Even the people who make your favorite pop culture have their own favorite pop culture. In Surprise Top Five, we ask them to list, off the cuff, their five favorites in a particular field of interest. They get no advance warning.

The Internet features more than its share of negativity and snark—sometimes you’ve just gotta vent. But there’s plenty of room for love, too. With Fan Up, we ask pop-culture people we admire to tell us about something they really, really like.

As the ’80s passed its midpoint, there was an increasing sense that the multi-camera sitcom had done all it could. It’s not hard to see why this was the case. Writers who had come up on the socially conscious, workplace sitcoms of the ’70s were increasingly slotted into family comedies with cute kids, because that’s…

In entertainment, an awful lot of stuff happens behind closed doors, from canceling TV shows to organizing music festival lineups. While the public sees the end product on TVs, movie screens, or radio dials, they don’t see what it took to get there. In Expert Witness, The A.V. Club talks to industry insiders about the…

(This is part two of a two-part series. For part one, click here.)

Walter White dies at the end of Breaking Bad.

Welcome to the Music Roundtable, a blatant rip-off of TV Club’s TV Roundtable feature. Here, music writers and fans discuss recent reissues, hot new releases, or just records we like. This week, we’re talking about Soundgarden’s 1994 album Superunknown, which is getting a 5-disc deluxe reissue.

“The Old Man In The Cave” (season 5, episode 7; originally aired 11/8/1963)

Adjust Your Tracking: The Untold Story Of The VHS Collector
People will collect just about anything, and the idea of collecting a basically obsolete format seems just about as pointless as collecting porcelain figurines. But the obsessives in the documentary Adjust Your Tracking aren’t just grabbing anything released…

“Tell me a story, Daddy.”

Welcome to the Tournament Of Episodes, an unending game of bloodsport between some of the best episodes of the 2013-14 TV season, inspired by The Morning News’ Tournament Of Books. To learn more and see the schedule, go here.

Welcome back to AVQ&A, where we throw out a question for discussion among the staff and readers. Consider this a prompt to compare notes on your interface with pop culture, to reveal your embarrassing tastes and experiences, and to ponder how our diverse lives all led us to convene here together. Got a question you’d…

Judd Apatow and Gillian Jacobs might be combining their cult TV powers to save the day for Hulu, which has struggled to make a mark in the original content game. (This is despite the fact that it has several fine imports, like Rev. and Moone Boy, which you should really just watch the both of already.) According to …

Welcome to the Tournament Of Episodes, an unending game of bloodsport between some of the best episodes of the 2013-14 TV season, inspired by The Morning News’ Tournament Of Books. To learn more and see the schedule, go here.

Is it any wonder that the first series from Damon Lindelof since Lost, the show that made his name and reputation, is all about the unbearable horror that is living under an unsolvable mystery? In The Leftovers, every single character lives with an unknowable at the center of their universe; a single, strange event…

“White Rabbit” (season 1, episode 5; originally aired 10/20/2004)

Here’s what’s up in the world of TV for Wednesday, June 25. All times are Eastern.

1. Spartacus
Game Of Thrones has left the air for another long hiatus. The HBO fantasy series became an even bigger hit in its fourth season, and at times seemed as if it was the only TV show airing, so breathlessly did the show’s fans and pretty much everybody in the media hype every twist and turn. (We at The A.V.…

It’s not a good sign that most of the conflicts in Tyrant could be averted by a few people getting on a plane. The series tries to point this out at several occasions, but the reasoning for why the characters at the show’s center don’t simply stand up and leave the country they’re in grows more and more specious the…

1-4. Kevin, Gene, Feldman, and Vargas, Seinfeld (1996)
Introduced to the Seinfeld universe in season eight’s “The Soul Mate,” Tim DeKay’s Kevin is depicted as a perfect match for Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Elaine. They’re introduced through a mutual skepticism toward procreation, though those convictions aren’t as strong a…