Author: Will Harris (Page 38 of 261)

Will is a member of the Television Critics Association and has written for Decider.com, the Onion A.V. Club, The Dissolve, Indiewire, Rhino.com, TV Week Magazine, The Virginian-Pilot, Popdose.com, and EW.com along with writing for Bullz-Eye.com and Premium Hollywood.

TCA Tour: 24

Having already seen the first four hours of the new season of “24,” I can tell you without hesitation that it’s absolutely going to be worth your while to tune in when Jack Bauer’s latest day kicks off on January 17th, but, then, if you’re a fan of the show, you’ve probably already had your Sunday night planned out for quite some time now. What you’re likely more interested in knowing is if this will be the last season of “24.” Fortunately, that was the first question posed of Kiefer Sutherland and his fellow executive producer, Howard Gordon, during Fox’s panel for the series.

“We’ve always approached each season, just the task of doing it, as so great that, literally, from the very first season on, we’ve completed that season, and it was really FOX’s decision to pick us up,” said Sutherland. “There’s never been one specific season that the next season was guaranteed or ensured. This has been one of the greatest gifts of my life, the ability to do ’24.’ So for me, yeah, it’s something that is absolutely open. I’ve always said that as long as people wanted us to make it, and people were really interested in watching it, I would be interested. There’s a lot of components involved. The task of writing it is far greater than the task of acting in it, so Howard can talk about that for a moment, but certainly, it’s always open to continue on doing it.”

“I sort of second Kiefer’s thoughts about it,” said Gordon. “It’s always been a very year-to-year, minute-to-minute, day-to-day experience. There’s the intellectual and sort of emotional and creative curiosity. The writers sit around, and in the margins of the time when we aren’t working on Season 8 we do ask ourselves, ‘What if…?’ So it certainly is a possibility.”

So there you go: now you can safely enjoy the new season without feeling a sense of dread that they’re entering it with feelings of finality. We’ll get back to Messrs. Sutherland and Howard in a bit, but with that bit of pressing information out of the way, let’s check in to see what some of the other “24” folks are thinking about as they prepare for the premiere…

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TCA Tour: Lost

Let us begin our coverage of ABC’s “Lost” panel by giving all due props to Jonathan Storm, TV critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, who kicked things off with the following statement: “Hello, I’d like to ask each one of you to tell exactly what happens in the final season.”

Nice try, Mr. Storm.

Fortunately, Storm had a back-up question ready to ask of the panel – which consisted of Emilie de Ravin (Claire), Daniel Dae Kim (Jin), Josh Holloway (Sawyer), Evangeline Lilly (Kate), executive producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, Terry O’Quinn (Locke), Michael Emerson (Ben), and Jorge Garcia (Hurley) – once the laughter stopped: how are you feeling as this comes to an end?

“As we were walking out onto the stage and this montage was playing, I was whispering to my cast members, ‘I am going to cry like a baby when this show ends,'” said Lilly. “It’s become so nostalgic for us to look back over six years and have grown up together and grown up in front of all of you together. It’s been so intense that for it to come to an end is going to be life-changing.”

Garcia instantly agreed. “Certain places that we shoot, it’s, like, ‘Wow, I haven’t been here since season three,'” he said. “Right now, it’s very appreciative and precious.”

“There’s a lot of camaraderie on set now,” acknowledged Holloway. “It feels…a lot of magic, like the first season. It was an incredibly magical year, and the whole experience, of course, has been incredible, but this last year, everyone’s really getting that sense of camaraderie and nostalgia, and it’s just been fabulous.”

“You know, personally, I’m just feeling a tremendous amount of gratitude,” said Lindelof, “and the idea that we’re getting to end something while anybody still cares and while we still kind of love each other, as opposed to everybody saying, ‘It’s about time.’ This is sort of a once-in-a-lifetime or once-in-a-career experience, for a show that’s still performing, for the network to allow us to end it, is a tremendous gift. As Evangeline was saying, as I was walking onto the stage, I was sort of experiencing a sense of, ‘I can’t believe they’re going to actually let us get away with this.'”

When asked how long the conclusion of “Lost” had been determined, Cuse acknowledged that there really wasn’t a definitive answer to that question. “We came up with the final image of the show a long time ago back when we were first plotting out the mythology in the first season, then we started adding elements to that as we went along…and, really, between the first and the second season is when we cooked the mythology,” he said. “We kind of knew what the end point was, but as you move towards the end point, you add elements. Obviously, the end is not yet written, and there are certain sort of mythological, architectural elements that are intact for that ending, but a lot of character stuff will get worked out as we go along. I mean, that’s part of the discovery process of writing. For instance, Michael Emerson wasn’t on the show at that point. It’s a fun process because we sort of have a concept of where we’re going to end the show, but there is still the process of actually executing it and there still is the process of discovery, particularly on a character level, that will come into play as we finish the show.”

“So if you guys have any ideas,” said Lindelof, “we’re open-minded.”

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NBC News’ Brian Williams weighs in on the Conan situation

I had a chance to chat with Brian Williams during NBC’s party at the TCA press tour on Sunday night, and as a throwaway of a closing question, I asked him what had been asked of virtually everyone else that day: do you think Conan O’Brien should stay?

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that, throwaway or not, he nonetheless gave me a serious, thoughtful answer.

“Oh, I hope to God he stays,” replied Williams. “We feel, I think, like east coast Irish-Catholic brothers. We came up and followed prominent people into our jobs and kind of came up at the same time. We talked about it a lot on the air. Conan’s got a great New England, almost blue-collar for a Harvard kid, work ethic. He drives himself hard, and I have just always found us to be kindred spirits. I love his sense of humor, and I hope to God he can stay with us.”

Hope may be dwindling, but Williams remains a class act.

Everybody’s talkin’ ’bout Conan…including Conan himself!

First, Dave’s take…

…and then Craig’s:

Please note how both of them find the time to bash Carson Daly, proving once again that there’s no such thing as too easy a target. Kudos to Jimmy Kimmel, however, for figuring out a way to get a laugh out of Daly’s situation without being mean about it:

Bob linked to this in the comments section of my earlier post, but here’s what Patton Oswalt had to say on the matter:

And, of course, this post wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t offer Conan’s own take on the situation:

Gee, can you tell he’s pissed?

TCA Tour: Parks and Recreation

NBC’s “Parks and Recreation” suffered through a first season which impressed only a handful of viewers and critics, only to return for its second season with everyone suddenly trumpeting it as one of the funniest shows on television. Now, this is certainly not unprecedented for shows from executive producer Greg Daniels, who endured the same fate with “The Office,” and when you think about it, every series has to endure a certain amount of growing pains. But what’s required of a show’s creative team to take a confused show and straighten it out?

“Well, I think it’s fair to say that we make some kind of change to the overall idea of the show for every episode,” said co-creator / executive producer Michael Schur. “It’s a constant process of learning what is good and what is not so good, and there is a little bit of an arbitrary pause, in that our first season is only six episodes, so that was the time that we had the most amount of time to sit around and think about what we liked and what we didn’t like. But there wasn’t, like, a ‘Eureka! Oh, here’s what we do’ moment. It’s just a constant kind of process of shooting episodes and writing episodes and cutting them together, seeing which way the characters seem to be developing and talking to the actors and getting their input. I think that…again, we had this sort of weird mini season of six episodes like ‘The Office’ did, and then we took, whatever, four months off, so when it came back, I think there was a temptation to say, ‘Oh, what has changed now?’ I would like to think that, if we had just been airing continuously, the episodes would have turned out the same way and that it would have seemed like a more gradual evolution, because I think that’s what character comedies are all about: evolution.”

I don’t know about the rest of the cast, but at the very least, Nick Offerman remembers precisely when he firmly grasped his character, Ron Swanson. “When I was originally auditioning for the role, Mike said, ‘I think this guy has a really big mustache,'” he recalled. “I think that was probably the moment. I was, like, ‘Ah, yes, I see…'”

Nonetheless, Ron has evolved a bit since then, something which Greg Daniels spoke to. “I guess it was the ethics episode in the first season where he kind of stepped up and defended Leslie,” he said. “Originally, he was more of an antagonist, I think, because he was a person who didn’t believe in the mission of the department that he was in, she was so optimistic, and they were so at odds. But then they developed a nice kind of grudging friendship, and when we saw how well that worked, we wrote towards it.”

Amy Poehler chimed into the discussion as well, adding, “What was discovered, too, was (that) Ron liked Leslie because she made his job easier.”

“It’s a very symbiotic relationship at this point,” said Schur.

“Co-dependent,” corrected Poehler. With a wink and a nudge, she added, “But we all know what those relationships are like, right?”

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