this season; she might have had the most natural talent on the show ever. That doesn't necessarily mean she's going to win, of course. She might lose to this lady right here, Kree Harrison.

Kree has been pigeonholed by the judges as a country singer, but really, she's sort of a ballad-y country-pop type, very much in the vein of Carrie Underwood — one of the few genuine superstars the show has produced. She doesn't have the wattage that Candice does, but she's a good, good singer. There have been many seasons when Kree would have been the head-and-shoulders most talented person there.

As you can see if you check out these clips, these are both specialists in the diva ballad, which has been a theme since the beginning of the season. In what sure looked like an effort to keep another white guy with a guitar (WGWG) from winning, Idol stacked the lineup with strong women and threw in a bunch of guys who were pretty clearly overmatched from the beginning.

But there was a sameness to the performances after a while. Even though everyone involved was talented, by the time you were down to the top four — Candice and Kree, plus Amber Holcomb and Angie Miller — you had a bunch of women whose focus was on the biggest performance possible. The biggest notes, the most open throat, the most impressive climb. It's not a bad thing, but what I would have given to see something fun, like Kelly Clarkson was.

Or like Chikezie Eze was on Beatles night, one of the best-ever upbeat Idol showings.

But these are small complaints compared to the main point: great singers. For once, legitimately great singing has been going on on this show all season, and fewer people than ever are watching it.

It really only hit yesterday: It's the end of The Office.

After nine seasons, Dunder Mifflin is going dark Thursday night, with an hour-long retrospective at 8:00 and a 75-minute episode at 9:00 that may or may not feature a cameo from Steve Carell. There have been denials of an appearance from him that could be read as emphatic or tiptoeing, depending on whether you focus on the obvious implications of those denials or the technicalities that might allow for wiggle room.

But either way, it's over after tonight.

The general trajectory is well known, but to recap: Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's U.K. series — which only had 12 episodes plus a two-part Christmas special, by the way — comes to the U.S., struggles in its first season, takes off in part because of iTunes, and runs for eight years. Jim and Pam become a supercouple. The show wins Emmys. Steve Carell becomes a movie star. The show struggles creatively, Carell leaves, it runs for two more seasons, NBC declines a spin-off featuring Rainn Wilson's Dwight, and the end arrives.

It was uneven, it got increasingly uneven as it went on, and yes, the decision to sub in Ed Helms for Carell in too-similar stories in the last two seasons didn't work. It could be frustrating and meandering, and there were mistakes.

But in between, boy, they did some beautiful, beautiful work. Here are my 10 favorite episodes, in chronological order.

1. "Health Care." A legend grew up eventually that the entire first six-episode season was something of a throwaway, but "Health Care" remains an absolute gem, the episode that cemented Jim and Dwight's hilariously contentious relationship. (When Jim locks Dwight in the "Dwight Schrute Workspace," their ensuing phone call is much funnier than you might remember.) The giddy playfulness of the writing comes out when Dwight angrily reads a list of diseases people have claimed to have, including "hot dog fingers," a turn of phrase so funny that even Angela cracks up. And the slow horror of Meredith explaining her hysterectomy proves that she was funny well before she became an outrageous drunk. It's also a great episode for Michael's terrible cowardice, as he both pushes a bad insurance situation onto others and pretends to have a great surprise in store for the employees when he doesn't.

2. "Office Olympics." If "Health Care" is the episode that established the Jim/Dwight dynamic, "Office Olympics" was the clearest yet explanation of a theme that would bubble underneath the entire series through this last season: Jim's position as an affable guy wasting his life in a job he doesn't care about, buoyed only by his affection for Pam and his fondness for horsing around. While there's also a lovely and sweet note of kindness toward Michael when everyone gives him a medal at the "closing ceremonies," the most important moment comes when Pam says: "The thing about Jim is when he's excited about something like the Office Olympics, he gets really into it and he does a really great job. But the problem with Jim is that he works here. So that hardly ever happens." Even now, several years into their marriage, this is still what they're dealing with.

3. "The Injury." The setup for this one is fairly simple: Michael hurts his foot and limps around on crutches all day. It's complicated, however, when Dwight rushes off to help and gets into a car accident. "The Injury" includes some of the best one-liners the writers ever popped off, including Michael holding out his foot, swathed in bubble wrap, insisting that he's disabled, demanding, "What does this look like to you, Stanley?" and Stanley saying, "Mailboxes Etcetera?" But it's also a showcase for horrified looks, especially from B.J. Novak (Ryan) as Michael, from inside the bathroom, demands that Ryan come in to rescue him. ("He's ... dead," Toby says helpfully.) There's less here than in some of my other favorites when it comes to interpersonal dynamics, but this one is really, really funny.

4. "Drug Testing." I questioned whether to include "Drug Testing," since the actual drug testing storyline (Dwight finds a discarded joint outside in the parking lot and launches an investigation) is a little dopey. But Dwight's investigations were an important part of his character, his sacrifices on Michael's behalf are both sad and funny, and this is the episode that brings both Jim's impression of Stanley and the related B-plot in which Jim loses at "jinx" and can't talk all day. It turns into a great Jim and Pam episode, a great Dwight and Michael episode, and a good day for all-around Dunder Mifflin weirdness: "What a terrible day to not be able to talk," Jim tells us. "Dwight was literally carrying around his own urine dressed like one of the Village People."

5. "Initiation." You've got Dwight taking Ryan to the Schrute family beet farm for a terrifying encounter with cousin Mose. You've got Stanley freaking out over Pretzel Day and Pam tracking everything Michael does on Jan's instructions. And at the end, you've got Jim and Pam finally connecting by phone after months of separation. It's a good one.

6. "Beach Games"/"The Job." Yes, yes, this is cheating — it's counting two as one. But this is the pair of episodes that wrapped up the third season and ended the will-they-or-won't-they part of Jim and Pam's relationship (which, in TV terms, hadn't actually gone on for all that long). Poor Karen (Rashida Jones) was pretty much doomed from the start, and we all knew it, but she was such a nice person and so funny and not-that-wrong for Jim that it made for a braver presentation of this kind of story than you often get. Jim's discovery of the yogurt lid/medal that Pam tucked away for him, followed by Pam's ecstatic grin when he returns and asks her out for dinner, make it just as satisfying as people who had followed that relationship needed it to be, and honored the fact that if this were a real documentary, you'd only see pieces of a relationship forming, and you probably wouldn't be invited to film the good parts. (There's a lovely callback to this in the next season opener, "Fun Run," but the rest of that episode is pretty bleh.)

7. "Dinner Party." Melora Hardin (Jan) was an underappreciated ensemble member, I think, and the horror show that is "Dinner Party" is one of her finest hours. It's so agonizing as Jan shows them around her scented-candle workspace, belittles an apparently (but perhaps not actually) oblivious Michael, and freaks out at Pam for eating before the hours-long osso buco preparation project is completed. Michael's tiny flat-screen TV, Jan's dancing to the music of Hunter, her ex-assistant, and the eventual knock-down drag-out that finally brings an end to Jan and Michael ... it's awful even before Michael starts explaining the number of times that he's gotten a vasectomy and had it reversed. Yes, the second season was probably the strongest, and the show was already getting a little more uneven, but "Dinner Party" is the really, truly cringe-iest episode this particular comedy ever produced. (From the same era, I almost chose "The Deposition," one of Steve Carell's finest hours, emotionally speaking.)

8. "Customer Survey." I love "Customer Survey" for two reasons: Dwight finally suspects evil is afoot and is right, and Jim and Pam wear tiny Bluetooth devices that allow them to talk all day. While sending Pam to New York wound up feeling like a misfire much of the time (though they paid it off with the charming proposal episode "Weight Loss"), the moment when Pam, who you've forgotten by then is on the phone, hears Kelly say "Get out of my nook!,", freaks out and starts bouncing in her chair, saying "That's what she said THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID" is a legitimately different comedy note for Jenna Fischer than the ones she usually got to play, and it's wonderful.

9. "Broke." Oh, "Broke." Michael's great triumph, where he begins as a guy on the ropes, doing early morning deliveries in a van that used to belong to the Alleluia Church Of Scranton ("it was either this or an old school bus with an owl living in it," Pam says). He ends by finding the right thing to say to David Wallace at the right moment, so that he can sell his failing company with the help of Jim, who (unethically but awesomely) keeps Dunder Mifflin from figuring out that the Michael Scott Paper Company is about to collapse until after they've already paid it to go away. The MSPC story seemed like it was going to be a road to nowhere, but it was kind of great for Michael and especially Pam, who was never the receptionist again.

10. "Goodbye, Michael." If you needed proof that The Office could still produce, Steve Carell's last episode provided it. It's just a beaut from top to bottom, and it demonstrated that while Michael was still kind of a dweeb, he had grown close to these people, especially Jim and Pam, both of whom had hard-won bonds with him.

It's hard not to include "Garage Sale," which has Michael and Holly's fantastic proposal, or "Weight Loss," which has Jim and Pam's fantastic proposal, or "Niagara," which has their wedding. There are individual moments from the series that are at least as great as these. And if I were a betting person, I'd bet the finale Thursday night will include a few more.

This was the week of the broadcast network "upfront" presentations, which are the splashy ads for new programming that networks show to advertisers to entice them into ignoring their fears that everybody is fast-forwarding through all the commercials anyway.

Because the trailers for the new shows are ads, just like movie trailers are, it's critically important not to draw conclusions about what will be good and bad based on those ads when you bump into them. For one thing, a lot of shows will be retooled to some degree before they actually air. For another, some people are just better at cutting trailers than others. And for yet another, the original state in which a show enters the world doesn't necessarily represent what it will become (as was the case with, for instance, ABC's delightful and recently canceled Happy Endings).

Keep in mind, too, that the premises of most shows sound terrible, simply because broadcast television is largely about execution, not premise. So the fact that they're making yet another wacky family sitcom, for instance, doesn't tell you whether it will be Malcolm In The Middle or Hank. (Remember Hank?)

The new shows are not necessarily the most important things going on in broadcast television. The most important things going on in broadcast television relate to the business model. ABC rolled out the first version of what will eventually be a mobile app that will allow you to watch ABC programming live on your phone or tablet. They're all talking about social media, cross-platform stuff, and how to deal with cord-cutting. So the state of new programming is not the state of television, certainly. And remember: most will be canceled, as most is every season.

At the same time, you can get a general view of what the broadcast networks are trying to do and what kinds of shows they've got planned. There aren't a lot of obvious audacious moves that were revealed this week from a programming standpoint, and the networks showed the same willingness as always to rely on sequels, spin-offs, remakes, and other previously existing properties wherever they could. Two of three new NBC dramas are updates, as is Fox's only new fall drama, though more originals will appear at midseason.

So let's look briefly at the new shows you'll be getting from broadcast this fall and the many familiar faces you'll be given a chance to see, if you choose.

Fox has another dark procedural to go after Bones on Mondays (in the slot where The Mob Doctor bombed in the fall and The Following did better this spring: Sleepy Hollow brings Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman to present day. (Feels a little Grimm-y from the trailer.)

They're also trying to build on their two woman-led comedies (New Girl and The Mindy Project) on Tuesdays by adding two guy-led comedies. One is Brooklyn Nine-Nine, a cop comedy with — I swear — Andy Samberg and Andre Braugher as a young cop who doesn't play by the rules and his boss who wants him to buckle down and get serious. (Again: I swear.) It's created by Michael Schur and Dan Goor, whose Parks And Recreation you might enjoy. The other is Dads, with Giovanni Ribisi and Seth Green as the younger pair of dads and Martin Mull and Peter Riegert as the older pair of dads. That one comes from, among others, Seth MacFarlane, for whatever that means to you.

Fox's new reality offering is Junior MasterChef, which will be on Friday nights and is apparently part of a continuing effort to make sure you get your Recommended Daily Allowance of Gordon Ramsay.

NBC continues to be hard at work trying to get something to stick besides football and Carson Daly, and they've got three new 10 p.m. dramas and three new half-hour comedies on offer. The dramas are The Blacklist, starring James Spader as a creepy criminal who turns himself and will only cooperate with a young, pretty female agent; Ironside, an update of the old Raymond Burr detective show starring Blair Underwood; and Dracula, with Jonathan Rhys-Myers as you-know-who.

The three comedies, which will join Parks And Recreation to make up the Thursday night block in the fall, feature a couple of old familiar faces (Sean Hayes in Sean Saves The World and Michael J. Fox in The Michael J. Fox Show) as well as Welcome To The Family, about a very young couple whose unexpected pregnancy forces their grouchy parents together.

ABC — actually the fourth-place network for last season, thanks to NBC's Voice/NFL boost — is so happy with how Once Upon A Time is doing that they're bringing its spin-off, Once Upon A Time In Wonderland, to Thursday nights before Grey's Anatomy and Scandal.

The search for good partners for The Middle and Modern Family on Wednesday nights continues with Back In The Game, featuring a single mom who takes her son to live with her mean old father (James Caan), and Super Fun Night, in which Rebel Wilson (with an American accent!) plays one of three socially awkward friends.

On the drama side, since they've already got a show called Revenge, they're adding a show right after it on Sunday nights called Betrayal, about people having an affair (great for those who feel adulterers are underrepresented on television).

But it's Tuesday night where ABC is making the biggest splash, bringing in an entirely new lineup. At 8:00 is Marvel's Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. from Joss Whedon (which, fair warning, I will be calling SHIELD from now on, in keeping with an agreement reached with a bunch of other critics who don't want to type that horrible name over and over). At 9:00, there will be a pair of new comedies — The Goldbergs, which looks like a sort of darker Wonder Years set in the 1980s, and Trophy Wife, in which Bradley Whitford is the husband, Malin Akerman is the new wife, and Marcia Gay Harden is one of the ex-wives. And at 10:00, Lucky 7 brings you the story of co-workers who win the lottery, but find that — dun! — nothing is ever as perfect as it sounds.

Over at CBS, where the attitude is rather more relaxed in keeping with the predicable humming along of the lineup of procedurals and broad comedies, they're making changes, but the ones they're making don't seem very big on change. As for comedies, We Are Men is a show about four dudes giving each other advice about women (sounds like CBS!), Mom is a Chuck Lorre show about a single mother (sounds like CBS!), The Millers is yet another attempt to successfully build a show around Will Arnett (here played a divorced reporter) (sounds like CBS!), and The Crazy Ones stars Robin Williams as the head of an ad agency with a daughter played by Sarah Michelle Gellar (sounds slightly less like CBS, until you hear that it comes from David E. Kelley, who made Chicago Hope and Picket Fences).

The dramas are Hostages, starring Toni Collette and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, and Intelligence, starring Josh Holloway and Marg Helgenberger in a story about a spy with a microchip in his head. (Seriously.)

We'll get more deeply into the fall season as it gets closer, and we'll see whether there are any regrets about pilots that didn't make it (an update of Beverly Hills Cop for CBS, built around Axel Foley's son and co-produced by Eddie Murphy and accomplished producer Shawn Ryan, was widely expected to be picked up and wasn't, and there were similar high hopes for an NBC comedy from marvelously funny standup John Mulaney). But for the moment, look upon the fall season and know that ... well, that very little of it will be alive a year from now.

Pop culture does not mean celebrity culture; I have perhaps said this more often than anyone you're going to meet. Who dates, who gets a divorce, who has a tantrum, who has surreptitious photos snapped of him by mangy, grim opportunists — these things are not culture of any kind, popular or otherwise, unless there is something else at stake. They are curiosities, and given that we are curious creatures, their pull is not surprising, nor is it new, nor was it invented by the internet, or television, or Americans. If the Lizzie Borden case happened now, we'd read all about how the fascination with her was the product of various elements of whatever we dislike about the last ten years of our history. This would not have happened in 1892! Except it would, and did, and will again.

But celebrity is like any other pollutant: you can fight it, but only while coexisting with it, and with people who are far less concerned with limiting it than you might be. You can close your windows, move away, don't look (I certainly try not to look), but it's part of the messy world anyway. And every now and then, somebody finds an upside.

That's what happened with the op-ed Angelina Jolie published in The New York Times this morning about her decision to undergo a double mastectomy after discovering that an inherited gene mutation put her at extremely high risk of breast and ovarian cancer. (Since she speaks of having "started with" the breast surgery, it seems likely she plans prophylactic removal of her ovaries also, though she doesn't directly say so.) She's been undergoing procedures, including a reconstruction, for several months at a breast center in California, during which time she somehow didn't find her surgery shared with the public.

She writes about making the decision to have prophylactic surgery so that she could reassure her children, so that it wouldn't be a constant source of worry, and so that she could feel confident she'd done what she could to take control over her situation. She writes about the financial obstacles that many women confront in having the genetic testing she had. She writes about feeling no less beautiful, about the importance of a loving partner, and about recovering: "Days after surgery you can be back to a normal life."

Of course, the fact that this is cancer and not a divorce or a drug problem doesn't make it any more important to any of us that it happened to Angelina Jolie, in and of itself. But what does matter is that she is a celebrity whether celebrity is a regrettable phenomenon or not. And if everybody is going to look at you, you might as well do the best you can to be seen doing something helpful.

This will certainly reignite debates over the value of mastectomies in women without cancer but with known and tested genetic mutations – debates that will not consist of her op-ed only, but of other people who will take time out of news broadcasts or in publications to explain what exactly she's talking about, and why some women make this decision, and what the science says about how effective it is.

It's hard not to see it, too, as a reminder of how very invasive and difficult it is for even wealthy people to have any privacy, given that it seems like a near miracle that she was able to undergo surgical procedures for months without it getting out. That shouldn't be shocking, but it is.

And yes, as much as none of us would likely say that we equate breasts with femininity or beauty, it will be powerful to someone at some brutal moment to have heard her say that she did this and feels no less feminine, no less beautiful, and she's still with Brad Pitt. That shouldn't make anybody feel better, rationally, logically, reasonably, it's just a famous person, it shouldn't matter. We should look to our parents as role models! To our teachers, our doctors and nurses, our fighter pilots and scientists! Yes, in a fair world, it wouldn't matter, but in a fair world, we wouldn't look at the same kinds of women and see them held up as ideals all the time anyway. We aren't in a fair world, but in a celebrity-infatuated world. It will be powerful to someone whether it should be or not. Someone will think about having a mastectomy and remember that Angelina Jolie had one, and she wasn't embarrassed, and she still felt pretty, and she told everyone that it can be survived.

Angelina Jolie didn't just get to celebrity-world. She lives there. She knew exactly what would be said: that she's unimportant, that she's self-obsessed, that she's a terrible actress, that she's a dilettante humanitarian, that she's doing everything wrong, that she should have just changed her diet or had a lot of ginger tea, and that nothing she says has any relevance to anyone who isn't as wealthy as she is. She knew the fact that she acknowledged how fortunate she is to be able to afford her course of treatment wouldn't stop people from responding, "BUT WHAT ABOUT WOMEN WHO CAN'T AFFORD IT?"

She knew all this was coming; that's part of what makes this a brave thing to do. Making this decision about her personal life, if in fact it is brave, is brave in a way that has no relevance to anyone, to public life, at all.

But making the decision to talk about it with full knowledge of what would happen, knowing that it would open her up to enormous scrutiny and criticism but it would be powerful to someone – that's where it does, in fact, matter. And where, yes, it is brave.

This is Canadian astronaut Commander Chris Hadfield, performing David Bowie's "Space Oddity" while floating around the International Space Station. You may have last seen the space station team walking around in outer space fixing stuff.

Yes, you will never do anything this cool. You could miniaturize Jay-Z and put him inside your iPod, inherit sixteen billion dollars, bring James Dean back to life, time-travel to 1968 to hip-nap Joan Holloway's hips, give birth to Miles Davis, and hire Stephen Hawking to help you develop the capability to spontaneously turn into a Corvette anytime you wanted, and you would not be this cool. Nothing is this cool.

Astronauts, right?

Over the weekend, ABC posted a trailer for Marvel's Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D., its fall show (time slot and premiere date to come) that jumps off from Marvel's Avengers universe, as seen in all kinds of movies that have made all kinds of money.

The series, created by Avengers director and TV veteran Joss Whedon, focuses on Coulson (Clark Gregg), who is apparently doing a lot better than he might have been last time you saw him, by whatever good fortune. Now, he's starring in the show with the most typing-unfriendly title since CBS tried to make us type all those symbols before the words "My Dad Says."

As you'll see, they don't want you to miss the connection to Marvel, since the screen says "Marvel" at the beginning and 10 seconds later says "Marvel's 'The Avengers' — Marvel."

So in order to make the largest number of friends, you should refer to it as "that Batman show," is what I'm saying. (Not really.)

Christopher Guest has made so many people laugh since he started making mock documentaries with This Is Spinal Tap in 1984 that his fans might be surprised to hear his response to Scott Simon's question on Saturday's Weekend Edition about whether he ever thinks about making a serious movie.

Referencing Family Tree, his new show for HBO starring Chris O'Dowd as a man discovering his roots, Guest says that even with comedy, the emotional content can still be critical.

"To me, this is serious," he says. "And I'm not trying to be glib. It couldn't be more serious. ... There's a tremendous amount of emotional undertow in this. It's very important that this guy, this main character [played by O'Dowd], is accessible and likable and you feel for his emotional well-being as well as any funny things that may happen."

That doesn't mean he's not writing comedy. How can there not be comedy in a character played by Nina Conti who goes everywhere with a monkey puppet? Monkey puppets are instant comedy, right? Well, they are to everyone except the family portrayed on the show. "No one pays attention in the family to this anymore," Guest says, "because they're so used to the monkey puppet speaking that it's just an everyday occurrence. But the monkey tells the truth, invariably," he adds, undoubtedly giving his fan something to quote for years to come the same way they do Waiting For Guffman and Best In Show. "The monkey always tells the truth."

The truth doesn't come easily to Tom Chadwick (O'Dowd), who inherits a mysterious box from a relative and begins to unravel his own heritage. Despite a smattering of recent shows about people looking for their relatives, Guest got his inspiration from his own experiences:

"After my father died, he left dozens of boxes filled with various things. And over a long period of time, I've found diaries from almost 200 years ago, war medals, and various other things, and I began doing my own search. And that prompted me to think that maybe this is an area that would work for a project."

And, like Tom Chadwick, Guest didn't always find what he expected. His ancestors include a ventriloquist who was working 200 years ago, who inspired George III to make a house call to see his puppet show. And then there was the one who died in the Spanish Civil War. Guest agrees that he has an interesting family.

Perhaps it's an affection for surprises that leads to Guest's known predilection for improvising. In fact, he says, there are no scripts at all on Family Tree.

"Jim [Piddock, Guest's co-creator] and I wrote outlines for each show, of the eight. We also do character breakdowns, and in those, the actors are given all the information that they would need for the work we're about to do ... but there's no dialogue written at all. And there's no rehearsal, in fact."

And the actors went ahead, despite the fact that O'Dowd, for one, has said that he grew up quoting Guest's films and felt a little intimidated. "I wish I'd known," Guest says dryly. "I would have been nicer to him."

On this week's show, we're joined by our friend Matt Thompson, who was around last summer for The Avengers and who here helps us tackle Iron Man 3. We chat about the importance of the suit, the quality of the villainy, and whether Robert Downey, Jr. should win an Oscar. (Okay, the last one is me.)

After that, we chat about the things that we've given up on, some of which might surprise you. (I am ready for your angry e-mails.)

As always, we close the show with what's making us happy this week. Stephen is happy about a performance that he rediscovered as part of helping me with a piece I wrote this week. Matt is happy about a video to which he can't help dancing. Glen is happy about a podcast that gives him nothing but happiness and gave him, believe it or not, his "jock jam." (Really.) I manage to be happy about a bunch of things this week, including a new IFC show, a couple of great moviegoing experiences, and the great disdain of Harry Connick, Jr.

Find us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter: me, Stephen, Glen, Matt, Trey, Jess, and our esteemed producer emeritus and music director, Mike Katzif.