The Internet has revolutionized the way we watch TV. We can chat with, tweet at and connect to not only other fans of our favorite shows – but their stars and creators. We can rescue shows from cancellation or in rare cases, bring them back to life. But we also need experts to help curate our conversations, to extract the good ideas from the tumultuous sea of noise, complaints and .gifs. Enter Todd VanDerWerff, the TV Editor of The A.V. Club, a digital beacon for thoughtful insight and analysis amidst the epic influx of fan commentary. Todd makes his living writing and talking about TV and stands as a resident authority for a generation who has come to subsist on a steady diet of episodic recaps.

Todd was kind enough to let Character Grades pick his brilliant brain. We discuss what makes a compelling TV character, fan reactions to Girls and Breaking Bad and his love-hate relationship with Twitter.

Here are Some Highlights:

Todd on GIRLS:

I’m always surprised. The reactions to Girls always surprise me. It was actually last year, but when I posted our review of the pilot, which was a cross-talk between me and Meredith Blake, we gave it an A. Maybe that was a little high, but I grade pilots based on potential and I saw all the potential in the world in that.

It was just immediate. People who had not seen the show, but had seen the marketing – I get this a lot with pilots, it’s people who’ve seen the marketing and assume the show cannot be as good or as bad or even as mediocre as I’m saying it is because they’ve seen the ads and they were really bad or really great or whatever.

Girls, just from the very first show, people came out of the woodwork. They were just crazy about it and it just never let up. If it had only been that week, if it had been people reviewing the marketing and saying, “How can this be good because the marketing is so bad?” I would understand that. But there’s just this colossal divide between 98% of the critical community on the one side and people who don’t like it on the other. Even though it’s not the case because I look at the numbers of people who vote on the show in our little “grade the thing” [ed note: This is how The A.V. Club allows users to submit their own grades for episodes] and the people who like it vastly outnumber the people who don’t like it. The people who don’t like it are the ones who do all the talking.

On TV’s Most original Character:

I think you’ve really got to look at the characters that other people start copying right away.

Within the last 10 years, my mind keeps circling back to Abed on Community, who I think was a different way to do a sitcom character. And I have some issues with Community right now but I think they still kind of have an idea of how to write Abed and that’s what makes me think they’re going to figure out how to write the show again.

An excellent read if I do say so myself and I do (and not just because my boss wrote it!). Click the link and read more you beautiful, beautiful monster.