A new study from the Center for the Study of Women in Television & Film has led to headlines claiming that women are missing from film criticism. "Female Movie Critics' Influence Shrinking, Says Study," reads the headline in the Chicago Tribune. "The age of the Internet has not been kind to female movie critics," says the lede in The Wrap.

What the study apparently did (it's not been released in full to the public yet, but was provided to some outlets) was examine the number of reviews by what the movie aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes calls "Top Critics," finding that men wrote 82 percent of the reviews, leaving a measly 18 percent written by women. The Center's executive director, Martha Lauzen, said in a report that because women wrote 30 percent of the movie reviews in the Top 100 U.S. daily newspapers in 2007 according to a study that the Center did back then, film critics are less gender diverse now than they were six years ago.

I certainly wouldn't quibble with findings I haven't seen, so let's assume this is all exactly correct as it's been given to these other outlets: 82 percent of this spring's "Top Critics" reviews on Rotten Tomatoes came from men. Would that really have the suggested meaning that film criticism is less gender diverse than before?

First, understand that the "Top Critics" designation on Rotten Tomatoes isn't primarily about quality. It has is a strong institutional tilt, favoring people who are longtime reviewers at large print publications, national broadcast outlets, or large web sites. (The Variety story syndicated in the Tribune explains this more.) Without special dispensation, online writers can't even get into the "Top Critics" ranks until they've been writing for three years:

To be considered for Top Critics designation, a critic must be published at a print publication in the top 10% of circulation, employed as a film critic at a national broadcast outlet for no less than five years, or employed as a film critic for an editorial-based website with over 1.5 million monthly unique visitors for a minimum of three years. A Top Critic may also be recognized as such based on their influence, reach, reputation, and/or quality of writing, as determined by Rotten Tomatoes staff.

So if online outlets were making criticism more gender diverse, any change in the last three years isn't likely to show up here anyway, making a comparison between now and 2007 a little suspect to begin with.

And in any event, comparing "Top Critics" from Rotten Tomatoes to the film critics at the nation's top 100 newspapers is apples and oranges. By 2007, there was already a thriving culture of online writers about film — it's entirely possible that that world was far more slanted than it is now, but you wouldn't see that from looking only at the newspaper film criticism of 2007. In fact, according to the study, newspaper reviews were still 28 percent written by women (about the same as in 2007), meaning the much bigger problem is Everywhere Except Newspapers, which is the sector where we don't know anything from these numbers about where we were in 2007.

Furthermore, film writing goes far beyond what are traditionally considered and counted as "reviews," so it's critical to remember that reviewing, in the sense that the term shows up on Rotten Tomatoes, is only a subpart of writing about film. And some of the women who are most passionate about film don't necessarily write "reviews," as much as they write columns or essays — and that's even more true with women who care specifically about gender issues in film. (Monika Bartyzel's "Girls On Film" column, for instance, or Melissa Silverstein's Women And Hollywood, or what Alyssa Rosenberg writes.)

Similarly, not all women who want to break into film criticism are particularly looking to do it in the largest traditional media outlets and the most heavily trafficked web sites. Some of them want their own space, their own voice, their own room to take whatever attitudinal approach suits them. And sometimes that means making peace with not being a "Top Critic," at least for now.

It's possible that women who are doing criticism and commentary have made their advances in formats other than day-of-release, up-or-down reviews in big outlets, which is essentially what interests Rotten Tomatoes and other aggregators that try to come up with a number that represents "critical opinion." It's possible that as you incorporate different voices into a conversation, they don't only contribute in higher numbers, but change the definition of a contribution and expand the spaces where it happens. So if you keep looking at the old spaces and formats alone, you might miss them.

But the most curious conclusion — at least as it was passed along by The Wrap and Variety — was a sort of shrugging at the fact that both female and male critics allegedly prefer the films written and directed by people of their own gender. As summarized by Variety:

The study also found that female critics do tend to gravitate towards writing reviews of films directed and written by women, while male critics are more drawn to films with male directors and writers. 36% of the reviews written by women were of films directed or written by women, while just 21% of reviews written by men were for films directed or written by women.

Okay, hang on a minute. Even assuming that this would be a bad thing, in order for any of this to mean anything about what people are choosing, you'd have to know how many films overall that would be eligible for review are written or directed by women. If it's 50 percent (spoiler alert: it's not), then men and women are both selecting against them. If it's 5 percent, then both women and men are disproportionately reviewing them over movies exclusively by men. If it's 36 percent, then women aren't "gravitating" toward anything; they're just reviewing what's out there. In other words, it's inaccurate to suggest that both women and men have a bias toward their own gender simply because within this sample, women reviewed somewhat more films by women than men did.

But more damaging to this part of the claim is that there is far, far, far more to a critic reviewing a film than "gravitating" to it. Film criticism for money is not a matter of looking at what's around in a particular week, picking something to review, and sending your copy. There's very often a process by which an editor of some sort either assigns or at least agrees to the critic's decisions about what to review. Women reviewing more movies by women could mean gravitating to them, sure. Or it could mean being assigned to them by editors who assume women are better at reviewing "women's" movies, or being assigned to them by editors because men don't want to cover them. Same with men — the fact that men review fewer movies by women than women do doesn't mean men prefer movies by men.

Sometimes, particularly when you're part of a staff, you review what needs reviewing. This is how I wound up doing Beastly.

Now, this may be a problem with the way this is being relayed in the press rather than reported by the study, because the Center that did the study certainly knows this, and raised this issue when they found exactly the same thing to be the case in the newspaper-only study in 2007. Back then, they acknowledged that a similar disparity could be the result of reviewer choice or editorial assignment.

But interestingly, at that time, of the newspaper study, 14 percent of the films reviewed by men were written or directed by women, and 22 percent of the films reviewed by women were. That means that both the women and the men in this study are reviewing substantially more films either written or directed by women, and whether it's because more films are available, because more critics are seeking them out, or because Rotten Tomatoes "top critics" review more movies by women than newspaper critics did when considered alone, that deserves to be part of the conversation as well.

Who reviews what is actually a really interesting soup of complicated issues. Some people think only a parent can really review a movie about parents, or only a woman can review a movie about women, or only a divorced person can review a movie about divorce. But there are certainly people who respond to a negative review of an action movie by a woman as proof that Women Don't Get Action Movies, rather than as proof that it's not a very good action movie. (The same thing may very well happen to men who review romantic comedies or Eat Pray Love or whatever.)

This is not, of course, to in any way minimize the issue of increasing the number of female voices (and voices of people of color) in criticism, in day-of reviewing, in papers, online, or anywhere else. There is absolutely a disparity, and there are absolutely issues of representation.

There's a lot going on here. Conversations about gender and gender politics are often engaged by men as well as women. Many women see no reason whatsoever to care what gender a director is. Some critics care a great deal about representation behind the camera, and some don't care at all. Some people write essays and reviews and lists and features, and some work every week in a strict review format with a grading/rating system.

But it would be a mistake, I think, to take this study as a sign that women aren't making themselves heard in cultural writing, because they are. Outlets that don't hire women or don't listen to them are, of course, causing problems, mostly for themselves and their readers. But whatever problems we're facing, the percentage of reviews showing up in Top Critic designations at Rotten Tomatoes is only a very small and very specific piece of it.

I'm far more concerned about what we say about actors and directors, and about how we receive stories that are about women, than I am about counting heads at one web site's definition of "top" outlets. There are a lot of women who are making themselves heard fairly tirelessly on gender-related topics and other topics, so underestimate (and undercount) them at your peril.

On this week's show, we take advantage of the new Star Trek movie to chat about — well, to chat about Star Trek, yes, but also more generally to cover the whole problem of coming in fresh to a franchise other people know well. We approach this particular film from every level of knowledge from almost none to basically all, and we manage to link it not only to Star Wars (obviously), but also to Arrested Development and Before Sunrise. (No Before Midnight spoilers at all in the show, promise, though there are some in what I wrote yesterday, as explained at the top.)

If you care about Trek stuff, by the way, make sure you also read our pal Chris Klimek from earlier this week. And by all means, if you haven't taken in NPR's super-obsessive guide to Arrested Development, you really should.

We also talk this week about Saturday Night Live and its place in our universe. Can it last forever? What function does it serve, at this point? And what about the question Glen dares to ask: Does it really need to be live at all?

We close, as always, with what's making us happy this week. Stephen is happy about a movie he finally saw and a video we should never have looked up. Trey is happy about a movie the rest of us heartily endorse as well. He's also happy about a coming book and the fantastic trailer that makes us so eager for it. It will shock you, but Glen is not happy about a podcast this week! He's happy about a video and a book! Hard to believe, I know. I am happy about the Office finale, although Stephen expected me to be happy about something else entirely.

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

Dear Tiny Desk,

I don't know if you remember me, but I used to work maybe 20 feet from you. Before that, I worked about 10 feet from you, but people used to come stand behind me and breathe their miscellaneous lunch smells on my neck while you were entertaining guests, so I moved.

When I saw our new building, it was so open that I assumed I would still be able to hear everything, even though I'm in an entirely different part of the floor from you. But as it turns out, the acoustical geniuses have given me the quiet place to work that I've been dreaming about ever since that one band (I'm sorry; I don't remember who it was) took five zillion years to warm up because the guy wouldn't stop playing '80s classics in the style of smooth jazz as he figured out how to drop himself into The Zone. (I'm assuming that's what he was doing. I know how musicians are about The Zone.)

Now, I don't get lunch smells breathed on my neck, nor do people idly drum their fingers on the back of my chair or pick up things off my desk on the mistaken assumption that I won't smack their hand like Mrs. Cunningham in the Happy Days credits. Nor do I have the opportunity to try to calculate how many people can squeeze into a single space with limited ventilation before its official odorific classification goes from "room-comma-work" to "room-comma-locker."

I find that I miss you a little.

It's not that my affection has been secret. I remember the day Stephen sneaked up behind me at work, looked over my shoulder at my computer, and realized I was watching The Avett Brothers, again — a show that had taken place about six feet from me (I crawled over into the corner for that one, because I am no fool). I saw him, closed the window, snatched off my headphones, and spun around in my chair. "This is like catching you watching [prurient adult content]," he observed.

I loved this one too, although heaven knows I've been heard on this topic before. Same deal, basically. I appreciate it. My little heart appreciates it. My swoon reflex appreciates it.

And I won't lie: when Chris Otepka (The Heligoats) came, I kept telling people that the funniest thing I'd ever seen him do was tell a story about eating a bike chain, and when he actually told the story and people finally absorbed it, with the giggle floating through a room full of generally very low-key folks, I was in heaven.

For the most part, my love was pure and true. I sat close to Jimmy Cliff and felt myself slipping into a reverie. And what could be better than Bettye Lavette, coming in and sitting on the edge of the desk and wanting us to close the blinds? Oh, my. (Best dressed Tiny Desk ever, by the way: Raphael Saadiq.)

Sometimes, I appreciated you because you brought into my life precisely whatever song I was obsessed with at the moment. When Kishi Bashi came, I was deeply into my "Bright Whites" fixation, as was Microsoft. (But that wasn't why! I promise! I liked that song way before Windows 8 did!)

Sometimes, you were ahead of the curve. Adele came before she was quite the monstrous phenomenon she became in 2011. She was the perfect example of the fact that in my experience, it was always the incredibly awesome people who were the best at coming in, doing their thing, and getting on their way with a minimum of fuss. She even forgot to take her gloves off! I thought of these as the Incredibly Polite Genius shows.

See also: Nick Lowe.

I loved the fact that sometimes, unexpected things happened and people really did keep going. David Wax Museum broke their standing bass almost as soon as they started using it, but they kept going and were hurt not at all.

Sometimes, it was the combination of the music and the moment — I'm not sure I could have loved Sierra Leone's Refugee All Stars as much at any other time as I did on a Friday afternoon.

It's not that I can't enjoy you anymore from a distance. I always had to enjoy some of your delights on video. I wasn't there for K'Naan, for instance.

I think I missed Miguel, too.

You kept passing along beautiful stuff until we left — one of the last ones I fell for was The Lone Bellow, only weeks before the move.

I'm not going to lie: we had our days together, you and I. The day that featured both [incredibly huge band] and [ensemble that played especially challenging genre] felt a tiny bit long. Not bad! Just long. And a little bit loud. And I like Dirty Three — I even have a Dirty Three record! — but I cannot disagree with your own description of it as "one of the loudest performances ever captured in the NPR Music offices."

We haven't even talked about Chuck Brown, or Booker T. Jones playing "Green Onions," or Juanes, or — OH MY GOSH, the Soweto Gospel Choir, which came into the offices singing in the hallway.

It was an embarrassment of riches, really. Where else was I going to hear "the world's reigning pipa virtuoso"? Nowhere. Where else was I going to become a huge fan of Macklemore and Ryan Lewis?

Man, you were loud sometimes. And crowded. And sweaty. And sometimes people gave me the stink-eye for working during the music, all clackety-clackety on the keyboard because I couldn't stop every time and listen. I'm thrilled to be wrong about figuring the sound would carry all around the new building, because let's face it: not everybody would love hearing that Chris Otepka eat-a-bike-chain story in the middle of a workday as much as I did.

But one of these days, you'll see my head poking around the corner. Breathing on your neck.

Your pal,
Linda

1. Newton's Laws Of Motion

2. The Reluctance Of Brilliant Criminal Masterminds To Freely Confess

3. The Inability Of Two Things To Coexist In The Same Physical Space

4. The Integrity Of Vending Machines

5. Gravity

6. Gina Carano's Ability To Snap Most Of These People Like Twigs Pretty Quickly, If We're Being Honest

7. The Hardness Of Cars, Which Are Actually Kind Of Uncomfortable To Land On From Great Heights

8. The Assumption That Even Innocent Bystanders Who Do Not Have Speaking Parts Have To Not Die In Order For The Good Guys To Be Considered Entirely Successful

9. The Conservation Of Mass

10. The Concern That Former Models Are Often Not That Funny In Movies

11. The Tendency Of People To Be A Little Down After Witnessing Devastating Car Crashes

12. The Fact That In Most Circumstances, A Truck Is Unlikely To Contain A Tank

13. How Much It Hurts To Be On Fire, To The Point Where Strutting May Become Difficult

14. Amnesia ... Something Something Something

15. The Loss Of Velocity Of An Enormous Object Traveling At High Speed That Collides with Another Enormous Object

16. The Difficulty Of Completing A Fistfight While You're In One Moving Car And The Other Guy Is In Another Moving Car

17. The Likelihood That Even Conventionally Trained, Rule-Following Law Enforcement Officers Occasionally Learn Something Of Value They Can Successfully Use Against Criminals

18. That Guy Reminds Me Of Somebody, But I Really Don't Think It Can Be "Luke Evans," Because I Don't Know Who That Is ... Wait, Who's The One Who's Not Tom Hardy?

19. Relativity

20. Indemnification

The biggest problem with pretending all of reality television is categorically odious is that it denies us the opportunity to identify and hold accountable what is actually odious. To those who insist that it's all gross — that no matter the documentary aspirations or good-natured competitiveness of plenty of unscripted television, it all belongs in the same giant dumpster — I am your Crocodile Dundee of distaste: Those aren't destructive and grotesque and irresponsible. This is destructive and grotesque and irresponsible.

And by "this," I mean Fox's new show, Does Someone Have To Go?

The premise of Does Someone Have To Go? is that we visit a troubled business and the employees are encouraged to "take over," which here means that they are given the authority to (supposedly) fire someone from within their ranks. This is presented as a very brave move by the owners, as if they are actually surrendering control, rather than refusing one of the fundamental tasks of management — making painful decisions — and pushing it off onto their employees.

This is essentially like claiming that because there's a food shortage at the zoo, you've let the lions "take over," by which you mean that they can decide which one of them will be killed and eaten by the rest. They can't leave the zoo, they can't get more food, they can't can the zookeeper and replace him with someone who will manage their environment a little better. But if they decide among them that one of the lions needs his neck ripped out, that's up to them, and nobody will interfere. The lions are "in charge."

It is in-group autonomy only — it gives people only the right to change the allocation of resources within the group of employees, not the right to change the fate of the group as a whole. Nevertheless: "We're going to put the power of this company in your hands," says the boss with a straight face in the first episode. The other boss says that they'll face "all kinds of difficult questions," which turn out to be: "Who should be demoted? Who should get a pay cut? Who needs anger management classes?" And, of course, they'll decide whether Someone Has To Go.

So, you know. Not all the kinds of difficult questions. Just the ones where the answer is, "Take it out of that guy's hide."

The company in tonight's opener is Velocity Merchant Services, or VMS, a firm that sells credit-card processing machines and is apparently featured here because Dunder Mifflin's depiction of paper sales as a simulacrum of American office life was considered too glamorous. Run by a husband and wife team, it has more than 70 employees, but is "a dysfunctional mess," says the grim but titillated announcer.

And why is it dysfunctional? "Often times," the announcer intones, "it's difficult to tell which of the employees is at fault." Is it the guy they call "Uncle Mike," subtitled "THE MOTORMOUTH"? Is it Shawn, "THE JERK"? Is it Zoe (a man), "THE SLACKER," who sometimes talks (oh, the humanity!) about wishing it were time to go home? Is it one of the members of the owners' family? Tina, "THE TATTLETALE"? Kout, "THE BOSS'S MOM"? The owners say that even members of their own family could be fired! If, that is, everybody wants to live with the boss after firing her mom. Want to place your bets?

The employees select three of their number to be imperiled — the reality-show standard "bottom three." How do they get there? First, they're herded into a room and shown footage of interviews in which the other employees dump on them. This isn't fun for anyone, obviously, even though when being interviewed on camera, they undoubtedly knew it would come to light eventually.

But then, they bring out the big guns: everybody gets to see how much money everybody else makes. Note that if the problems are personal dysfunction, as is claimed earlier, then employees knowing who makes what has no purpose. The reason for revealing salaries is to breed resentment and only to breed resentment — to suggest that the rungs of the economic ladder you need to worry about are the ones just above you that you can reach. Knock those people down to where they belong, and you're getting somewhere. "There's no better way to get everybody at each other's throats," says one employee, "than to expose what everybody makes."

The moral of the story is that when you feel frustrated at work and economically helpless, the problem is the person you bump into at the coffeemaker who is earning just slightly more than they should, doing just slightly better than they should, getting a little too much for a little too little, and that by rendering that person unemployed, or knocking him or down a peg, you will be better off. "Ask yourself," the bosses say, "who's undervalued ... and who's overvalued."

And what do the employees do? I will tell you that, asked to pick three people to get rid of, two of them are among the worst-paid in the company. They've just heard about everyone's salary, and what they decided to do was target people who don't make much, but who they think are still somehow getting away with something.

It's a similar nasty fantasy to CBS's also obnoxious Undercover Boss, which shows an unerringly kind, humble CEO joining the ranks of his employees just long enough to bestow Queen For A Day-style gifts on a few select employees with sob stories. If they change much, it's often to give a little talking-to to middle managers, on the theory that they're the real problem. It always turns out that company policy is to be good to employees, kind, generous, fair — it's that assistant manager who makes a tiny bit more money than you do who's twisting things around. You want to be mad at somebody, it says, be mad at that guy. (My friend and co-panelist Stephen Thompson talked about this on an early episode of our podcast, Pop Culture Happy Hour, in which he bemoaned the show's introduction with its simplistic view of every company CEO as "your benevolent daddy.")

Fox didn't show critics the end of the opening two-parter, so I couldn't tell you whether they fire someone even if I wanted to. My guess is that they don't, and that even if they do, they reach for a feel-good solution where they grow in understanding, where all this brutal treatment and disrespect turns out to be yet another Benevolent Parent move by the owners where everyone is better off than if they'd never been forced into a cage match that seems to have no motive other than making everyone miserable.

But I can tell you how Fox describes the second hour: "In this episode, the bottom three employees ... plead with the rest of the employees to keep their positions." People begging and pleading to keep their (in some cases) low-paying jobs from people who make (in most cases) a bit more than they do — doesn't that sound like a great big hoot?

The opening for Does Someone Have To Go? features an animation in which two figures are standing with what seem to be boxes of their possessions in their hands, waiting for a verdict. Suddenly, a trapdoor opens and one of them is dropped through it.

It's not that this is the most vile thing television has ever offered; I'm sure people could come up with much worse. But the idea of granting phony agency to employees to target and punish each other, as if fixing a troubled company means breeding resentment among those who probably stand to profit the least if things go better? It's pretty bad, and pretty gross, and pretty distasteful, and unlike a lot of "guilty pleasure" television, there's really not much pleasure to be found.

[Note: Before Midnight is an especially difficult movie to write about, simply because for some people, even what has become of Jesse and Celine since Before Sunset is information that they don't want. But it's impossible — absolutely impossible — to write about the movie without talking about where they stand and what the premise is. I did my absolute best to spoil as little beyond that as possible. But if it's extremely important to you not to know whether he missed the plane, whether they've seen each other in the last nine years, or the rest of the table-setting that happens in the film's first few minutes (and if you've managed not to know until now), stop here.]

It took three movies for the stunning series made up of Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and now Before Midnight to go back to the beginning.

And what was the beginning?

In 1995's Before Sunrise, directed like the other two films by Richard Linklater, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) spend a single romantic night together in Vienna. But that's not the beginning. Before they can spend that night together, they have to get off the train together. And before they get off the train together, they have to talk. And before they talk, they have to meet. And before they meet, that's the beginning.

Remember? They're on the train, and Celine gets up from her seat and moves, ultimately plunking herself down right across from Jesse and going back to the book she's reading. And he spots her out of the corner of his eye, an impossibly beautiful French girl, and he makes a little goggle-eyed smile into his book, because it's all just a little too unreal.

But that's not actually the beginning either.

In the very beginning, the reason Celine gets up and moves is that the middle-aged couple sitting near her is fighting in German, and she's tired of listening to it, even though she can't understand it. She winds up next to Jesse specifically because she's quietly but firmly put off by the ugliness of couplehood that's been corroded by years of togetherness; by familiarity that has bred contempt. The first conversation they ever have is about that couple, and the fact that Celine has heard that in time, couples literally lose the ability to hear each other — men lose their hearing of higher tones, and women of lower ones.

It took three movies and 20 years for Jesse and Celine to be the ones having the fight, and to worry that now that they've passed 40, they are becoming the couple they ran away from when they'd just passed 20. It's not hard to reshoot that scene in your mind's eye, with the 2013 Jesse and Celine fighting in the foreground while, in the background, the 1995 Jesse and Celine huddle to roll their eyes at those people who can't hear each other.

See, it turns out Jesse really did miss that plane at the end of Before Sunset, and he never really went home. They've been a couple ever since, and they have twin daughters, conceived shortly after they got together. His son and ex-wife live in Chicago and he's published more books; she's still a professional environmentalist. We meet them here in Greece, at the end of summer.

And they've learned, perhaps unsurprisingly, that if you think being separated for nine years is hard, you should try being together. Their relationship, originally so perfectly preserved and gorgeous in memory, has gotten scuffed and noisy and complicated. It's not just the two of them in a listening booth in a record store now. It's them and their daughters, and his son, and his ex-wife, and their friends, and their work, and ultimately everybody with the ability to intrude, which is ... everybody.

The neat trick of Before Sunrise was that as between the two of them, there were no obstacles for Jesse and Celine. They were perfect according to each other's greedy and generous interpretation. Everything that happened made them like each other more; every conversation they had made them seem more mutually well-suited. It's an almost perfect document of the intoxication of first meetings, of the sense that every time your phone wasn't ringing, this is the person who was supposed to be calling you, and every time you felt a space next to you, this is the person who was supposed to be in it.

The obstacles were simply guts and time; he had to get on a train in the morning so he could catch his flight home, and if they weren't going to get lost, somebody would have to find the nerve to say something before they parted. (Note, if you are under 25: we didn't have Skype or smartphones or Facebook then, so sometimes people we really liked got lost. P.S. Looking for them is one of the first things we did with Google.)

In the break between the first movie and Before Sunset, the big lingering question was whether they kept their promise to meet again six months later so they wouldn't get lost. The answer? They didn't. Life had intruded, and they'd gotten lost. That second leg of the story started with a broken promise, which announced that we were in a different place with these two. They knew more; more had happened to them. Still, they fell instantly into those same talks and walks. The obstacles were still external but more complex — professional obligations, other relationships, timing, geography, and the assorted bullpucky of life that keeps most things from ever happening. They had the opportunity to take a regret and transform it into a rescue, it seemed.

But now they are over 40. They have children. They have outgrown the question that clearly was on their minds when they were in Vienna: Is this meant to be? Now, there's no such thing as "meant to be." Now, there's only whether or not they will keep trying.

Before Sunrise was a perfect little romance, and Before Sunset an equally impressive if less unexpected artifact, like a comet's tail. But when you see Before Midnight, it seems like it could all have only been leading to this story, and to these conversations.

This is a love story, as it turns out, rather than a fairy tale. And in a real love story, the roles of destiny and fate and chance, all of which are critical in Sunrise and still present in Sunset, fade over time, to the point where what's left is a bunch of choices, most of which are variations on a single theme — is this worth it? First it was magic, then it was a thicket of circumstances, now it's exhausting work and ultimately the weighing of options.

In a perfect inversion of the way we first met them, Jesse and Celine have all the time in the world in Greece. They can wander all they want, have all the sex they want, and certainly talk all they want. Nobody has a train to catch or another relationship; nobody has a reason to leave at all. Everything that makes it hard is in the room with them, not outside. And the writing plays fair, because everything that's in the way has been there from the beginning: she can be stubborn and defensive; he can be mean and dismissive when he thinks she's being irrational. (Remember the palm reader?) He's a sometimes tiresome writer; she's a sometimes self-righteous complainer. And all of that, or at least the groundwork for all of that, was there in Vienna and in Paris, and now it's there in Greece. It's not happy that scruffy youth often matures into embittered middle age, or that the young guy with a funny idea about a 24-hour-a-day cable-access reality show becomes the older guy who won't shut up about his high-concept book project, but it's fair.

But perhaps what's richest about taking these three films together is circling back to Jesse and Celine as nervous twentysomethings and seeing how filled with anxiety they were about the future. He dreaded being a bad father, she dreaded being stuck with a man who wanted to change her, and they both feared that they were doomed to become boring and sad and dead inside and that they'd lose the ability to feel like they did in that strange little bubble. When she asked him whether he knew any happy couples and he said he did, but he suspected them of lying to each other, it didn't seem at the time like they were talking about whether they could ever be happy, but now it seems like they were.

Back then, Celine told Jesse a story of her grandmother spending her life with a man other than the one she really loved. Jesse assures her the other guy would only have disappointed Grandma. "People have these romantic projections they put on everything," he tells her, "that's not based on any kind of reality."

They talk compulsively in that first movie about what will happen later — he coaxes her off the train by telling her she'll be glad she did it in 10 or 20 years. She wonders what he'll say about her years from now if they have sex on the one night they're together. They rehearse the conversations they'll have about each other. They wonder whether their little bubble might survive in daylight: he says, barely knowing her, that if his only choices were marrying her and never seeing her again, he'd marry her. But that's crazy, of course. You can't do that, of course. When it's morning, you get on the train, because that's what you do. Daylight intervenes.

And now that we know what was coming, nine years later and then nine years later, Sunrise is like a six-sided die turning into a 20-sided die. Those kids, that floppy-haired boy and that willowy girl, would be so glad if they knew what was coming, and so sad, and so scared, and so relieved.

It's not that there's never been a story told about the maturation of a relationship over years, but there is something about the way they executed these films, in real time, that cannot be duplicated with makeup. People age unpredictably — if you tried to dress up as You In 20 Years, you would fail, because there's a mystery to whether faces get craggier or softer or fuller, and to how women's hips change when they have kids. This is why people go to high school reunions: everyone is a forward projection brought to life. You are more in the past than in the present, a time traveler sent back to tell yourself who went gray first. The Before movies, taken together, are a trippy knot of consequences and anticipation, where seeing the last one makes you want to watch the first one and seeing the first one makes you want to watch the next one, because they all mean more as pieces than alone. Before Midnight is the flawed future of those kids in Before Sunrise; Before Sunrise is the bittersweetly remembered past of that couple in Before Midnight. There's a sense of forward and backward motion, because they've been truthful about the fact that everything looks one way now and a different way later.

Before I went to see Before Midnight, I watched Before Sunrise and commented that it was startling, even as someone who's seen it many times, to see how young they really were. And someone pointed out something remarkable to me: For those of us who were roughly the same age as Jesse and Celine, it's not that we don't remember how young they were; it's that we never registered how young they were to begin with, because we didn't register how young we were.

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.