While you look at photos of “what’s left” after last year’s Kontinental Hockey League’s plane crash, Bernie Goldberg laments the tragedy and asks a question: “Why were some of the world’s best hockey players on this plane in the first place?” Goldberg’s segment for this week’s Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel provides some possible answers. Initially focused through the story of Ruslan Salei, whose widow Bethann and their four-year-old hockey-playing son offer a glimpse at the consequences of KHL’s bad decisions, the segment points out that the KHL has recently been offering players huge contracts in order to rebuild Russia’s reputation as a hockey powerhouse. But it has not looked after them. Goldberg speaks with a Russian pilot now flying for a US carrier, former KHL coach Barry Smith, and a current player whose identity is obscured because he “fears retribution.” All point to the atrocious conditions of the planes used for teams, old Soviet contraptions flown by undertrained pilots.

“I will always be black,” says Tamu Smith, an actress and member of the Mormon Church. “I don’t mind defending the Church to black people. I do mind defending my blackness to the Church.” And with that, Smith lays out a dilemma facing many black members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and one explored in Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Black Mormons, premiering on Documentary Channel on 21 February. Even as white Mormons have become increasingly visible in popular culture, thanks to Big Love, Mitt Romney, and Matt Stone and Trey Parker, black LDS members continue to grapple with a difficult history. That is, from 1849 to 1978, the Church refused to ordain black priests, that is, it refused them the status granted to all other LDS male heads of households. Leaders claimed they were awaiting a “revelation” to overturn their policy.

This handy guide answers the question that I’ve been asked more than any other this TV season: When is Game of Thrones, HBO’s swords-and-treachery epic, coming back? As you’ll see (below), it happens to be the same night that The Killing, AMC’s murder maze, returns for its second season. And there’s more new programming than you can shake a remote at.

So, yes, it’s going to be a busy spring. Good news indeed for TV viewers. There’s star power (Dustin Hoffman, Ashley Judd) and casting quirks (Julianne Moore as Sarah Palin; Dawson’s Creek’s James Van Der Beek as a comic version of himself). Enough palaver. Let’s plunge right in.

OK, I admit it… largely on account of I’ve just finished a lengthy essay on Horrible Histories, so there’s no sense denying it: My interest in new SkyOne Britcom Spy—currently also available on Hulu.com in the US—was initially about seeing more of one particular Horrible Histories star, Mathew Baynton, in an environment I didn’t have to keep justifying every time another adult walked past the TV.

On the plus side, this means the readership will be spared the usual rant re: how only in TV-land would we be expected to believe either Baynton or Spy’s star, 6’4” Darren Boyd, as random computer-shop schlubs. No offense to my local Best Buy, but one look at these two and I immediately thought of 87 questions I needed to ask about cabling alone.

Beavis & Butt-head have returned to television after a nearly 15 year respite. Highland High’s favorite students haven’t changed all that much, which is fairly comforting. Yet, as welcome a presence as MTV’s witless and unwitting arbiters of taste may be, these two idiots have yet to repeat the sound and fury that accompanied their original run in the mid-‘90s.

With so much “reality”-based drivel having set a not-so-lofty standard, perhaps we’ve all grown a little too accustomed to shock factor television. Furthermore, Beavis and Butt-head paved the way for even more outrageous prime-time and cable network cartoons that tackle hot button topics of the day. Since Beavis & Butt-head dropped out of sight, shows like South Park and Family Guy have more than picked up the slack with off-color hilarity and social commentary.