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. 

Based on the much loved Inspector Morse series, taken from the novels by Colin Dexter, Endeavour is a prequel, but to describe it as such feels a touch unjust. With a more imaginative title than Young Morse or similar, Endeavour is free to stand on its own merit.

As played by Sean Evans (Ashes to Ashes, The Take), a relative unknown, Endeavour Morse begins the series as an introverted young detective constable, unsure of his place in the world. He’s on the verge of leaving the force, for lack of an intellectual challenge, when called to join the search for missing schoolgirl Rose Tremlett. As with the original series, Endeavour is set in an idealised Oxford of cloistered colleges and leafy suburbs. The setting, lushly filmed, together with Endeavour’s careful pacing, gives the sense of conferring a privilege to viewers, a glimpse into a rarefied world running parallel to ours.

The thing is, the British attitude toward how one might go about teaching history is a bit more… relaxed than most.

Not that this has traditionally trickled down to UK classrooms anymore than it has North American ones; only that it’s not surprising that when the floodgates did finally open, it happened in the land of 1066 and All That, et endless seq.. When once you’ve decided to adopt Rowan Atkinson as a media icon, there’s not much use trying to prevent children learning about the Renaissance from the perspective of a sewer rat.

Thus was enabled the origin story of the best-beloved Horrible Histories franchise. When asked circa 1992 by Scholastic Books UK to write an historically-themed joke book with a few factoids thrown in, British children’s author Terry Deary had traumatic flashbacks to his struggles to stay awake during middle school courses on the subject. Wouldn’t it be much more fun, Deary suggested instead, if he were to write a book of historical factoids with some jokes thrown in…?

As he delved into the ‘serious’ history texts, that quite naturally evolved into lots of jokes—in fact, into the entire grand gold mine of black comedy that is human civilization throughout the ages, just naturally packed full of the kind of bodily-fluid-filled gags that invariably set children to squealing happily. All of it underpinned by the particular sort of shrewdly anarchistic cleverness that the UK media have been on high alert for, oh, just about f40 years now. Hey, “Chapter One: The Dead Pirate Parrot Sketch” has a nice ring to it…