The notoriously tight-lipped Matt Weiner has been giving many interviews, as have members of the cast, but everyone continues to play things close to the vest. In some relatively serious web-digging, I managed to find precious little concrete information about what to expect in Mad Men: Season 5, airing Sunday, 25 March.

In the process, I became fascinated at the hilarious ways in which Weiner-and-co. manage to converse about the new season without actually saying anything. From the eight or so short videos posted on AMCTV.com, the main thing I learned was about the various new menu items offered at Pizza Hut, whose ads (bizarrely, right?) ran before the video clips (also, gross!).

Season 1
It is 1960, and the historical event we move towards is the Kennedy/Nixon election. Much of this season is spent figuring out exactly where Don Draper came from. He cheats on Betty throughout, most notably with Midge (the Beat artist) and Rachel Menken (the Jewish department store owner), which Betty discovers in the season finale. We learn about Don (i.e., Dick Whitman) throughout flashbacks and his brother, who reemerges into Don’s life and later hangs himself.

When Pete discovers Don’s past (he took the identity of Don Draper, a man he served with in Korea), he threatens then attempts to blackmail him; upon learning the information, Bert Cooper famously remarks “who cares?” Oh yeah, and Peggy is unknowingly impregnated by Pete and, in a scene that perhaps inspired the series I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant, gives birth.

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.