Archive for category TCA Summer Press Tour 2010
Day 6: Fox Still Wily. “Idol” Judge Watch Continues.
Posted by Melanie McFarland in Commentary, TCA Summer Press Tour 2010, Tune In Info on August 3rd, 2010
Fox Entertainment Chairman Peter Rice answers questions at TCA.
Monday was the day. It was really supposed to happen. Honest, and for reals! Many of us thought — nay, hoped — Fox Entertainment Chairman Peter Rice and Entertainment President Kevin Reilly were going to announce the new judges for “American Idol,” putting to rest all of the speculative burbling in the trades through the weekend.
Jennifer Lopez and Steven Tyler, seated side by side at the judges table, delivering scathing critiques from behind gigantic Coca Cola cups! Can’t you just see it?
Granted, we are not six-year-olds on Christmas morning, convinced that behind that soft, wrapped package of tube socks our parents have hidden a rocket ship. We cover television and are used to keeping our expectations low.
That’s for good reason. Not long after the trades began quoting unnamed insiders swearing J. Lo and Tyler were in there, other reporters slowed their roll by saying the contracts are still being hammered out. And it appears that the T’s had not been crossed, the I’s dotted or the dollar bills counted by Monday morning.
“The only thing I can tell you with absolute certainty right now is that no one has signed a deal yet on either side of the camera to join ‘American Idol’ next year who wasn’t on it last year,” Rice said. “And I know that that is it’s not particularly a fun announcement. It’s certainly not the choice I would have made, but it is the truth as we sit here today. There are no signed deals with anybody.”
Rice added, “I can tell you that much of the information that has been written is accurate. And some of the information that has been written is wildly inaccurate.”
Did he tell us which tidbits were on the money? Even hint at it? Of course not. We came at him from the front, the side, directly and obliquely. We tried through the normally gregarious Reilly. No luck.
“If variations of ‘I’m not going to get into conversations we’ve had with people’ were a drinking game,” one critic tweeted, “TCA members (would) be dead.”
What Rice did say was that when the main audition rounds kick off in September, the judges will be in place and ready to make dreams come true or irreparably crush hopeful spirits. Meanwhile, Mr. Tyler, currently on tour with Aerosmith, reportedly let a few details slip through his trademark lips over the weekend.
“This beautiful girl from Fox came up to me and made an offer. I honored her offer… and it’s just a work in progress,” Tyler said in a radio interview quoted in a Billboard.com article.
So it remains, for the time being. Keep reading for the day’s other takeaways…
TCA Day 5: The A in ABC Stands for Awkward
Posted by Melanie McFarland in Casting alert, Commentary, TCA Summer Press Tour 2010, Tune In Info on August 2nd, 2010
Kevin Brockman and friend address the TCA. Photo courtesy of ABC
You can assume it’s going to be an interesting day when the network you’re covering has lost its head…of entertainment programming. This kind of thing happens quite a bit. Usually lawyers get involved, as is the case ABC’s freshly ousted head of entertainment Steve McPherson.
Then there’s the question of handling the next guy, Paul Lee. Two days ago, Lee was the former head of entertainment programming for ABC Family, a.k.a. the guy who gave us “Kyle XY,” “The Secret Life of the American Teenager,” and “Pretty Little Liars.” Now the mothership’s programming lineup and overall reputation is in his hands.
ABC’s publicity department was quick to put the kibosh on any questions about McPherson, however. On Sunday morning publicity head Kevin Brockman came to the podium to welcome critics, accompanied a gigantic stuffed pink elephant. Talk about getting literal. Following brief announcements, he informed the room that last Tuesday’s statement on McPherson’s departure holds, and no further questions would be answered. With that, Lee took the stage and Brockman exited, taking Dumbo with him.
Generally a move like this would result in some sort of upheaval but frankly, people like Lee. A little more about him: He also breathed new life into BBC America and did some good work at Auntie Beeb before that. The guy seems straightforward and slightly in awe at the job that has fallen in his lap.
ABC Entertainment President Paul Lee talks to critics on Sunday.
“I think there’s a whole load of brand equity there,” Lee told critics, referring to the hits ABC has built over the past few years.
Yes, having new blood at the top can be a very good thing, unless you happen to be the producers and stars of one of the new shows premiering during 2010-2011. None of the new dramas and comedies set to premiere in fall or midseason, including “Mr. Sunshine” starring erstwhile “Friend” Matthew Perry (who experienced a legendarily awkward moment himself) are Lee’s babies.
Lee has also proven that his love for his own discoveries does not blind him to the reality of ratings, which he cited himself when he professed his adoration for “The Middle Man,” a wonderful ABC Family series that was cancelled after one season. If he’s willing to do that with a show running on cable, where the stakes aren’t nearly as high as they are on network…well, let’s just say the new showrunners must be quaking in their boots. The ratings and creative development of every new show will be under scrutiny, but we’re betting Lee will be closely watching the following…
TCA Awards: Where Yo Gabba Gabba! Meets Tom Hanks
Posted by Melanie McFarland in Commentary, TCA Summer Press Tour 2010, TV News on August 1st, 2010
The joke about the Television Critics Association’s annual award ceremony is that if you’re a star and you receive an invitation, you’ve won.
You may not know what you’ve won, mind you, but what does it matter? It’s an open bar function with dim sum and pizza, followed by tiny desserts when the show’s over. Most attractive to the stars and producers who show up? No red carpet. The fun part for the critics is casually mingling with the people who make shows we like so much that we voted to have them here. In a sense, the TCA Awards are the small way we try to make up for the grave omissions made by Emmy and the Golden Globes each year.
But last night’s awards ceremony, the 26th in the organization’s history, was particularly special for a number of reasons.
It marked the first time that Dax Shepard hosted an awards ceremony, an honor he handled with aplomb and no shortage of nervousness — which is to say he went off script quite a few times and had the room in stitches.
It also marked the last time Damon Lindelof would appear for “Lost,” and he entertained the room by reading a number of the angry tweets he received following the finale. For the record, it looked like Lindelof also teared up when he accepted his award; he explained that it meant a lot because TV critics were the first supporters of “Lost” and in most cases, stuck with the series through its bittersweet end.
TCA awards night happened to coincide with “Modern Family” star Rico Rodriguez’s 12th birthday, and a room full of critics sang “Happy Birthday” to him along with the casts of “Breaking Bad,” “Glee,” and Tom Hanks, who gracefully showed up to accept an award for Outstanding Achievement in Movies, Miniseries & Specials for “The Pacific.”
In fact, Hanks even stuck around afterwards to chat with critics and take a few pictures with “Yo Gabba Gabba’s!” stars Foofa, Plex, Toodee, Muno and Brobee, who made a surprise appearance to accept their second TCA award for Outstanding Children’s programming. Say what you will about the overall cultural impact of this organization’s small slabs of Lucite — you won’t see anything that cool at the Emmys.
Here is the full list of 2010′s TCA Award recipients, taken from the press release:
• PROGRAM OF THE YEAR: “Glee” (FOX)
• OUTSTANDING NEW PROGRAM: “Glee” (FOX)
• INDIVIDUAL ACHIEVEMENT IN COMEDY: Jane Lynch, “Glee” (FOX)
• OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN COMEDY: “Modern Family” (ABC)
• OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN DRAMA: TIE – “Lost” (ABC) and “Breaking
Bad” (AMC)
• INDIVIDUAL ACHIEVEMENT IN DRAMA: Julianna Margulies, “The Good Wife”
(CBS)
• OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN NEWS & INFORMATION: “Life”
(Discovery)
• OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN YOUTH PROGRAMMING: “Yo Gabba
Gabba” (NICK JR.)
• OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN MOVIES, MINISERIES & SPECIALS: “The
Pacific” (HBO)
• HERITAGE AWARD: “M*A*S*H*” (CBS)
• CAREER ACHIEVEMENT: James Garner
Day 3: NBC Wants You Back!
Posted by Melanie McFarland in Commentary, TCA Summer Press Tour 2010, TV News on July 31st, 2010
“Everything on television is born under a death sentence, they just don’t tell you when the execution date is.” – Dick Wolf, creator and executive producer of the “Law & Order” franchise
It has been a long time since anyone who cares about TV took NBC very seriously. From the top down, the network spent more than a decade making a hobby of ruining its brand and trashing its relationship with viewers.
But what’s done is done…we hope.
On Friday, network executives Angela Bromstad and Jeff Gaspin humbly expressed their hope that viewers are willing to get over the multiple betrayals and move forward. Join us, they said in so many words, won’t you?
This fall NBC has a couple of decent shows — and the guts to let “30 Rock” air a live episode on October 14 — so they’re not completely blowing smoke. That said, none of the critics here seem particularly excited about NBC’s new crop. The J.J. Abrams-created romantic spy dramedy “Undercovers” is a bit of an exception; most poeple seem to like it, but even that excitement is slightly muted.
Instead, as we watched most the new candidates make their cases onstage, we couldn’t help thinking of Dick Wolf’s fresh quote on a TV show’s life expectancy. Among the seven new series NBC showcased, only “Undercovers” has a pilot indicating the show could have the goods to make it to a May finale. Another, “The Event,” is already pleading for your faith that it knows where it’s going, and a third, “Outlaw,” is banking on the audience’s decades-long love affair with Jimmy Smits. The L.A. version of “Law & Order” is still casting and, according to Wolf, still figuring out what it’s going to look and feel like.
Then there’s “Outsourced” and “Chase“…we’ll rip into those in a bit.
Day 2: All About Show Stealers: Laura Linney,”Episodes,” Maggie Q…and “Idol”?
Posted by Melanie McFarland in Casting alert, Commentary, TCA Summer Press Tour 2010, Tune In Info on July 30th, 2010
It’s a funny thing, TCA Press Tour. On the one hand, as Daily Beast editor Kate Aurthur pointed out in a tweet, the networks profess to hate it. The Tour costs them a lot of money, time, and sanity. They put on a show for us, and often get nothing but griping about their products in return.
Without Press Tour, however, think of all the wrangling they’d have to do when major TV news implosions occur. Phones would be ringing off the hook. Reporters would be jockeying for position and screaming if they don’t get the story angles they want when they want it. Mass hysteria.
Tour is also something of a mixed blessing for TV writers. Entertainment business news is breaking all the time, but it certainly seems to go nuclear when most of us are brought together in a hotel ballroom. Often the news is very inside baseball, such as the sudden resignation of ABC Entertainment head Steve McPherson on the first day of Tour, followed shortly by trade reports that he was the subject of a sexual harrassment probe. Critics care because McPherson’s the guy we talk to about ABC’s lineup, and as such, some of us like to imagine we have something of a relationship with him.
So things of this nature happen, we express shock! (Not really.) Alarm! (Actually, executives get spectacularly booted all the time. Right, Ben Silverman?) Then we sharpen our knives for the network’s executive session. Sadly, the word is that ABC isn’t having one. (UPDATE: On Friday ABC announced that ABC Family’s Paul Lee had officially been named as McPherson’s successor, so there will be a short session on Sunday after all.)
This news has very little impact on the typical viewer. As such, it was quickly swept under the rug when Fox’s (highly orchestrated?) “Idol” bombshell exploded late this afternoon in the form of a Variety story announcing Ellen DeGeneres‘ sudden and not altogether surprising exit, either by choice or by force. That, people care about.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves a bit. “Idol” dominated the early evening news, but Showtime opened the day with four panels, three of them actually worth our time.
The day started with a tour of “The Big C,“ which stars Laura Linney and officially premieres August 16, although you can watch the pilot right now. In the half-hour dramedy, Linney plays a woman who receives a cancer diagnosis and decides to take what time she has left and live it to the fullest.
Whether the show becomes a hit depends largely on how much people are willing to spend time with a character who may be outlandish and hilarious, but is dying before their eyes. It’s a tough sell. But there’s no denying the cast’s chemistry and the absolute luminosity of Laura Linney. The entire panel was something of an eat-pray-love fest as the stars talked about the beauty of living in the now. After Oliver Platt asked, “Why do we start to live beautifully when we get a death sentence?” and Gabourey Sidibe pointed out, “whatever plan you have for your life, you are wrong a lot of times,” it was hard not to commit for at least a few installments.
Once that panel’s high wore off, though, I remembered a vexing truth about Showtime comedies: they’re not particularly funny. “Comedy” seems to be a term the premium cable channel uses because it’s more succinct than “half-hour oddity,” or “30-minute award nomination bait.”
Happily we were reminded of that by watching the clip for “Episodes,” an upcoming comedy about a disastrous American remake of a nice British series. The clip reel was genuinely hilarious, and what exchanges we saw between series star Matt LeBlanc and his British co-stars Tamsin Greig and Stephen Mangan were gut-busting.
Executive producers and writers David Crane (“Friends”) and Jeffrey Klarik (“The Class”) consistently made us giggle as they described the horrific sausage making process a series goes through as its churned through the Hollywood machine, which is precisely what “Episodes” is about. It’s a shame we have to suffer through a slew of substandard comedies this fall while we wait for it; “Episodes” premieres in January.
Keep reading for more details on “Dexter” and a breakdown of the CW panels.
TCA Day 1: CBS Starts With “Big Bang,” Ends In the “$#*!”
Posted by Melanie McFarland in TCA Summer Press Tour 2010, Tune In Info on July 28th, 2010
Jim Parsons and Kaley Cuoco. Courtesy of WireImage.
Sometimes skepticism gets in the way of everyone’s enjoyment. This idea occupies the same flavor territory as “ignorance is bliss.” It is a vote for the willful flooding of the brain with seratonin and other happiness-inducing substances, something that often happens when we turn off the internal mechanisms that regulate intellect in favor of turning on, say, G4′s late night programming.
The next eleven days are not part of this idea. At the Television Critics Association’s Summer Press Tour, currently underway at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, CA., skepticism hangs heavily in the air. There are a couple hundred of us here, and we’ve seen the fall pilots. Not only that, we get to confront the people who are bringing them to us — executives, producers, and the stars — and find out what they were thinking.
That, in essence, is the point of TCA: to look under the hood of each network’s programming and see whether the new fall crew has any hope, or if old favorites are worth sticking with. A pilot can look perfectly fine, but unless the people writing it know what they’re doing, it won’t have a chance as a series. The opposite can be true as well; “30 Rock’s” pilot, for example, was mediocre. That’s putting it kindly. But after a chat with Tina Fey, it was easy to have faith that it would improve. Midway through the first season, it did.
All of this is in service of you, the television viewer. You know how difficult it is to decide what to watch in the best of circumstances. Now the networks and cable channels want you to make room for new series, most of which won’t make it through the winter.
Mind you, there are a few CBS shows that we can say, with a degree of certainty, that you’ll be happy to load onto your DVR. CBS’s new crop looks fairly typical and as such, its TCA day was generally painless and free of controversy…save for the panel for “$#*! My Dad Says.” Even that wasn’t awful, per se; rather, it did precisely what a TCA panel is supposed to do. It showed us why that show, in its present incarnation, is destined to crash and burn.
At one point, “$#*!” executive producer Max Mutchnick explained how he and David Kohan came to be a part of the project by saying, and this is a real quote, “We got involved because, when we heard this and we read about this, we saw Justin’s beautiful tw*ts.” Yes, that’s right — he referred to tweets by using a vulgar reference to female genitalia. And he kept on doing it.
By the time Mutchnick tried to correct himself by calling tweets “twits” and about the 10th time series star William Shatner referred to it as “The Twitter,” the panel had lost control of the room. It was a beautiful cringeworthy moment.
Overall, CBS started the day with its greatest assets and stumbled on down the mountain from there. Keep reading for the full diary.
Day 7: FX, Home of the Unshaven Hero
Posted by Melanie McFarland in Commentary, TCA Summer Press Tour 2010, Tune In Info on August 3rd, 2010
"Anarchy" at the TCA: Kurt Sutter, Charlie Hunnam, Ron Perlman and Katey Sagal. Credit: Ray Mickshaw
Pretend for a moment that your favorite cable channels are people. The idea isn’t all that weird when you consider that discussing a channel’s brand identity is, in a sense, outlining its personality. HBO, for example, has a closet full of designer suits and couture dresses. AMC also dresses well, but has a hidden life involving hard liquor and drugs.
Then there’s FX. FX has a five o’clock shadow by 10 a.m. FX is a beer and whiskey drinker, isn’t averse to getting into a scrap now and then, and has a rowdy sense of humor. If you need dirty work done, you call FX. He is the guy you love to hang with, but you’d stop short of inviting him to a formal affair.
That image is both to FX’s benefit and its detriment. It’s home to some of the brashest, most thoughtfully-written series on television. That tradition began with “The Shield” and lives on with “Sons of Anarchy,” kicking off its third season Sept. 7 at 10. In January it adds “Lights Out,” a drama about a boxer whose career is in a downward spiral, and “Terriers,” which follows a pair of down-on-their-luck private investigators, arrives Sept. 8.
FX just picked up Louis C.K.’s comedy “Louie” for a second 13-episode season, and is adding “Alabama” to its lineup. The latter take space in space, and was created by “Reno 911‘s” Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon.
Meanwhile, “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” is getting a syndicated run on Comedy Central, which could set up its sixth season (starting Sept. 16) to be its most successful so far.
FX has hit its stride, in other words. Yet, it’s becoming rarer for FX’s dramas and casts to be invited to the industry’s most glamorous parties. “Sons’” Katey Sagal nailed her role in season two, and in the springtime, Timothy Olyphant‘s portrayal of “Justified‘s” quietly simmering U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens seemed to be all that anyone could talk about. The fact that neither received an Emmy nod for their performances is a crime.
This is the curse of having great shows on a network most often associated with the words “raw” and “gritty,” terms that make awards voters shy. “Sons” is about an outlaw biker club. Emmy can’t have that up there with a meth-cooking teacher, a serial killer and vampires, can it?. What would people think?
But FX president John Landgraf seemed unfazed by the snubs as he introduced panels for his network’s fall series on Tuesday. Landgraf considers himself in the business of promoting what he calls the literature of the common man and common woman, and he’s succeeding in that goal.
Look at the names on the network’s roster: Louis C.K., not only a great comedian but an ace comedy writer and director. Kurt Sutter, executive producer of “Sons of Anarchy,” whose story arcs display a fearlessness otherwise absent in the realm of basic cable or, really, anyplace else on TV.
“Boomtown’s” Graham Yost, the formidable brains behind “Justified.” Shawn Ryan, who has the midseason cop drama “Ride Along” coming to Fox in addition to FX’s private eye dramedy “Terriers,” for which he’s joined forces with screenwriter Ted Griffin (Ocean’s Eleven, Ravenous). In the world of television literature, they are all amazing authors.
So when the cast of “Sons of Anarchy” was asked for reaction to the Emmy snubs, nobody in the room was surprised when a few F-bombs were dropped — but then, none of the cast seemed too broken up about it either.
“Every year when the Emmys are announced, the stories that come out — half the
stories are about the nominations, and the other half of the stories are about the absurdity of the nominations and the snubs,” Sutter told critics. “So to me, perhaps that suggests that the system is somewhat flawed.”
“Yeah,” said Tommy Flanagan, who plays SAMCRO member Filip ‘Chibs’ Telford on the show. “Emmy, shmemmy.”
Read on for more from FX’s Press Tour day.
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