Every movie should either be about a haunted trampoline or a dog who is also a detective. However, sometimes movies insist on being about other things. Why anyone would want to explore the intricacies of the human condition instead of watching a dog solve mysteries will forever escape me, but if I can’t stop these films from happening, I can at least hold them to standards.

So here is a tier list for the types of social commentary seen in both TV and film. From lowest to highest:

• The Saturday Night Live Tier

Never be in the Saturday Night Live Tier. Retire from writing and join Greenpeace before you allow yourself to be in the Saturday Night Live Tier. Move to the Netherlands and make clogs for farmers before allowing yourself to take up residence in the Saturday Night Live Tier, which is the Sacramento of tiers.

The SNL Tier does not actually include comment in its commentary, which is impressive because 70% of the word commentary is the word comment. An SNL sketch about the news consists mostly of reminding the audience that the news exists. This is not commentary. If I tell you that there is a tree outside my window, I have not commented on the tree outside my window – I have just pointed out that there is a tree outside my window. A baby can do this.

Do not be in the SNL tier of commentary. Become a barista instead. People will always need coffee.

• The Mountainhead Tier

The Mountainhead Tier is better than the SNL Tier because falling asleep behind the wheel of your car and driving directly into the Grand Canyon and landing on top of a bighorn sheep who was just minding his own fucking business and blasting the both of you straight to hell in a gruesome fireball of iron chaos and noise is still somehow better than the SNL Tier.

Here is what characterizes the Mountainhead Tier, which means well and does a lot right, but is still slightly off the mark:

Character is lost in the commentary. The writer clearly has opinions, and knows how to convey those opinions, but in their eagerness to be heard has crafted too precise a portrait; dialogue doesn’t sound like humans conversing so much as robots reciting information from a Wikipedia page.

While the writer deserves a lot of credit for doing some really good stuff – actually having an opinion on something, for starters, but also crafting characters that represent different aspects of the topic in question, and placing those characters in disparate situations so as to highlight the various grim realities of the subject matter – it’s hard to get any more emotionally invested in the story beyond, “these fucking guys, am I right?”

• The Superman (2025) Tier

In this tier you have an extremely moist David Corenswet delivering a speech about how adhering to values in an imperfect world is agonizingly difficult but also noble and necessary. The upside to this tier is that it is awesome. The downside is that you have to be Superman (2025) for it to work.

• The Network Tier

I hope you weren’t expecting this list to conclude in a plot twist, because fuck me if Network isn’t at the top of the commentary food-chain for a reason. It understands that the best commentary is like makeup, in that you’re not supposed to consciously notice it. Good commentary informs rather than displaces the role of the human condition in storytelling. It paints the edges of perception and quietly influences your appreciation of what you’re watching, which allows social insight to be laundered into your brain so effectively that things like a Communist terrorist group negotiating a television contract or Ned Beatty ranting about God feel completely natural. The specifics of the plot can get as far afield as you want but you’ll still be along for the journey because the emotions are real.

Network is the best. Always try to be like Network.

Oops, I forgot to put a joke in this segment. SNL is like if your brain could get kidney stones.