Thanks to Paula Abdul, the bar for speaking coherently as a judge has been set remarkably low. Paula was one of the original judges when “American Idol” began 10 years ago, and she made the jump with Cowell to “X Factor” last year, where she continued to vend her particular brand of addled kindness, never saying anything mean or insightful, and often saying it in spacey and strange ways. Spears is, of course, way more famous than Paula Abdul, and if she sits on the panel and says nice, meaningless things to the contestants each and every show, she will have earned her money. (It’s basically what the booted Nicole Scherzinger did all last season of “X Factor,” and just by virtue of being Britney Spears, Britney will be better at it.)

“X Factor” doesn’t need a hyper-articulate ballbuster to do this job and do it well. The time of sharp, critical insight on the singing shows — which initially seemed so crucial to “Idol’s” massive success — has passed. If viewers regularly lament how dull and plodding the judging rounds are now that even Cowell has tempered his honesty, “Idol” remains the biggest show on television with a judging panel that consists of Steven Tyler, Jennifer Lopez and Randy Jackson, a group as likely to insult a singer as call a newborn baby ugly.

But even if all that’s required of Spears is a season’s worth of banal compliments, that will add up to more sustained speaking than Spears has ever publicly done before. Rarely, if ever, has there been a person as famous as Britney Spears who talks so infrequently. Her most famous moments are all gestural — dancing in music videos, performing on the stage at some MTV awards show, shaving her head, bashing a window. Long before her breakdown, she displayed an uncanny tendency to speak in linguistic white noise, to say sentences that contained almost no content, just lots of y’alls and “you knows” and “oh my goshes” and a basic mood of sweetness, excitement, gratitude, eventually disconnect, and more recently, in her conservatorship years, anxiety and discomfort.

If this doesn’t make Spears a perfect judge for “X Factor” it should make her a perfect character for “X Factor.” The drama of Britney — how she will be, what she will say, and how she will hold up — is a story line at least as compelling as the one that will play out with the performers, if not far more so. We’ve been watching her for 13 years, not merely half a TV season. It’s possible “X Factor” will be as good for her career as “Idol” has been for Jennifer Lopez’s, but it’s more likely it will be uncomfortable and upsetting, a full season of watching a zonked-out Spears nervously navigate a live TV show. But we Americans owe Britney Spears a pension and worker’s comp for pain and suffering risked for our entertainment, and I’m happy a major corporation is paying it out (to the tune of $15 million). However “X-Factor” goes for Britney, I can’t wait to see what she says.

So does a prospective new client, Max Rosenberg, who’s impressed that WASPy Roger Sterling has a wife named Siegel. He wonders if she’s related to someone he knows, leading his wife to gently remind him that they’re not related to every other Rosenberg, without adding the electrifying reason that’s a good thing. As Roger puts it to the client, they wants SCDP to sell Manischewitz to “a different kind of people” – after all, groups of people are different from each other, aren’t they? (North Carolina sure thinks so.) Even Jews are further subdivided by Roger into “Fiddler on the Roof” cast or audience members, a coded way of describing how assimilated they are.

“Different” is the polite code that Roger uses with the client, but with his man Ginsberg, he straight-talks about selling the product to “normal people – like me.” (Isn’t it great that we’re long past white males defining “normal” as being just like them?) Cultural ventriloquist Roger secretly uses a Jewish copywriter to produce an ad campaign to sell a traditionally Jewish wine to gentiles, before adding what Bert calls his “finesse” to it. That’s code for privileged WASP sheen, as when Roger talks boats with Max’s thoroughly assimilated son, who’s moved up from his father’s steerage class to Roger’s yacht class.

Roger’s double-talk extends to that “Semitic wife” of his who Bert’s unaware has already been circumcised from Roger’s marital staff, telling her that while on LSD she promised to help him any way she could. Jane one-ups Roger’s lie by double-talking her way into a second apartment, complaining that the old one has too many memories (and mothers-in-law) attached to it. “I feel like I can’t start a new life until I start a new life,” she argues, giving Betty some competition for self-actualizing platitudes – or bad soap opera dialogue. (It’s hard to tell the difference at times – unlike how easy it is to tell the difference between people — at least if you’re Roger.)

Jane shares with Betty an inability to take responsibility for her own acts, blaming Roger for ruining her new digs by digging her a bit too much after the client dinner, even though she starts to stop him before going ahead with their little housewarming. “Now this is no different than the last place,” Jane pouts about the apartment she’d considered “perfect” up to that moment, cluelessly conflating her emotional state with the situation she finds herself in.

If only she’d join Betty at that fount of philosophical wisdom, Weight Watchers, she’d have all the answers. Gleaning not only diet plans but life lessons from the weekly meetings, Betty uses them to complain about how very hard her life is and how proud she is of not overeating in response. Turning inside out the facilitator’s pre-Thanksgiving advice to not overeat but instead “fill ourselves with our children, our homes, our husbands, our health, our happiness,” Betty stuffs that old bird Henry with her newfound wisdom. “It’s so easy to blame our problems on others, but really we’re in charge of ourselves,” she advises primly after he complains that he “bet on the wrong horse and jumped ship for nothing” in leaving Nelson Rockefeller for John Lindsay, since Lindsay (unlike everyone else in this episode) is choosing not to compete.

In marrying, both Henry and Betty have bet on the wrong horse, and each is coping with it in their own way – Henry by secretly feeding himself what he misses in the dark shadows of the night, and Betty by embracing a strict diet while helping herself to a heaping plate of revenge. Her transparent attempt to turn Sally against Don and Megan fails only because women know what games their gender plays. Having seen Megan partly undressed through a window, Megan in turn sees through Betty, physically holding Don back from the angry call that would have made Betty smile as much as that loving spoonful of stuffing she savors. Having chided Megan with “Who’s the child here?” when she says she was trying to respect Sally’s wishes, Don quickly realizes that he’s the one who’s reacted childishly and apologizes – showing once again how he’s changing, in large part because he has a wife who’s leading him in a new direction.

Unfortunately, this maturity isn’t duplicated at the office, where he competes with the far younger Ginsberg to prove whose SnoBalls are bigger. But there’s never really any contest between the juvenile Ginsberg, who channels the child’s desire to throw a snowball in authority’s face (including the “pig,” which will soon be code for the cop in his ad), versus the manly Don, who channels the devil himself to chuckle, “This could change everything.”

Like Jane, Don wants a new life, and after trying to change everything at home, he now senses that he needs to do so at work, especially after having looked at the portfolio of the year’s ads that Joan presents and realizing he has nothing to contribute to it except his anti-tobacco letter from a year before. “We’re still suffering for it, might as well get something out of it,” he decides, an approach that Ginsberg would probably joke is his people’s motto and that could double as self-help advice for Betty and Jane.

Goaded by this lack of product and the sight of Ginsberg’s name on so many ads, Don feels inspired to create for the first time since he married Megan, and riffs his way into a devilishly good campaign that he sells “the hell out of” to the client. “Even me,” are the words Don puts into the thirsty devil’s mouth as he devours a SnoBall – a sentiment echoed by Ginsberg, who’s amazed that even Don can come up with something that good after not writing an ad for so long.

But Ginsberg’s grudging admiration turns to mere grudge when he finds out that Don ruthlessly edited him out of the friendly and fair competition he believed they were having. Apparently he needs the same disillusioning speech that Roger gives Peggy after she says he only cares about himself and he retorts that she’s just the same because, “That’s the way it is, it’s every man for himself.” Roger’s masculine phrasing was the norm at the time but nevertheless underlines Peggy’s objection to the idea that choosing Ginsberg for Manischewitz was a no-brainer. “I’m sick of hearing people think that way. I’m not an airplane either. I can write for anything.”

While Ginsberg makes a joke about Roger assuming he’s Jewish, Peggy’s genuinely angry at being categorized, having felt the impact of that thinking in negative ways (being denied accounts or having to work hidden in the background) while so far Ginsberg has benefited from being Jewish while also getting “non-denominational” work due to being male. Having earlier declared that he needed a penis working on Mohawk, Roger apparently doesn’t care if it’s circumcised — just as Jane points out that he’s suddenly OK with letting people know he married a Jewish woman. Here the show accurately portrays the fact that religious and even racial barriers often dropped before ones that kept women from competing equally with men in business and other pursuits.

The result is that the women are left to compete with each other, as both Betty and Sally do with Megan (and Megan does with her acting friend, Julia). Betty’s visibly jealous of Megan’s relationship with her children, as well as envious of Megan’s youthful beauty and Don’s love for her, which is underscored by a romantic note he’s scrawled on the back of Bobby’s drawing. In revealing Don’s first platonic marriage, Betty hopes to poison several wells – making Sally angry at both Don and Megan for hiding the truth, and casting Megan as merely the latest in a string of wives and therefore unimportant. (We can only assume Betty sees herself as different since she alone gave Don children, as when she explains to Sally that on the family tree Henry and Megan “get a branch off of us because we’re your parents,” showing the primacy of blood relationships to her, with everyone else mere appendages.)

Competing with Don for Megan’s love, Sally argues that she was friends with her first, and scowlingly demanding that Megan not betray her secrets to Don. Both Megan and Don tell Sally she’s just a little girl, but she only objects to Don categorizing her this way, leading him to disclose the hard truth that “you should realize your mother doesn’t care about hurting you, she just wants to hurt us.” Earlier Megan had taught Sally the actor’s trick of creating tears by keeping your “eyes wide open and think(ing) about something that makes you sad.” But Sally chooses to keep her eyes open to the truth while not getting sad but even. Proving she deserved the A+ she got for working on her family tree, Sally goes right to the root of the problem, axing Betty’s attempt at revenge by telling her that everyone had a love fest sharing the merry wives of Whitman.

Not so merry is Pete, who’d love to share the wife of his train buddy, and who sucks up to a New York Times reporter only to find the flattering profile he’d expected about “hip” agencies has omitted SCDP and turned into a “bullshit piece on the usual assholes” in which the writer “compares them to philosophers.” One man’s philosopher is another man’s asshole, of course, as the shelves of self-help books can attest — and those two identities also tend to shift as the times and fashions change. (As the out-of touch Bert shows when he tries to correct Pete’s use of “hip” to “hep.”)

Pete himself is the designated asshole of SCDP, and both Bert and Roger compete with him by secretly wooing Manischewitz, for reasons that Roger explains to Ginsberg in dark shadowy terms indeed: “When a man hates another man very, very much sometimes he wants to know something is his even if in the end he has to give it up.”

Where things end up is precisely the question in any story, of course. As Ginsberg says when he sees the Pop Art painting in Roger’s office, “I like the connect the dots. What does it end up being?”  What each character on “Mad Men” will end up being – enlightened or disillusioned, successful or defeated, happy or bitter – remains undefined, the dots waiting to be connected once they realize they have the power to do so. Each seems to be stumbling along unaware, from Ginsberg not realizing what the poem he’s quoting from means, to Don believing that competing with Ginsberg doesn’t matter to him, to Roger not understanding why he feels the need to take everything for himself, to Betty who’s grateful for what she has only to the extent that she can feel superior to others.

Like Don, they each need to find a light bulb to dispel the dark shadows and see both themselves and other people better – how we each are different, and how we are all the same.

Things are very different today. Kid-targeted movies filled with teenage actors like “The Hunger Games” and the “Harry Potter” franchise have found a huge adult audience, while actors like 15-year-old Chloë Moretz (who stars in the new movie “Hick,” opening this week) and the Fanning sisters are given prominent roles in serious dramas. On TV, children have become a regular part of many casts, from sitcoms (“The Middle,” “Modern Family”) to dramas (“Shameless,” ‘The Walking Dead”). Child actors, once a sign of cheesiness and unprofessional conduct, have become integral to the success of a large number of critically respected and commercially successful entertainment properties. And not only that, many of these child actors have gotten really, really good.

Think of Kodi Smit-McPhee from “The Road,” holding his own next to Viggo Mortensen. Or Emma Kenny’s Debs on “Shameless,” capable of moving from a funny scene — yelling “Eat my ass!” at a video game — to the heartbreaking moments she shares with her unappreciative father, slipping him beer or covering his passed-out body with a blanket without getting any thanks. Or even Aubrey Anderson-Emmons, the new Lily on “Modern Family,” only 4 years old but emphasizing the weirdness rather than the cuteness of the 2-year-old she plays. (When she was cast, other cast members talked about how good of an actress she was, which seemed strange to say about a 4-year-old, but she’s proved it this season.)

The rise of the quality child actor (coming, it should be noted, considerably later than the rise of “quality” TV) can be traced to two general phenomena. One is that scriptwriters and directors figured out how to use child actors effectively, emphasizing a naturalistic style that let them fit in with their costars and lose all the groan-worthy signals that a movie was just for kids. But the other is the emergence of that very parallel entertainment universe. Nickelodeon and Disney didn’t just create hugely successful TV shows and movies; they also created a reason for more and more child actors to come to California, to learn their craft and to be able to fill those new, cheese-free parts.

Why were child actors so reviled throughout the ’80s? Here are some names that might jog your memory: Michelle Tanner. Jennifer Keaton. Willis Jackson. Child actors seemed either designed to run onstage and say something cute to elicit an “awww!” in unison from the studio audience, or to smirk and hack their way through the broad teen comedies filling mall multiplexes. While directors like Stephen Spielberg and John Hughes were able to elicit compelling performances from younger actors, their technique didn’t seem to take and derivatives of their successes seemed to share more with the B-movies of yore than they did with “E.T.” or “The Breakfast Club.” (It didn’t help that a lot of those “kids” were being played by adults, either.)

It’s no surprise, then, that anyone backing a TV show or movie intended to be seen as serious and high-quality would do everything they could to keep kids out of it; even good shows focused on kids couldn’t survive on network TV during the dead zone between the mid-’90s and early ’00s, as “My So-Called Life” and “Freaks and Geeks” could attest. It’s a style of acting we still see today: think poor Jake Lloyd playing young Anakin Skywalker in “The Phantom Menace” in such a cutesy way that it rendered the movie nearly unwatchable. Or most of the actors on Disney and Nick shows, for that matter. (Though at least the kids are playing themselves; previously many “teenagers” were played by adults.)

Sometime during that fallow period, though, producers figured out how to not only capture that Spielberg magic, but even improve on it. There are times (see above, or here) when the acting in Spielberg’s kiddie flicks is so unaffected that it comes close to breaking the fourth wall. Young actors are now placed in fantastic situations (wizard school, vampire wars, Upper East Side prep schools) and expected to convincingly embody a real character — and they’ve become very good at it.

“Over the years, the acting style has changed,” said Harriet Greenspan, a casting agent and acting instructor in Los Angeles who has worked with a number of kids’ shows. “It’s become a lot more real. Thirty years ago, acting was acting. We look for kids that aren’t acting anymore, that are more real.”

The general path of child actors has always been commercials to TV shows to movies, but there was a long-standing block at that second level: There simply weren’t very many TV shows child actors could work on. Most “children’s entertainment” was cartoons or educational programming staffed by adults. Cable changed all that. While the first shows for tweens are generally thought to have aired on NBC during its Saturday-morning block of “Saved by the Bell” and its spinoffs, cable created a venue for kids to watch themselves acting like kids — and, unsurprisingly, it turned out they really liked it. (Cable also created the split, in its way: If the kids were off watching tween shows, “family hour” shows didn’t have to feature cute kids to get the parents to watch.) This marked an important shift in how kids were portrayed.

“Nickelodeon first came up with its ‘Kids Rule’ slogan quite purposefully in the early ’90s,” Dave Moore, a media expert at Temple University, wrote in an email. “This necessarily transformed kid actors from subservient to adult programs to perceived ‘rebels’ acting out against authority.”

Both Disney and Nickelodeon slowly built up universes of programming and stars that spanned media from TV to music to movies, a world with kids playing kids to an audience of kids. The acting there was frequently as broad as you might have seen on any ’80s sitcom, but that wasn’t the important thing. “Child actor” isn’t a career anyone decides to pursue; first you get a gig, and then you make a life of it. The emergence of so many more roles for younger actors created a much larger pool of actors other projects could draw from. By the time a child actor is being asked to play an 8-year-old, he or she is likely to have more experience now than ever before.

“The trend of ‘grooming’ child actors from a young age has probably been facilitated in an age with more media exposure sooner,” Moore noted. But this has not always been a positive development.

“It’s a kids’ world out there,” said Greenspan. “So many families are picking up their lives and moving to California because of their child’s career. Of course, kids get bad advice — they get one role and the parents pack up and move, and sometimes it’s months or years before they get another gig.”

Exploitation has always been a concern when it comes to child actors; while California has strict rules about how long kids are allowed to work per day, it can’t control the bad decisions parents might make when their kid isn’t working. Bogus “talent searches” and managers ostensibly trying to discover the next big child actor or model pop up regularly in cities small and large, and most of these are scams. Nor has the fate of child actors generally been smooth.

All that said, the return of younger characters to mainstream entertainment has been a welcome one. In the last decade, both comedies and dramas have gotten a lot better at showing us adults who are recognizable humans, not just collections of showbiz gestures assembled into a numbing whole. While that sophistication in storytelling techniques was happening, though, children were largely left out, as if adults wouldn’t be interested in seeing compelling portrayals of kids (even as they cropped up in shows like “Malcolm in the Middle” or movies like “The Sixth Sense”). Now, Chloë Moretz can give us a dark comedic take on a character her age while Helena Bonham Carter does the same; Kiernan Shipka shows us how girls like Sally Draper deal with the socio-historical shifts of the ’60s just as Elisabeth Moss does the same for young women; and if Chandler Riggs’ portrayal of Carl on “The Walking Dead” sometimes makes you root for his death, well, he’s right there alongside Dale and Lori. On the children’s shows of Disney and Nickelodeon, kids have been portrayed from their own perspective for the last few decades. Now, adults are getting to see kids as real humans, too.

The Dayenu I’ve been humming this week has the same tune, but slightly different lyrics. They go like this: If NBC had aired just one season of “Community,” Dayenu. If NBC had aired the missing pen bottle episode, Dayenu. And the Christmas claymation episode, the my dinner with Abed episode, the Dungeons & Dragons episode, and the paintball sequel, Dayenu. If Inspector Spacetime, day-day-enu, day-day-enu, day-day-enu, dayenu dayenu.

The “Dayenu” sentiment, the knowledge that something really would have been enough while simultaneously not being enough at all, is all around this week as the major networks decide what series they’re keeping and canceling in preparation for next week’s upfronts, the yearly presentations they make to advertisers in which they unveil their new shows and schedules. To make room for all the new shows, the networks have to ax some old ones, decision-making that can be painless — as when, earlier this week, Fox decided not to renew “Alcatraz” or “The Finder” — or infuriating and nerve-wracking — as when NBC took its time picking up “Parenthood,” “30 Rock” “Parks and Recreation” and “Community.”

If it seems ridiculous to compare the parting of the Red Sea to getting a fourth season of “Community,” well, yes, it is ridiculous. As disappointing as it would be not to see new episodes of  “Parks” or “Community,” or ABC’s “Happy Endings” (which is still in limbo) ever again, these series have already aired more episodes than “Freaks & Geeks” or “Arrested Development” did, truncated TV series that are still perfectly satisfying, hugely influential, and really fun to watch, over and over again, on DVD. There has been enough.

But if there’s nothing logical or reasonable about the Dayenu mentality when it comes to TV, there is something emotionally intuitive about it and the “sure, there have already been enough episodes to make for a really sick DVD box set of this series, but there needs to be more” feeling. And it’s that you can have enough TV, but you can’t have enough of some people, even if they happen to be stuck in TV shows. Underlying all the gruff, screechy bluster about how idiotic NBC or ABC would be to cancel beloved series isn’t anger, but attachment. We audience members don’t know what next year’s episodes will be like, but we do know they’ll have certain characters in them, characters who have never, ever asked us how we’re doing, but who we have invested lots of time and caring into nonetheless.

On last night’s episode of “Parks and Recreation,” Leslie Knope achieved her lifelong dream of getting elected to public office. It would have been a great ending to the series, until one starts to imagine all the things Leslie would do with her new job. Then the ending, good as it was, didn’t seem like enough anymore.

The 10 aforementioned murder series can be divided into two general categories, crime-solving shows and the corpse-studying shows. Both activities take place in both, but with a different emphasis. Programs in the first category, like “The Mentalist,” “Castle,” “NCIS” and “Criminal Minds,” have forensic scientists in the cast who can and do deliver helpful deductions about any cadaver, but the main characters mostly interview living people. On programs in the second category, like “Bones,” “Body of Proof” and the “CSIs,” the main characters mostly examine dead ones. The bodies in the crime-solving shows tend to be significantly less gruesome and graphic than the ones in the corpse-studying shows: The corpses may be a major plot point in both, but they’re only a major prop in the latter, where they have to look the part.

“The Mentalist” and “NCIS” begin with a corpse, but rather than some goopy, dripping horror show, it tends to resemble a not too mutilated human being. (“Bones,” as I’ll get into later, usually leads with a corpse more likely to resemble hamburger meat than a person.) These bodies serve a relatively staid Pavlovian function: You see one, and you know what’s coming next, 40 minutes of case cracking. Since the originality of the caper does not stem directly from the originality of the cadaver, standard murder — guns, stabbings and fights, as opposed to death by sky diving, motorboat or giant chocolate bar — tends to suffice. (This is not always the case: “NCIS” has done episodes about, for example, a murderer who cuts off and collects his victims’ feet, but it still tends to be more straightforward about cause of death than shows like “CSI” and “Bones.”)

This year “Castle” began to hew to this formula as well. In the past, “Castle,” which is a more jokey, lighthearted show than the “NCISes” and “The Mentalist,” had gone the over-the-top murder route — a burned-up guy found in a pizza oven; lumps of flesh stuck in the spin cycle. This year, episodes revolved around the death of a contestant on a show much like “Dancing With the Stars,” a victim who had teeth marks all over his body, and a third encased in concrete, but none of them looked particularly gnarly.

Dead bodies often look horrifying on “Criminal Minds,” which is about a group of law enforcement officials who track down serial killers. These serial killers, psychopaths and perverts with dark and creepy pathologies are a much more twisted bunch than the kind of kicky, oddball murderers who populate a series like “Castle,” and “Criminal Minds” is a much more twisted show. On it, a number of lifeguards show up dead … with their genitals cut off. Women show up murdered … with their lips removed. A man in a wheelchair murders prostitutes … with the help of his parents.

If all murder shows let the audience have its cake and eat it too, to identify with the good guy, but get the kicks of seeing the work of the bad one (or, to watch a group do-gooders help bring a victim, often young and attractive, to justice, but also to get to see her laid out half-naked in a morgue), “Criminal Minds” comes closest to tripping over this dichotomy. It regularly tangles with plots so creepy and horrible, it almost ruptures the real sanctity of the procedural watching experience: the feeling that, whatever is happening on-screen, you are safe at home.

This sensation is never a risk while watching the “CSIs,” shows so fizzy about murder they are, in their way, more disturbing than “Criminal Minds,” despite being much, much easier to watch. On the “CSIs” the murders are outlandish, zany and enjoyably gross: Three guys die in a car crash, and a fourth very pink brain is found with them; a woman drained of blood  is hung upside down in a haunted house; a guy gets run over by a motorboat, and the audience is treated to his ground-up throat; someone tosses body parts around Hell’s Kitchen. And those are just plots from this season. In recent years the “CSIs” have done episodes about patty sniffers, food orgies and death by alligator and dinosaur. One just has to compare “CSI” to the far less successful “Body of Proof” to see how effective its jocular attitude is. “Body of Proof” is much more serious, the plots are less crazy, it doesn’t revel in its victims’ wounds, and it is hardly any fun at all, and not nearly as successful.

But when it comes to taking the death out of murder, there is no show on TV as successful as “Bones.” The light, jokey “Bones” is about a forensic anthropologist, Dr. Brennan, who studies, yes, bones, and who is only brought in on a case when a body is in disgusting shape. This year Dr. Brennan has dealt with a head and melted body found in plastic wrap; a postal service-ready box of red goop, packing Styrofoam and a skull; an eyeball in a toilet; a body in a terrarium full of white rats; a guy pancaked so totally to the road, he had to be spatulaed off. “Bones” has an antic, enthusiastic approach to gore — more is always better — and seems to be crafted by a horror movie and Halloween enthusiast who treats each episode as an excuse to show off his or her impressive skills with awesome and icky make-believe. Of course, to have the intended good time effect, a key change has been made: None of the bodies on “Bones” much resemble people, making it much easier to forget the box of goop in the lab was ever a person. But, as all the murder shows ably demonstrate, that’s not such a hard trick to pull off.