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To gauge the practicality of investing the long years of speculative writing that it takes to produce a first novel, I asked my agent, Kate Garrick of DeFiore & Company, to estimate the percentage of the first novels submitted to her she considers saleable. Her answer (like all these answers, via e-mail):

I'd probably qualify it a little by saying that I'm only looking for certain kinds of books at any given moment, but I tend to receive queries that cover the whole spectrum of publishing, and so it's absolutely possible a lot of the books I pass on for being outside my wheelhouse will go on to find homes.

That said: probably 1%? Maybe a little less.

This is a monster sold on a sigh. For all of the bombast, the buildings falling, and the brawling beasties, the moment when this Godzilla is most impressive, the moment he suddenly transcends his digital underpinnings and feels like a real presence, is one of his subtlest and quietest. During a lull in a battle among the skyscrapers of downtown San Francisco, the danger around him briefly subsides; his head droops momentarily, his body heaves ever so slightly downward, and he exhales quietly. The fearsome jaws, knifelike talons, and spiky plates on his back might scream world-destroying lizard god, but that sigh just murmurs, "I'm gonna need a minute here."

Godzilla is nearing retirement age, with nearly three dozen movies under his scaly belt, so as the franchise enters its seventh decade, it's fair to ask any director attempting to resurrect the series whether there's a good reason (apart from box-office grosses) to poke this particular sleeping giant. British director Gareth Edwards' answer to that seems to be that it's time for a return to the creature's sober, serious roots after decades of rubber suits and silly monster-on-monster action.

To that end, Edwards demonstrates a clear understanding of what made 1954's Godzilla such an enduring story. As was the case there, he's attempted to create an allegory about the dangers of militarized science, and one that foregrounds the human drama while the monstrous chaos unleashed by man's dabbling in nuclear power and weaponry goes down in the background. He centers the story on one family, the Brodys, whose fates are intertwined with a Japanese nuclear disaster and its subsequent fallout.

Bryan Cranston plays Joe, an engineer at the Janjira nuclear power plant, which early in the film is destroyed in a series of earthquakes mirroring the real-life Fukushima disaster. His wife dies in the accident, and he becomes a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist, trying desperately to prove that the official explanation for the disaster is a smoke screen. Fifteen years later, he's an embarrassment to his son Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a military ordnance expert now with a family of his own in San Francisco. Ford has to head to Japan to retrieve Dad after a run-in with local authorities, and his visit just happens to coincide with the earth starting its familiar rumbling again. Turns out Joe's theories aren't so crazy after all, particularly to Dr. Serizawa (Ken Watanabe), a secret government scientist studying a mysterious phenomenon at the Janjira site.

The characters don't quite escape the thinly drawn traditions of the standard summer blockbuster, but they are full enough to provide adequate personal stakes, especially with Ford's desperate attempts to reunite with his wife (Elizabeth Olsen) and son amid the carnage. Similarly, the allegorical underpinnings never quite match the grace with which the 1954 Godzilla interrogates scientific ethics in a militarized age, but they're present enough to provoke at least a little thought.

What Edwards is really after here is balance, not just of character and meaningful story, but also of spectacle. This is still a big summer tentpole, after all, and Edwards is committed to making a popcorn flick that thrills without sacrificing brain cells.

Edwards' only previous feature was the 2010 indie Monsters, which impressed its small audience with how effective a monster movie could be even if it barely had the budget to really show the monsters. Godzilla has the budget, but it maintains commitment to the notion that the unseen is more impressive than the seen: Godzilla doesn't appear until over halfway into the film (after one nicely executed bait-and-switch), and really doesn't take center stage until the very end.

When we do see him and the movie's other creatures — because this does still share some DNA with the later monster-vs.-monster iterations of Godzilla — it's most often from specific human points of view. They're partially obscured by goggles, by blurred binoculars, by smoke, by foregrounded buildings. Everything Edwards does visually creates a sense of scale as compared with humans, and when he does open Godzilla up to wide shots, it makes him all the more impressive.

Edwards' willingness to not always go over the top, to not try to be bigger than Godzilla, is what drives restrained moments like that labored sigh, or the stunningly executed paratrooper sequence teased in the poster, with troops falling from the sky trailing red smoke while the eerie Ligeti Requiem made famous by Kubrick's 2001 winds up the tension in preparation for another release.

This is exactly what big summer movies ought to aspire to: never short on dazzle, but unafraid to let us catch our breath once it's been taken away.

Where does Don Draper's formidable presence come from in Mad Men? From his impeccable style, sure, and from his brooding good looks, of course, but also from his stillness. A few drug-induced exceptions aside, Don is as restrained in movement as he is in his speech. The combination gives him an irresistible, if unsettling, allure; in meetings, it's his solid stare that holds your attention as much as his words.

Jon Hamm's stillness playing Don in Mad Men became particularly noticeable after I watched him in Million Dollar Arm, which, among other things, lacks a noteworthy performance to ground an otherwise loosely constructed film. Hamm doesn't play Don in Million Dollar Arm, of course, but he does play another salesman: the sports agent JB, who, after leaving a large agency to start his own business, is struggling to sign a big-name athlete and pay his bills.

In fact, Million Dollar Arm begins with a pitch from JB to a superstar NFL linebacker he hopes to represent. JB doesn't quite offer the same satisfactions as Don, though. He's something closer to Jerry Maguire in need of an editor, concluding his promise to secure countless riches with a supplication: "Will you let me help you do that?"

JB leads a hurried existence, rushing around LA in his Porsche convertible. Eventually he takes that energy to India, where, with the prospect of a billion new baseball fans on his mind, he hopes to save his career by converting Indian cricket bowlers into professional pitchers. To that end, he holds a contest called Million Dollar Arm, offering two finalists an opportunity to try out for the major leagues in the U.S. And when the winners, Rinku (Suraj Sharma) and Dinesh (Madhur Mittal), return with JB to LA, one of the first English words they learn is the essence of JB's way of life: hustle.

Looking at Hamm's previous roles, you can chart his range by whether his characters default to a smile or a stone-faced stare. If deadpan, he's Don — assertive, composed, unflappable. With a smile — which, unlike most things about Hamm, is generally strained and awkward — he flips: Now he's goofy and approachable, characteristics he used to great effect on 30 Rock.

Either way, he has presence. In Million Dollar Arm, he disappears. And he's not the only one: Between director Craig Gillespie (Lars and the Real Girl), writer Thomas McCarthy (The Station Agent) and co-stars Bill Paxton, Alan Arkin and Lake Bell (who is good enough to make you realize how wasteful her love-interest-as-motherly-sidekick role is), there's a lot of potential talent subsumed here by plain studio fare.

Whoever you want to blame, Million Dollar Arm is a film that, like JB, is in a needless rush. This isn't the hurry of a tense thriller. Instead, with time to kill, the film resembles a long car ride, with McCarthy and Gillespie producing the closest approximations to excitement possible so no one realizes they're bored. The scenes in India stuff a series of montages in between jokes about animals roaming the streets and a brief, preposterous stop at the Taj Mahal. (A Disney movie isn't where one ought to search for nuanced multiculturalism, of course, and here, at least, both sides are reduced to stereotypes: America is baseball, luxury and cultural insensitivity; India is spicy food, crowded streets and poverty.) In other moments, when a montage is too clearly out of the question, the film resorts to sudden leaps in time: anything, that is, but a stop for breath.

In the end, Hamm is most affected — there's a strain to his performance that suggests something about JB, perhaps, but also strips the character of any charisma. As a result, Million Dollar Man may be the first hint that Hamm is unable to rise above mediocre material and demand our attention regardless (an essential feature of any leading Hollywood actor or actress). But before passing judgment, I'd like to see a film that lets him sit still and prove otherwise.

For those of us who have spent time arguing for increased ethnic and cultural diversity on television, the last seven days have felt like a fantasy fever dream.

This week, the big broadcast networks announced their schedules for the 2014-15 TV season during the industry's "upfront" presentations to advertisers. And there are 10 new series featuring non-white characters and/or show creators – numbers we haven't seen since the days when everybody was trying to clone The Cosby Show.

But don't think this change is about altruism or fairness. Some of the most successful shows on TV this season have had significant levels of diversity in casting. ABC's Modern Family and Scandal stand out, along with Fox's Sleepy Hollow and Brooklyn Nine-Nine.

"We really do think ABC reflects the new face of America," said the network's entertainment programming head, Paul Lee, this week. "America has changed. It's the right thing to do now."

Let's overlook the fact that America has been a pretty diverse country for a while.

Now that network TV has agreed to make diversity a priority in its mix of new shows, they face the next challenge: not screwing it up.

Because nothing can reverse efforts to add diversity in television programming quicker than failure. Doesn't matter that most new shows fail; in an industry where success feels like a lightning bolt from above, failure can be hung on anything that deviates from what was done before.

Fortunately, I've got some ideas for how network TV can avoid fumbling away its progress by getting diversity on television right.

But first, a look at just how groundbreaking this coming TV season truly is.

ABC stepped up strongest, handing Grey's Anatomy and Scandal creator Shonda Rhimes their Thursday night, scheduling Rhimes' new show How to Get Away with Murder at 10 p.m. after her two hits. It's smart counterprogramming – rival CBS will have NFL football until the end of October.

But it also gives the most powerful black woman in scripted television her own night in prime time with two shows starring black women; Scandal and Murder (which features Oscar nominee Viola Davis). That hasn't happened, ever.

The alphabet network also has comedies featuring a black family (Black-ish), a Latino family (Cristela) and an Asian American family (Fresh Off the Boat). And they also picked up American Crime, from 12 Years a Slave screenwriter (and NPR contributor) John Ridley, who is black.

Fox has Oscar winner Octavia Spencer in a high school drama (Red Band Society), along with an animated comedy about American and Mexican families living along the border (Bordertown). The Butler director Lee Daniels helped create Empire, a drama set in a family-run rap music empire. NBC has a comedy featuring Office alum Craig Robinson and Alfre Woodard as the President in a new drama (State of Affairs); CBS has a summer series, Extant, featuring Halle Berry.

So here's a few rules to help them avoid screwing it all up when these shows actually hit air.

Rule #1: Don't define characters completely by their ethnicity or culture. You've likely seen TV shows where non-white characters are mostly a collection of jokes rooted in their ethnic/cultural heritage. Or where their most prominent traits are rooted in stereotypes about people like them.

The key to creating authentic non-white characters is to acknowledge and reflect their ethnicity or culture without completely defining them that way. Cosby's Cliff Huxtable was an upper middle class father raising kids with his lawyer wife.

But he was also a black man who talked about attending a historically black college, celebrated when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday was made a national holiday and had grandkids named Winnie and Nelson after the Mandelas. That's how real people of color live life – never completely defined by their culture but always a reflection of it.

Rule #2: Show us things we thought we knew in new ways. The Eddie Murphy sketch many people mention when talking about his amazingly successful time on Saturday Night Live is the piece where he dressed as a white man and discovered white people get everything free in New York City.

The skit was wonderful because it got at stuff we all know: the subtlety of modern prejudice, the suspicion that racism has just moved underground, the difficulty in understanding how someone of another race feels. But it presented those ideas in a fresh and funny way.

Rule #3: Earn the right to reference stereotypes. I once asked TV writer David Mills, who died in 2010 on the set of HBO's Treme, how to differentiate between a critically-acclaimed series like The Wire, which featured a lot of characters living down to the worst stereotypes about black and brown criminality, and a seriously backward series like Homeboys in Outer Space.

Mills said the quality of the show and the characters had to justify the stereotypes. Because characters on shows such as The Wire and The Sopranos were humanized and complex, they often confronted stereotypes even while echoing them.

Rule #4: Don't freak out if everyone doesn't get the joke, as long as they don't get it for the right reasons. One of the saddest elements of the recent controversy involving Saturday Night Live writer Leslie Jones' controversial Weekend Update skit was her immediate dismissal of critics as "idiots," "f—-ing morons" and "too f—-ing sensitive."

The fact is, critics had some good points about how the tone and delivery of her bit could have been adjusted to make it funnier and less stereotypical. But she was too busy defending her work to engage the conversation it started.

That was also the opportunity missed when Dave Chappelle decided to abandon his hit Comedy Central series Chappelle's Show amid concerns about stress and the notion that some white fans of the program took his satire of racial issues too literally.

Playing in this field will always have a high level of difficulty. Producers must make sure that when the people who don't get it speak up, they have good answers for their concerns.

And if they don't have answers, just be sure to listen and learn.