Underrated/Overrated

UNDERRATED

Galactic’s ‘The Other Side of Midnight’: If you’ve been watching HBO’s “Treme,” odds are you’ve caught this jazz-funk ensemble lighting up New Orleans’ rich music scene. But those cameos are just a taste of the group’s raucous performances, captured here with this newly released live album. Featuring guest turns from Trombone Shorty and Cyril Neville, the recording is a brassy, hip-shaking snapshot of the Crescent City sound, no cable subscription required.

Seth Meyers: Just before the big news on Osama bin Laden, the story of last weekend was this “Saturday Night Live” star absolutely nailing the annual one-man political roast at the White House Correspondents’ Assn. Dinner. Not only was Meyers fearlessly hilarious in skewering the president, Donald Trump and his own network, he reminded everyone why “Weekend Update” remains the only part of the “SNL” broadcast that doesn’t warrant fast-forwarding through.

OVERRATED

The literary mash-up trend: It was easy to be charmed by the gleefully anarchic spirit behind “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” and “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter,” but Quirk Publishing’s genre-mashing mini empire is wearing thin. Can books based on clever but one-dimensional jokes really sustain their upcoming film adaptations? And as cute as the upcoming Kafka-tweak “The Meowmorphosis” seems in theory, is there really more to know beyond its cover?

The end of nightly news: With word that Katie Couric was stepping down from the “CBS Evening News,” many media watchers declared this was the end of the influential, world-in-a-half-hour evening news from the old Big Three. And that’s a shame. Sit with any 24-hour news network and try to get a measured summary of the day’s events in 30 minutes without ratings-grabbing sensationalism, ADD-afflicted headline crawls and argumentative pundits. You can’t.

—Chris Barton