Time now for a home viewing recommendation from our film critic Bob Mondello. This time Bob urges taking the plunge from the seven-and-a-half-th floor into the Criterion Collection's Blu-ray release of Being John Malkovich.

1999 Weirdness run amok: Struggling puppeteer John Cusack gets a filing job in an office building where one floor — seven-and-a-half — isn't quite tall enough for him to stand, but does have a portal into the mind of actor John Malkovich. As he tells co-worker Catherine Keener, "you see the world through John Malkovich's eyes, and then after about 15 minutes, you're spit out into a ditch on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike."

When the two decide to charge cash for entry to Malkovich's mind, things get complicated, first for the puppeteer's marriage when his wife (Cameron Diaz) takes the trip, and even more-so when Malkovich enters his own mind — the ultimate exercise in narcissism — and finds a world of Malkoviches.

Screenwriter Charlie Kaufmann and director Spike Jonze have decently strange sensibilities, so it makes sense that the commentary track by Michel Gondry, who made Kaufman's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, is a little strange too.

There's also a documentary about puppetry, a Malkovich interview conducted by comedian John Hodgman of all people (who elicits the info that Kevin Bacon was the first choice to play the part ultimately played by Charlie Sheen). And Spike Jonze even finds a way to make an extra about photos he took on the set feel odd, imagining himself looking back from 2028 at the pictures in a new format that allows viewers to see the film and all its extras in half a second.

Mostly though, Being John Malkovich is worth watching for itself — an enduringly quirky comedy with grand metaphysical implications, that you can just watch because it's a real trip-and-a-half.

The difference between Fox, whose lineup we're looking at today, and NBC, whose lineup we looked at yesterday, is that Fox considers itself fundamentally healthy with challenges, while NBC knows that it really really really needs something to hit already. Fox's schedule doesn't have quite as many holes, so in the fall, they'll actually only have two new comedies and one new drama. More to come in midseason, but as long as much of the schedule is taken up by giant swaths of The X Factor, they're not bringing as much that's new.

The first new comedy is Ben & Kate, which will be paired with Raising Hope on Tuesday nights. It's about a brother and sister and the sister's absolutely adorable child, who is played by absolutely adorable child Maggie Jones, who was absolutely adorable in We Bought A Zoo. The official description says, "What happens when an exuberant, irresponsible dreamer who always says 'yes' moves in with his overly responsible little sister to help raise her five-year-old daughter?" I think we can all agree that the answer to this question is: "A sitcom."

Starring Dakota Johnson and Nat Faxon (Faxon co-wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay to The Descendants with Community's Jim Rash, if you're keeping track of that sort of thing), the show seems heavy on warm family moments, but possibly also on Raising Hope-ish weirdness, which could be good.

The other new comedy is Mindy Kaling's project (currently called The Mindy Project after briefly being disastrously called It's Messy) In it, Kaling plays a gynecologist who acts a lot like the best parts of Kelly Kapoor, meaning perhaps she shouldn't be a doctor? But whatever. As much as I like Kaling, I'm likely to have limited patience with the "should I pick the obviously awful guy or the obviously awesome guy?" story they seem to be playing with here, but we'll see how it goes.

The drama is called The Mob Doctor, and as you might imagine, it's about a mob doctor. Jordana Spiro (who you may know from My Boys) plays a surgeon who works for bad guys to pay off her brother's debt. I'm not sure why (perhaps it's because I am easily bored by mob stories), but I hate this premise a lot, and this is the one I'm struggling to remain open-minded about.

Coming at midseason will be a few more entries, including The Goodwin Games, a comedy from the creators of How I Met Your Mother, The Following, a drama starring Kevin Bacon, and The Choice, which is basically a celebrity version of The Dating Game. No, really.

In the meantime, Fox has to worry — at least a little — about downturns in viewership for Glee and American Idol, both of which used to be powerhouse shows, though the latter for much longer than the former. They're adding Britney Spears and Demi Lovato to The X Factor in the fall, they're moving Glee to Thursday ... there's a lot going on. This time next year, both Glee and Idol will probably be either recovering or foundering even more, and we'll know whether Fox has, with The Mindy Project and New Girl, managed to create the most self-consciously cutesy night of comedy you could dream up or a powerful one-two punch. Or perhaps both.

As the networks are currently rolling out their plans for the future courtesy of their upfronts, it just so happens that they're also winding down the current season of shows, the ones that they touted last year at this very time. It's a good time for television viewers to reevaluate the investments we've made in the shows we bought into at the beginning of the season.

Television watching is ultimately an act of faith. So is all entertainment, of course; you plunk down $10 for a movie, or $50 for a concert, or $125 for a Broadway musical, and you pray that your money and time will be well-spent.

But even disregarding the cost of cable and/or an Internet connection, television asks for a heavier investment. It pretends to ask only 30 or 60 minutes of your time, while actually asking you for a year or two or three or ten. What it wants is for you to subscribe. And it can be tough to figure out when to pony up for a full subscription.

Matt Zoller Seitz recently talked about this on Vulture, when he evaluated the mess that was this past season of The Office. There's a big difference, however, in sticking with a show that you once loved dearly that seems to have fallen on hard times (and that you hope will rebound) and keeping your fingers crossed for a show that you have no history with.

Which brings me to NBC's Smash, which airs its season finale tonight, and Fox's New Girl, which ended its first season last week. Both freshman shows have been renewed for a second go-round. And both debuted with problematic pilots.

Right there, that's a risk. If a show's first episode is strong – think Lost, Arrested Development or Glee – then it's obviously easier to buy in right from the start. The show might make good on that promise or it could fall apart or it could fall somewhere in between (I leave it to you to figure out which is which in this example). But at the moment when promise is all that's available, it's not hard to hop on board, at least for a little while.

Smash and New Girl, on the other hand, both required an entirely different calculus. Neither one was fully formed by the time their pilots aired. In New Girl's case, major casting decisions were still to come, as the character of Coach needed to be immediately eliminated (thanks to the fact that Damon Wayans, Jr.'s show Happy Endings — another series with a terrible pilot — was somewhat unexpectedly renewed for a stride-hitting second season) and replaced with Lamorne Morris, who stepped in as new roommate Winston in the second episode.

Casting uncertainty aside, New Girl had issues at the start. All of the characters were unformed, none more so than Zooey Deschanel's Jess, whose quirkiness (or "quirkiness," depending on how much you were willing to indulge the show's marketing) and naivete were particular lightning rods for criticism. The show's tone was also uneven, generally positioning Jess as the sunshiny medicine that her new roommates didn't realize they'd needed all this time.

Smash, meanwhile, gave the audience an intriguing premise for a show in the premiere: the development of a Broadway musical from the ground up, complete with the various people who would be thus involved. It, too, didn't seem to quite know what to do with its characters, positioning Katharine McPhee's wide-eyed Midwesterner as the heroine of the show when Megan Hilty's cynical, ambitious and far more charismatic Ivy had immeasurably more star quality. And Smash's own tone bordered on hysterical right at the start.

Two new series, two pilots that had as much going against them (or more) than for them. Sticking with either one (or, as might be the case with some people, or so I've heard, both) was an act of pure optimism. It could come only from a Jess-like belief that whatever flaws they started with, there was good in them that would eventually come to the fore.

And when it came to the long-term payoff for that investment that each demanded, New Girl and Smash became almost polar opposites of one another. New Girl not only began addressing and then fixing Jess's apparent childishness, it did what a lot of great recent comedies (like The Office, Parks And Recreation and even, appropriately enough, Happy Endings) have done, which is to identify the strengths of a cast and immediately begin learning how to play to them.

That's led to one of the most well-balanced ensembles currently on television, itself an evolution from a show originally built as a showcase for Deschanel. It also has a feature that works very well in sitcoms (provided that it's kept in check by the writers and producers), which is that it looks as though the cast is having tremendous fun playing with one another. The result is a solid show that's only getting solider.

Smash hasn't been as lucky. What began as Glee for grownups has unfortunately devolved into exactly Glee for grownups. The writing is abysmal on any number of levels: dialogue, character, plot. People recite clunkers like, "Maybe I'll go [to church], too. I could use a little faith." The entire chorus of the fictional musical seems to exist solely to further the ambitions of either Karen or Ivy, depending on the scene, with no apparent ambitions of their own. Karen, with no stage experience, feels wounded that she's stuck in the ensemble, which is fine; but Smash itself seems to consider her attitude justifiable, which it is not.

And so on, and so forth. The creative problems with Smash are reasonably well-documented (follow me on Twitter!), so there's no need to go into too much depth here. But there was a point when New Girl wasn't much better, and sticking it out with either show required a bit of faith of a viewer's own.

That's what's so hard about upfronts and premiere weeks. A handful of shows will immediately reward the viewers who tune in. A handful will immediately turn viewers away for good. [Hello, 'Work It.' — ed.] For a lot of the rest, it's both a crapshoot and a waiting game to see whether the amount of time and energy we invest in a show will be worth it. Some will pay off, some won't. And for a lot of what the networks are trying to get us excited about — starting about now — we won't quite know the answer until this time next year.

"What are the upfronts, exactly?"

People who write about television get this question a lot. And we're getting it a lot right now, because this is upfronts week for the major networks.

The primary purpose of a network's "upfronts" presentation is to announce its fall schedule and get advertisers interested in buying time on the new shows. Unlike press tour — which happens in late July — upfronts isn't a time when journalists raise concerns or questions; it's a pure marketing blitz from the network. It used to be really primarily for advertisers, but more and more, it's also PR aimed at journalists and viewers. That's why, to many of us, it's not nearly as interesting as press tour, but the fact remains that this is the first glimpse most folks get of the fall shows. Not full pilots — those won't arrive for a while, even for critics. But at least you get a look at what each show is, and particularly how it's being marketed.

NBC kicked things off yesterday, and frankly, the biggest news it made from the perspective of television fandom was that Community, which currently has only a 13-episode order (about a half season), will be moving to Friday nights in a block with Whitney, perhaps NBC's most critically reviled show (of those that are returning).

Fridays are typically considered an absolute dead zone of television, but NBC likely doesn't expect to expand Community's existing audience very much, and its fans are so loyal that they'll probably find it — if not live (and probably not live), then on DVR or Hulu or whatever. It's probably as close as I've seen a network come to keeping a show on the air clearly having almost no interest in how many people sit down and watch it when it's on.

But it's also important to remember that Fridays haven't always been, and aren't in all cases, dead zones anyway. That's where Fox tucks away Fringe, also a show not very many people watch but a certain number of people absolutely adore. It's also a show where, in the past, CBS was able to make money on shows like The Ghost Whisperer. (Not that there seems to be much of a match there demographically, but the point is: where you're placed isn't necessarily destiny.) Questions remain about whether this will be Community's last season, and about whether Dan Harmon will return as showrunner (he's not yet signed) but the biggest takeaway is that it's still going to be on, despite several past cancellation scares.

As for new shows, they rolled out four new comedies and two new dramas for fall.

 

Revolution (drama)

Revolution is the next show to try to get a piece of whatever people originally liked about Lost, although honestly, its DNA seems to be more a split of the space-dinosaur drama Terra Nova and the militia-dystopia-something-something drama Jericho, neither of which survived as long-running classics. There's certainly some talent kicking around (including Giancarlo Esposito), but hardcore serialized stuff like this appears to still be an uphill battle for networks.

Chicago Fire (drama)

Chicago Fire is from Dick Wolf, who did not call it Law & Order: Big Flames Unit. There's no game here; it's about Chicago and fire. And specifically, it's about firefighters and paramedics. This is a kind of show Wolf has brought to air a bunch of times with varying degrees of success, but we'll see what happens here. A note for the delicate and/or easily overheard: the trailer contains an unbleeped expletive. No idea whether they're going to leave that unbleeped when it airs on NBC. They presumably could, since it's on at 10:00.

The New Normal (comedy)

The New Normal is a comedy about a gay couple (played by Andrew Rannells of The Book Of Mormon and Justin Bartha of The Hangover), who hire a surrogate to help them have a baby. Points of interest: It's produced by Ryan Murphy (Glee, Nip/Tuck, etc.), it co-stars Ellen Barkin, and it also includes NeNe Leakes, originally of The Real Housewives Of Atlanta and more recently of Glee.

Go On (comedy)

People keep on trying with Matthew Perry. He was on Studio 60, he was on ABC's Mr. Sunshine with Allison Janney (remember that?) and now he's got this new comedy, Go On. He's working in this clip opposite Laura Benanti, who was utterly, utterly wasted playing a supposed jealous, fading crone in The Playboy Club last fall. So good for her.

Guys With Kids (comedy)

You know how sometimes, men will try to take care of babies? Isn't that hilarious? If you think that's hilarious, you are the audience for Guys With Kids, a comedy Jimmy Fallon produced (tentatively: boo!) starring, among others, Anthony Anderson and Jesse Bradford (who looks the same as he did in Bring It On) as dads doing their best to overcome biological destiny and actually participate in child-rearing, har har har!

Animal Practice (comedy)

Justin Kirk has kicked around in television for quite a while, and now he's playing what appears to be a really ... weird ... veterinarian? All I'm going to say is this: I'm not proud of the fact that a monkey riding a toy ambulance makes me laugh, but it does.

We're focusing on the fall for now, but midseason will bring even more: a Dane Cook comedy about radio called Next Caller, an adaptation of Hannibal (the dangerous criminal, not the ruler), a competition called American Ninja Warrior (!), a medical drama called Do No Harm about a doctor who apparently goes crazy at night (!!), a comedy about the White House called 1600 Penn, and even more and more (and more). (Seriously, they show 12 midseason shows. If we go into all of them, we'll never get out of here. Look for yourself!)

So: Do any of these appeal? Do you intend to watch any of them? Do any of them seem to be the answer to the ongoing problem that is NBC?

Our intrepid host, Linda Holmes, is wrapping up her self-imposed isolation in the mountains of North Carolina, so the rest of the Pop Culture Happy Hour crew was forced to soldier on without her for one harrowing episode. And, given that we just did a No Boys Allowed episode two weeks ago, we figured we'd fill the room with dudes — you know, men's men.

So Glen Weldon, Trey Graham and I — already a veritable murderer's row of pure testosterone — invited in our colleague Matt Thompson (no relation to the other one in the room), who works in some sort of editorial-product-development-synergy-management capacity here at NPR, but who also wrote his senior thesis on Joss Whedon. So, you know, our kind of people, and just the agreeable sort to bring in for a discussion of Whedon's octillion-dollar super-blockbuster The Avengers. We're very proud of ourselves for offering a handful of insights beyond, "When that thing happened, I really liked that thing, which happened."

We then move from The Avengers to the idea of the A-list — not The A-List, tempting though that might have been — and the idea of superstardom in an age of media Balkanization. It may be easier than ever to hop on the D-list, but is there a modern-day equivalent of a Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe or Elizabeth Taylor? What makes an A-list celebrity, anyway?

Then, as always, it's on to what's making us happy, which — for those who wish we'd actually provide links when we say we're going to — include this and this from Matt, this and this from Trey, this from Glen, and this from me. As always, we invite everyone to join our happy community of nice folks on Facebook, and to follow me, Trey, Glen, special guest Matt, and esteemed producer Mike on Twitter.

Everybody settle down.

News came in late yesterday that NBC was confirming that next season would be 30 Rock's last — and that that show, Community and (unconfirmed as of this morning) Parks and Recreation would all receive shortened 13-episode orders instead of the standard 22.*

Certain parties — not you, I'm sure — interpreted this as the network's kicking the shows to the curb and gnashed your teeth — sorry, their teeth — at yet another batch of low-rated but beloved comedies being canceled by the suits.

But before the rending of clothes reaches Hulk levels, it's important to understand that despite the shortened seasons, none of this is a death sentence. For 30 Rock, it's a victory lap. And for Community and Parks and Rec, it's a stay of execution.

What it decidedly isn't is cancellation. It is, in point of fact, the opposite of cancellation. All three shows have been given the go-ahead to resume production and return to television. Thirteen episodes is fewer than 22 episodes, to be sure, but it's a lot more than zero, by a percentage of approximately infinity.

Even if NBC plans on running out the clock on Community and Parks and Rec, that's a lot more of a pat on the back (for both the shows and the fans) than most shows whose plugs get pulled.

Besides, 30 Rock excepted, there's no actual reason to assume that they won't be renewed after the end of next season, simply because of those reduced orders. As noted over at The AV Club, the last three seasons of spy-geek show Chuck each began with a 13-episode order. All but the final one eventually got the go-ahead to make more than that. More important, all but the final one got renewals. In all, Chuck ran for 43 episodes beyond its original third-season order. There's no reason to assume that NBC doesn't reserve the option to do the same for Community and Parks And Rec.

There's also an argument to be made that 13-episode seasons for these particular shows make for smarter programming. Certainly, they more closely resemble the short-run British model that comedy nerds are familiar with, and occasionally laud for being lean, efficient and devoid of filler. While I was writing this, in fact, Alyssa Rosenberg went ahead and offered a nice defense of this model for these specific shows over at ThinkProgress.

Not only that, the shorter orders might solve scheduling problems in a way that appeases fans of the shows while minimizing ratings damage. If, for example, Thursdays at 8:30 were devoted to viewer-challenged prestige comedies, NBC could run, say, Community in the fall and Parks And Rec in the spring, assuring a happy, loyal year-round audience without locking up more than one time slot.

For shows with low ratings and devoted fanbases, this might be the most sustainable model available. It would allow NBC to offer something for every audience, if not everything to a specific audience. It provides flexibility and ensures the shows' immediate survival. For people who love Pawnee and Greendale, that counts as a win for now.

*UPDATE: Parks And Recreation has now been officially renewed (expected) for a full 22-episode order (unexpected). You may wish to substitute 30 Rock for it in, for instance, the discussion about timeslot-sharing with Community. But since my point was simply "Don't panic" (at a time when there were those who were panicking quite hard), Parks And Rec's full-order renewal shouldn't affect too much of the above.

Earlier this week, James Cameron made a rather bold statement in the New York Times, effectively swearing off any and all non-documentary filmmaking that doesn't take place within the fictional world he invented in 2009's Avatar. Here is the quote:

I think within the Avatar landscape I can say everything I need to say that I think needs to be said, in terms of the state of the world and what I think we need to be doing about it. And doing it in an entertaining way. And anything I can't say in that area, I want to say through documentaries, which I'm continuing.

Cameron has certainly been a return-to-the-well director his entire career. Of the eight features he's directed, half were either sequels (Piranha 2: The Spawning, Aliens, Terminator 2) or remakes (True Lies). The only movie of the remaining four that he hasn't revisited, either as a franchise (The Terminator, Avatar) or as an updated special edition (the current 3-D rerelease of Titanic) is — and now apparently will always be — 1989's The Abyss.

So his decision isn't entirely out of step with his tendency to double back every so often. But it's hard to imagine that limiting himself exclusively to one fictional world from here on out will best serve his creative impulses. (Insert obligatory joke about Cameron having little creativity to begin with. Can we move on?)

When I heard about Cameron's plan — which, it should be mentioned, could very well just have been Cameron talking to hear himself talk, something he's been known to do on the odd occasion — two people immediately came to mind, one who embraced the trap he'd set for himself and one who chafed at its constraints, even as he had to keep feeding the beast: George Lucas and Douglas Adams.

Lucas, of course, has made and continues to make a ludicrous amount of money off of the empire (pun!) he built off of Star Wars. He's also famously infuriated legions of fans for how he's shepherded the franchise into the new millennium (half-pun!).

For many, the solution would be for him to better understand the universe he created. (Read: understand it the way they themselves understand it.) But I take the opposite approach: I think that many of the problems with the latter-day Star Wars movies could have been avoided if they weren't the only movies he was making.

Granted, Lucas had made other movies as a producer in the meantime: he had a hand in the Indiana Jones franchise, and in Willow, Labyrinth, and Howard The Duck, among others, to varying degrees of success. But by the time The Phantom Menace came out in 1999, it had been 16 years since Lucas's last screenplay credit (Return Of The Jedi) and 22 years since he had directed a movie (the original Star Wars). If he'd been writing and directing that entire time, or even if he'd chosen to return with a non-Star Wars movie first, perhaps he could have ironed out his storytelling kinks and then brought in a new generation of fans without alienating the old one.

Adams, on the other hand, did push back a bit from the success he had with The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. But he largely followed Cameron's stated plan, exploring his other interests in nonfiction (Last Chance To See), non-narrative humor (The Meaning Of Liff) and computer games (Bureaucracy). With the exception of a pair of Dirk Gently books, on the other hand, his novels were almost exclusively Hitchhiker-themed.

More frustrating still, Adams seems to have never been able to escape the cage of his initial inspiration. When I recently read Don't Panic, Neil Gaiman's 1988 history of/tribute to Adams's creation, what I was struck by more than anything was how Adams was continually reworking the same material again and again until his death. What started out as a BBC radio serial was adapted for album release (which wasn't the original broadcast but a rerecording), rewritten as a novel, turned into a stage production, serialized for television and converted into an interactive videogame, all by Adams himself.

Gaiman suggests that Adams began seriously working around 1983 on the inevitable film version, which finally came out in 2005, four years after he died. That means he spent the last 23 years of his life, starting from the original 1978 radio broadcast, continually rewriting the same story over and over for different media. And as much as I love the books and have enjoyed many of the different iterations, I can't help but think that that's an almost tragic waste of talent.

The sort of dedicated focus on a single narrative that Cameron envisions can certainly be productive. Cerebus author Dave Sim used a comic book about a grumpy aardvark as a 26-year platform to explore whatever narrative, political, and philosophical threads interested him. With unlimited possibilities at their fingertips, fantasy and science-fiction universes tend to be good for that sort of thing; just ask George R. R. Martin.

But Cameron's strengths lie in being a director, not a writer. He'd do better to emulate not Lucas but someone like Steven Spielberg, who has both recurring themes in the stories he tells (World War II, the Jewish experience, distant or absent fathers) and a pair of franchises (Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park) that allow him to return to the worlds he's created if he so desires.

He also has the freedom to step away from them as his stories dictate. Cameron might think that he can use the planet of Pandora and the Na'vi people (or "people," I suppose) to make his War Horse or Munich or Minority Report or The Color Purple, and for all I know, he could be right.

But it's just as likely that forcing himself to make them conform to the world he's created will both lessen those stories and misuse his formidable directorial skills. Without other ideas to act as release valves or palate cleansers, Cameron risks becoming so entrenched in Avatar that he can't hear anybody on the outside.

1. Ryan Seacrest's double/triple/quadruple fakeouts. Our host used to screw with the contestants by teasing the results before throwing to a guest performance or commercial. Now he gives those results using sentences so convoluted, with so many double-backs and twist-arounds, that you need a white board to diagram them and unpack their actual meaning. Frustrating the singers, yes. Confusing them entirely, no.
2. That half-hidden, slightly elevated lip-ramp at the front of the stage. Someone's going to wipe out on it, I just know it. It's like a trap, hidden in plain sight, just waiting to be sprung and claim its first victim. Sometimes I can barely concentrate on the performance, so worried am I.
3. Wikipedia Randy. Okay, this is technically about the judging, but it's really more Randy Jackson's unwavering drive to be liked by somebody, anybody, for any reason at all. In particular, his tendency to pepper his comments with factual information that nobody requested, just to prove that he knows it. Here's him responding to Steven Tyler's unfamiliarity with "Bleeding Love," which Hollie Cavanagh had just performed: "This was a really big song written by Ryan Tedder from OneRepublic, huge hit for Leona Lewis..." This sort of thing happens all the time, usually under even flimsier pretenses.
4. TMZ visits. They've done this twice now, which says that not only don't they realize what a horrible, gross mistake it was last year to toss the contestants – who are, remember, still essentially average Joes and Janes untutored in public-image coaching – into TMZ's offices and hope for the best, they've decided to flat-out embrace it. At least last year's contestants had the presence of mind to look disgusted at basically being told "We're here to show you what kinds of bottom-feeding gossip-hound scumbags you should be careful to avoid out there. It's called providing a service." The current batch seem to have been told to play along.
5. The limited screen time given thus far to Hollie Cavanagh's family. Father, mother, brother, it doesn't matter. They are, to a person, pretty much the most cutest thing ever. They're easily the best Idol family since Elliott Yamin's mother, and they've been put in front of the camera maybe twice. Unacceptable.
6. Two-hour shows, apparently now and forever. Time was, performance shows would gradually shrink with the number of contestants, first to 90 minutes and then to an hour. But why do that when you can double and triple up the performances, slap together some duets and trios, none of which work very well, and maybe bring in an outside act or two? Idol has always been stuffed with a brutal amount of filler (when it hasn't been insanely rushed, and sometimes when it has), but this is the first season it's used that to show active contempt for its viewers.
7. Yawn-inducing Ford commercials. Sure, they used to be incredibly cheap and jaw-droppingly cheesy. But at least they weren't boring.
8. Shipping. It's one thing if fans hope amongst themselves for contestants to pair up and get all kissyface with one another. But when Seacrest keeps pestering Colton Dixon and Skylar Laine about whether they're a couple (despite their increasingly vocal insistence that they are certainly not), we tip into weird territory for a show that has almost zero backstage component that's not directly advertising-partner-related.
9. The steadfast belief that words have no meaning. For one thing, there was the theme of "pop songs from Great Britain" that Seacrest was determined to keep calling "Britpop," despite the two not being synonymous and the latter actually referring to a fairly specific subgenre. But there's also the longstanding issue of songs being edited down to fit the time allotted without any consideration for how the lyrics that are left are affected. It reached its nadir several week ago, when Elise Testone and Phillip Phillips, Jr. sang Gotye and Kimbra's "Somebody That I Used To Know." The song is already a duet, with two very distinctive parts thoughtfully divvied up to create a specific dialogue. Naturally, the show just haphazardly assigned whichever lines to whoever, because why not? That'll work, too, right? It's all just sound.
10. "Goosies." You are a grown woman, Jennifer Lopez. Call them "goosebumps" or don't call them at all. And for crying out loud, use your talking-to-adults voice. You are a grown woman.

I'm sure that my first exposure to Maurice Sendak was Where The Wild Things Are. The book is such a fundamental necessity for any child's upbringing that it's been a staple of my So it seems you've had a baby gift pack for years.

You get Where The Wild Things Are, you get The Cat In The Hat, you get The Very Hungry Caterpillar and you get Make Way For Ducklings. You might not need them right away, but you will need them.

To many people, that was the book that came to mind when they heard that the author had died at 83. To others, it was his recent (and rippingly funny) two-part interview with Stephen Colbert. But for a music nerd like me, it was 1975's Really Rosie.

Really Rosie was one of those movies that always seemed to pop up in school at the slightest provocation. It was short enough – having originally been a half-hour TV musical – that teachers could slot it in just about whenever they wanted. It was ostensibly educational, with its core songs serving as lessons about counting ("One Was Johnny"), the alphabet ("Alligators All Around"), good manners ("Pierre") and the calendar ("Chicken Soup With Rice").

And it had Carole King. Stuck with what was surely a limited supply of acceptable movies to show elementary-school students — and the knowledge that they'd have to see them over and over — I can only assume that my teachers all breathed a small sigh of relief whenever they circled back around to the cartoon scored by one of the greatest songwriters of all time.

It's a cute movie, with a hint of subversive genius in the fact that it's about little more than a bunch of kids who are bored. But the soundtrack is brilliant. King wrote music to go with Sendak's words (some repurposed from earlier books, some brand new). She brought in her kids to sing terrific backup (her own stroke of genius; just listen to Sherry and Louise Goffin's youthful yearning as they sing "Believe Me" in the title track). The result was her strongest album not called Tapestry.

The songs that aren't in the movie expand on the setting in which the characters live, but they're not about going on new adventures. Instead, they articulate their worldviews, taking in what they see and letting us in on how they think. What they never do, not once, is treat the children as stupid, even when they're being bad.

And then there's "The Ballad Of Chicken Soup." In the movie, it's perfectly clear that the story is being told specifically in the most dramatic, gruesome manner possible, as bored children will do. But stripped of the comically exaggerated visuals (and the kids playing dead immediately afterwards), it becomes the greatest utterly terrifying children's song I have ever heard.

With a perfectly sinister piano part ticking away underneath, King recounts Sendak's tale of choking to death (...on soup). As the title character reaches his inevitable demise, King lets out an agonizing shriek, dies with a horrific moan and then snaps back to an entirely matter-of-fact tone as she brings to a close the event on such an ordinary day. You know, like today. Pleasant dreams.

Really Rosie was Sendak's lone foray into pop songwriting. Unlike Shel Silverstein, he didn't seem interested in pursuing music as a parallel sideline, and he certainly didn't feel the need to get raunchy the one time he did it. It wasn't necessary. On Really Rosie, he gave us a character who was a child pretending to be a adult — and by assuming that not only was she as smart as any grownup, but his audience was as well, he and King created one of the greatest children's albums in pop-music history, no matter how old you are.

If you've had an eye on pop culture recently, chances are you've seen Admiral General Aladeen, the subject of Sacha Baron Cohen's upcoming movie The Dictator.

You might have seen him on this weekend's Saturday Night Live, trading quips with Seth Meyers (and prisoner Martin Scorsese!).

Perhaps you came across his recent interviews with Larry King, Matt Lauer and the New York Times.

Or maybe you caught his act on the red carpet at this year's Oscars, dumping fake cremains on an unimpressed-looking Ryan Seacrest.

One person you probably haven't seen during all of this is Sacha Baron Cohen. As with his previous blitzes for Brüno and Borat, the actor has made an aggressive point of doing publicity in character as much as possible.

That doesn't mean that Baron Cohen hasn't ever been interviewed as himself, but as evidenced by reports of resistance by a handful of media outlets like the BBC, he clearly prefers not to. And when he does, as he did on Fresh Air in 2009, that very fact might be the headline.

While that sort of thing certainly demonstrates the commitment with which Baron Cohen throws himself into his comedy — although did anyone who watched Borat ever think to themselves, "It's funny, but I wish he'd COMMIT more"? — it also imposes a subtle tyranny on anyone who tries to engage with him, either directly or simply watching at home. That might be a meta-riff on The Dictator, except for the fact that Baron Cohen's been doing it for years.

There's a fierce selfishness in play. It forces everybody who interviews him to become absorbed in whatever bit he's working on. When Lauer sits down with Aladeen on NBC, he essentially cedes control over Today to Baron Cohen for the duration. An interview with the actor qua actor would still be promotion for the movie, of course, but there's something off-putting about inviting someone into your house and then letting him call all of the shots. Lauer, like just about everyone who wants to get a segment on a potentially popular movie, is volunteering to be batted around by Baron Cohen, when an actual interview would be closer to the other way around.

Just compare Jon Stewart's sit-down with Baron Cohen back in 2004, before he started disappearing into his characters, with his interview with Borat two years later. In the first one, Stewart is talking comedy with a colleague, and the two have a happy give-and-take that reveals a little bit about how Baron Cohen works.

In the second video, Stewart doesn't have much to do and is entirely at Baron Cohen's mercy. It's awkward — Stewart, after all, constantly reminds us that he's a terrible actor — and not nearly as much fun, despite being a more dedicated comedy segment than the earlier interview.

The worst instance of this was this year's Oscars. Most people with a substantial role in a nominated movie would have attended in the spirit of supporting their film. But instead of celebrating Martin Scorsese's lovely Hugo like a normal actor, Baron Cohen opted to tromp around in character. And not even as the arch station inspector he played in the film, but as Aladeen. Rather than drawing attention to the work that was being honored that night, he apparently preferred to say, in a funny accent, "ME ME ME ME ME!"

(Scorsese, on the other hand, showed up to help Baron Cohen promote The Dictator on this weekend's Saturday Night Live. He did throw in a small plug for Hugo, but that was more than Baron Cohen did on the red carpet.)

What might be most irksome, however, is that for anyone actually interested in what Baron Cohen does, there's a way that appearing in public almost exclusively as his characters reveals his comic creations as less than meets the eye. Interviews with comedians often do an excellent job of shining lights on the roles they play and can reveal additional dimensions to their work that might not have seemed apparent at first.

Even when Robin Williams free-associates on Jay Leno's couch for six minutes or Steve Carell goes to The Daily Show and plays off the weirdness of being a former correspondent (either by pretending that Jon Stewart's still his boss or veering hard in the other direction and dramatically insisting on how far above his old show he really is), you can still get a sense of the processes that drive their comedy.

Baron Cohen would rather avoid all of that. Interested in finding out why, specifically, he thought it would be funny and/or fruitful to lampoon a quasi-Qaddafi strongman? Whether he thought that the events of the Arab Spring made it more relevant, or gave him second thoughts about the timing? Why he developed it as a scripted comedy instead of the semi-documentary approach of Borat and Bruno? How he compares these movies with non-proprietary projects like Hugo or Sweeney Todd? Well, tough. You're not going to learn, or at least you will have to work exceptionally hard for it.

Instead, you can dislike Borat, Bruno and Aladeen and not know a thing about Baron Cohen — and certainly not discover something that might make you think that there's more to them than you originally thought. He seems to be determined to convince us that there isn't anything more to them.

And by refusing to appear out of character except on frustratingly rare (and, as per the above, genuinely enlightening) occasions, he's not only right: He makes a convincing case that there isn't anything more to Baron Cohen, either.

With The Avengers just opening in your local jillionplex, it seems like the right time to look ahead to summer movies and see what's on our radar, both good and bad. Dark Shadows, Safety Not Guaranteed, Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World ... well, you'll hear them all.

And because we want to expand our demographic reach (okay, it's actually also because we really like him and he's smart and will own us all one day), we invited much younger Digital Arts intern Joel Arnold — a/k/a "Intern Joel" — to share with us a few thoughts about the summer movie he's most excited about. As you'll hear, this led to a marvelous back and forth with Glen and made us all smarter.

As always, we close with What's Making Us Happy This Week, in which you will learn, among other things, that I will be on vacation next week, so you will be in the hands of whatever team of weirdos winds up behind the microphones in my absence. Good luck!

You can find us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter: — me, Trey, Stephen, Glen and Mike, along with Intern Joel, Tell us what movies you are and are not looking forward to this summer, and let us know how hot it will have to get before you see some of these turkeys.

The Avengers is getting a lot of mileage out of uniting the stars of several different films for one big, knock-down-drag-out superfilm in which there are so many people floating in from hither and yon that you would be forgiven for expecting a cameo from Plastic Man. (There isn't one.)

But it doesn't seem like superheroes should have all the fun. Why can't we bring together other kinds of characters from other kinds of movies to combine their powers? Why not? Fortunately, I have suggestions. (You knew I would.) Please note that in some cases, this would require people who are deceased to appear via CGI, but let's be honest: they won't look any less fake than The Hulk.

The Deep Feelers: Nicholas Sparks heroes from The Notebook (Ryan Gosling), The Lucky One (Zac Efron), Message In A Bottle (Kevin Costner), Nights In Rodanthe (Richard Gere), Dear John (Channing Tatum), and A Walk To Remember (that other guy who was also in that Cyrano thing with James Franco) get together and open a custom furniture shop where their signature is burning the initials of their lady loves into every item with an artisanal match made from reclaimed pine trees from the mountains where they once buried time capsules they expected to eventually open and never got the chance because of (in most cases) death.

The Bloodsuckers: Selfish businesspeople Gordon Gekko (Wall Street), Randolph and Mortimer Duke (Trading Places), Katharine Parker (Working Girl), and several different Kevin Spacey characters decide to run a food truck, but they immediately get tied up in a scandal over health-department inspections and the fact that Randolph and Mortimer don't want to serve what they call "the wrong element."

The Advisors: Romantic-comedy BFF/sister characters played by Judy Greer (27 Dresses, Love Happens), Bonnie Hunt (Jerry Maguire), Kristen Johnston (Music And Lyrics), Carrie Fisher (When Harry Met Sally), and the entire supporting cast of Notting Hill get together to create a small consulting company that specializes in couples counseling. It flops in three weeks and they decide to open a karaoke bar instead. It flops also. As it turns out, they are only meant to be supporting members of other people's projects.

The Muggers. Adorable moppets of the past, played in their respective youths by Abigail Breslin, Tina Majorino, Jonathan Lipnicki, Ross Malinger, and Mae Whitman decide to make a film bringing back the style of face-making they were able to capitalize upon in their youth. [Film fails miserably after audiences assume from the title that they are being asked to go see Jonathan Lipnicki as a hardened criminal.]

The Educatables. Inspirational teachers played by Robin Williams (Dead Poets Society), Edward James Olmos (Stand And Deliver), Michelle Pfeiffer (Dangerous Minds), Paula Patton (Precious) and John Houseman (The Paper Chase) unite to score more than 100,000 math tests in only three days as they attempt to defeat Standardo, the villain that represents overzealous standardized testing.

The Indivisibles: Everyone who has ever played a member of Congress in a movie — Ben Affleck from State Of Play, Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, Warren Beatty in Bulworth, Tom Hanks in Charlie Wilson's War — gets together for a film in which they drive around vandalizing polarizing campaign literature.

The Debatables: Jar-Jar Binks, those two jive-talking robots in Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen, and Kate Capshaw's lounge singer from Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom unite for a movie where they hang in a cage from a single hook, and at the end of the movie, they either fall into a pit of fire or do not, depending on an audience vote.

The Lunchables: Convenient and usually close at hand but ultimately bad for you, the Lunchables (Adam Sandler, Miley Cyrus, and Megan Fox) join forces to burn down a fast casual restaurant.

The Salt And Peppers. Every character played by George Clooney gets together in one place to defeat a supervillain bent on knocking out the internet, but when all of them simultaneously look at the ground and briefly wonder whether they are really up to the task given that their lives have been spent sliding by and they've never really lived up to what might have been their potential, they lose their momentum and live out the rest of their lives doubting themselves, unable to shop for stubble-creating electric razors on eBay. Because there's no more internet. Because of the supervillain.

The Massagers: Mark Darcy (Bridget Jones' Diary) and ... some other people, whoever you want, men, women, I don't care, but they should give massages, is what I'm saying.

I am guessing that the majority of you do not own thoroughbred horses. In fact, that is the underlying assumption of this entire post, and to the degree it does not apply to you, I offer humblest apologies (your highness).

But this is the weekend of the Kentucky Derby, which I normally appreciate primarily for the way it causes everyone to momentarily forget everything they ever knew about what constitutes Too Much Hat.

Since I don't know how to encourage all of you to submit your own hat designs, it seems that the next best thing is to encourage you to imagine that you own a thoroughbred horse — fortunately, for the sake of this exercise, you don't have to like or approve of horse racing, as it is safe to say no horses will be harmed in the imagining of their existence. If you owned such a majestic animal, you would have the option of naming it.

Well, "option."

While you can name your horse, there are a variety of requirements. The name can't be more than 18 characters, including spaces and punctuation. It can't include the name of a living or dead person, unless you jump through some hoops to make sure you're not offending anyone. It can't have "commercial, artistic or creative significance," which I think means you can't call your horse "Sherlock Holmes" or "Monster Energy" or probably even something sly like "David Hasselhoof." (That is a freaking great name for a ripped, slightly erratic horse. You have to admit this much.)

The name also can't be just initials, and it can't be a number, except that numbers over 30 are okay if they're spelled out. No names that are "suggestive or have a vulgar or obscene meaning; names considered in poor taste; or names that may be offensive to religious, political or ethnic groups." You also can't duplicate anybody else's existing horse's name, but I think we can let that go, since our horses are imaginary.

With those rules in mind, what would you name your horse? I have settled on the name of my imaginary, undoubtedly winning horse, based on the thing that means the most to me at the moment. And what's that name?

Vacation Next Week.

But I'm pretty sure that's a me thing.

Maybe you needed a good cry, but you were at work and didn't have easy access to your DVD of "The Notebook." So, you searched for that heart wrenching break-up scene on YouTube and let the tears flow freely.

Could be, nostalgic for times past when "real" men wore suits and drank bourbon, you were itching to watch Humphrey Bogart tell Ingrid Bergman, "Here's lookin' at you kid."

Or, it's possible you just wanted to have a good laugh at the expense of someone getting hit in the unmentionables.

Whatever your mood, you've probably watched clips from your favorite movies or TV shows on YouTube. And, most likely, the clips weren't supposed to be there.

Five years ago, content owners and media companies, like Viacom, were taking YouTube to court for copyright infringement. They claimed YouTube's success was based on people uploading clips of TV shows and movies without permission. Today, "old media" can't deny the power of YouTube's gargantuan audience (the site claims 4 billion video views a day) and is scrambling to find ways to work with rather than against it.

Vin Di Bona is the affable TV producer with a shock of white hair who created America's Funniest Home Videos in the late 1980s. His contentious relationship with YouTube began 16 years later: "Here's what happened," he explains. "I turned on the television, and CBS evening news said, 'There's something new. It's called YouTube and it's a way to trade video and collect things and share it and we're going to show you what it does.' And they showed six clips, and damned if three of them weren't mine."

Di Bona called his lawyer, and the cease-and-desist chase was on. But it was his responsibility to search the site for pirated material and have it taken down. "It was like playing Whack-A-Mole," says Di Bona, "You know, whack the mole and six more would pop up, and those were my clips."

So Di Bona chose the 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em' strategy and partnered with YouTube. His channels – CuteWinFail and Petsami — legally repackage those funny home videos we all know and love.

"We began to embrace it, and it has become very successful," Di Bona says. Now an ad plays before the videos start and Di Bona's company, Fishbowl Worldwide Media, shares the revenue with YouTube.

L.A.-based entrepreneurs Rich Raddon and Zach James knew that movie studios were having the same problem with piracy as Vin Di Bona. So Zach James thought, "Why don't we go on YouTube and help figure this out with the studios?"

And, voila, their venture-funded startup MOVIECLIPS was born. "Clips can be a powerful driver to watching the feature film," says Raddon, re-enacting the pitch to movie studio executives. "And so when we walked in, we said, 'Hey, do these licensing deals with us, you know we'll treat the content correctly and let's see if we can't throw people, after they watch the clip, to buy or rent the movie.'"

MOVIECLIPS is already working with six major studios and a handful of independents to help them get the most from YouTube, and it has a staff of more than 50 film nerds to help make that happen.

"I studied critical film studies, actually," says Julianna Strickland, a content curator for the startup, "so I love watching movies and writing about them. That's what I did all four years of college."

The not-so-fun part of her job involves trolling YouTube for illegal uploads. But, if a user puts up their favorite clip from a movie and it meets certain criteria (it's not too long, it's good quality) then rather than force the user to take the clip down, Strickland claims it on behalf of the studio that owns it. Oh, and the fun part: she gets to watch movies, pick the most memorable moments, and upload those clips to YouTube. Today, it's L.A. Story.

"We always pick a clip that has a beginning, middle and an end," says Strickland, pointing out the various fields she has to fill out in the content management system before she uploads a clip to YouTube. "I put everyone that's in the scene: so Steve Martin, Richard Grant, Victoria Tennant, Sarah Jessica Parker, I put some of the memorable dialogue — 'SanDeE your breasts feel weird, oh, that's because they're real' — then you put discussion topics, character types, settings, eras, what they're doing."

It consists of hours of tedious work to ensure this licensed content will show up first when you go searching for your favorite movie clip on YouTube. Not an easy task when 60 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.

But Thomas Hughes, a senior VP with Lionsgate (the studio behind The Hunger Games), says it's working.

"We don't have the time or resources to do it. They do it for us, minding the Ps and Qs and make it available for the world to see," Hughes says. "We've seen our claimed views double and we fully expected that."

The more views you claim, the easier it is to prove to advertisers that you've got the eyeballs they want to reach. Even Viacom, the media goliath suing YouTube for copyright infringement, is in on the game. Viacom's Paramount Pictures has a deal with MOVIECLIPS. So the next time you watch Michael Corleone say, "it's strictly business," in that "Godfather" clip you just clicked on, you won't have to feel guilty.

Jessie Knadler is the thirty-something author of Rurally Screwed: My Life Off The Grid With the Cowboy I Love (Berkley Hardcover).

I like her immediately as she strides in the door at WMRA, the Shenandoah Valley public radio station that kindly employs me. There she is, short and slight as two seconds; still got this big-city, offhand glamour and presence going six years out of Manhattan. She's "bring 'em on" without any silly bravado.

It's no wonder. This speck of a woman has hands-on experience killing chickens. Plus, she also teaches Pilates, which explains her enviable abs.

We sit. We talk. I've read Rurally Screwed, but I want to hear the story directly from her. Stripped to its bare bones, it's this: Big-city magazine writer meets a real, bull-riding cowboy while on assignment in Montana. Bull-riding cowboy comes to New York City for a visit. A short time later, cowboy and magazine writer decamp for those mythical greener pastures where magazine writer feels completely inadequate about almost everything...

There is, of course, a lot more depth to Jessie Knadler's book than this, which is why I find it so interesting and endearing. Rurally Screwed, for me, is a very good writer's account of her very real life. It's a memoir of nitty-gritty daily adjustments, of the Herculean personal growth demanded within a committed partnership.

One side note: Rurally Screwed's jacket belies the story's depth. It shows a Jessie stand-in, decked out in red high heels and a handkerchief-hemmed frock, standing next to a muscular, Wrangler-clad male rear torso with a rope around it ... all plunked down in a pasture with three actual chickens.

Is this Carrie Bradshaw moves to the farm or what?

Indeed, the day before we talked, The New York Post had blasted forth a cover story focusing primarily on the Sex and the City aspect of Jessie Knadler's love story and relocation, complimented by photos of her standing around the farm decked out in designer duds, with husband Jake there in his cowboy hat as a kind of Mr. Big stand-in.

Jessie looks unexpectedly uncomfortable when I mention The New York Post. "It's a tabloid — they don't do nuance. So I wasn't all that surprised I came across as a Manolo Blahnik-wearing city slicker and Jake veered toward hick-with-the-heart-of-gold stereotype."

But then, whoosh, all distress is gone. "Hey, I'm not complaining. That's what makes the Post fun and outrageous. And I did love wearing those designer duds for the photo shoot." Jessie's grin is wicked. "It's been years since I had on anything with a label."

Jessie Knadler moved to New York City from Missoula, Montana, in her late teens. By her early thirties, she was living in a small, chic Chelsea apartment, publishing widely, writing mostly stories from an urban-hipster woman's point of view. She'd reinvented herself, Jessie explains, left her poufy Missoula ski parka behind to live and dress as she'd always figured she was meant to. But she was also drinking and partying too much, and had gotten herself stuck in a unhealthy relationship with a man.

From the distance of a couple of settled decades, I find myself relating. Been there, done that – in different ways, of course. Jessie talks and writes about that time of her life as though it was funny and sad and scary, all at the same time; which is certainly how I remember my own creatively self-destructive period.

Sure, there's a chick lit/romance novel flavor to Rurally Screwed. But so what if Jessie extricates herself from borderline self-destruction through love? Let she who has never been a bit desperate to escape her own life cast the first stone. Which would not be me. I'd like it to me, but it isn't.

I found Rurally Screwed to be a memoir with unexpected, unpretentious – and very funny – heft; the story of a young woman who drives herself so hard for a couple of decades that she neglects to notice who she is. Then, after an interlude spent raising chickens, canning, sewing her own clothes, attempting Bible study and overthinking almost everything about rural life, the young woman gets real.

Jessie Knadler writes toward the end of Rurally Screwed:

I finally understood that identity comes once you stop searching for it, once you stop looking to conceptual thought for definitions of who you are or think you should be... It is possible to bend and sway in the breeze too much, endlessly tossed by questions of who you are and, what does it all mean; sometimes the most courageous thing a person can do is stand straight and strong. There is freedom in this...We lived an honest life, Jake and I, not because we slaughtered chickens, sold eggs, sipped moonshine and built fence, but because we were finally honest with each other; I was finally honest with myself.

For me – a woman who's screwed up a lot and come out the other side happier than I ever hoped to be – Jessie's story affirms my own belief that life really gets good only when we relax.

Oh, and one more thing. The author of Rurally Screwed leaves me with the best exit line I've ever gotten from an interviewee.

Heading out the door, Jessie Knadler turns, waves, and says, jokingly, "Gotta get home and slaughter some chickens."