Last night’s Breaking Bad season premiere was an absolutely riveting hour of television. I’d strongly recommend you catch up on this thing if you haven’t yet. And if you have already, do yourself a favor and check out Grantland’s exquisite interview with Vince Gilligan, analyzing some of the finer points of the episode.

Scott Tobias has a great summary of some recent Conan O’Brien-related pop culture paraphernalia, including the recent War for Late Night book by Bill Carter and Rodman Flender’s disappointing documentary, Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop:

All the attributes on display in Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop—the ceaseless drive to perform, the ability to connect broadly with audiences and improvise on the fly, and, yes, the need for constant gratification—underlines a point made in Carter’s The War For Late Night: Very few people can do what Conan does. Greater and lesser lights have tried and failed, from Magic Johnson to Pat Sajak to Chevy Chase to Dana Carvey, but only a handful can capably manage the various moving parts that go into the show—the monologue, the interviews, the remote segments and bits of sketch-comedy business—and get it done every night, in a marathon run with a finish line that keeps receding into the horizon. It takes a special kind of versatility and brilliance to pull it off (and I wouldn’t exclude Leno from that, however determinedly mediocre his show), and Conan, after a famously rough start, has logged the thousands upon thousands of hours to prove it. He’s a comic entertainer with very specific qualities: He’s not a stand-up, but he can get through monologues. He’s not an actor, but he can goof his way around desk and sketch bits. He’s a talk show host, a rare fusion of diverse attributes.

Interest in the unreleased teaser trailer for The Dark Knight Rises is at a fevered pitch. Yesterday, /Film took the unorthodox step of posting a description of the trailer. Sure, people might think such a posting goes too far in the world of fandom, but the interest has gotten so insane that every time we post ANYTHING related to The Dark Knight Rises, our servers stutter as thousands of film fans simultaneously click through the front page to see us eat of the scraps from Christopher Nolan’s table.

You could cluck your tongue and furrow your brow at this behavior. But above all others, Dustin Rowles from Pajiba totally gets it:

A movie like The Dark Knight Rises generates a ton of web traffic. For instance, that description of The Dark Knight Rises trailer on Slashfilm was retweeted over 100 times and Liked on Facebook nearly 300 times. It probably generated thousands of page views. So, while we were all making fun of Peter over at Slashfilm for posting it, he was probably laughing his ass off as his wallet grew three sizes because that one post generated more traffic than a lot of movie blogs put up in a week, a notion that makes some of the more high-minded assholes weep in their Ramen noodles. The economy is in the tank, but he just paid a writer for a week. He’s got an audience; he caters to it, and honestly — as TK so eloquently put it — the rest of us can go f*ck ourselves. After all, in the 100 or so comments underneath the description, what I didn’t see from his readers was, “You asshole. I can’t believe you posted this.” It’s taken for what it’s worth, and the world moves on. It’s not like we’re dealing with the debt crisis, like Emily Miller — a political reporter for the Washington Times — who actually tweeted in the midst of debt negotiations: “Forget debt ceiling … hello tan Clooney. RT @popsugar: Wow! Newly single #GeorgeClooney is lookin’ good in Cancun!”

Fascinating piece on Breaking Bad (via Donald), and how it compares favorably to The Wire, The Sopranos, and Mad Men (I agree on at least two of those counts):

It’s not just that watching [Walter] White’s transformation is interesting; what’s interesting is that this transformation involves the fundamental core of who he supposedly is, and that this (wholly constructed) core is an extension of his own free will. The difference between White in the middle of Season 1 and White in the debut of Season 4 is not the product of his era or his upbringing or his social environment. It’s a product of his own consciousness. He changed himself. At some point, he decided to become bad, and that’s what matters.

Stephen Colbert’s Jack White interviews are the funniest thing I have seen all year (and I include all the comedic films I’ve seen, although I exclude Bill Maher and Jane Lynch’s performance of Anthony Weiner’s sexting). White is the perfect foil for Colbert, with his deadpan, catatonic, and totally unimpressed demeanor. Together, they create comedic, musical gold.

Here’s part one of the three-part interview:

Be sure to check out part two and part three as well.

Eric D. Snider, with his usual hard-hitting (AKA hilarious) analysis.