The Winter 2011 TCA Press Tour kicked off on January 5th with the MTV family of networks offering up panels from TV Land (“Retired at 35” and “Hot in Cleveland”), CMT (“Working Class”), Spike (“Coal”), and Comedy Central (“Onion SportsDome” and “Tosh.0”). From there, it was on to a working lunch, where we learned of the TV Guide Channel’s new reality series, “The Nail Files,” while indulging in a grilled chicken salad and, to ruin any possible health benefits, followed it with a cupcake. With our bellies full, we moved on to the National Geographic sessions: “Beast Hunter,” “Explorer,” “Alien Invasion” and “Area 51 Declassified,” and “WILD on Snakes.” Next, we got a look at two new TV One shows, “Love That Girl!” and “Way Black When,” took a gander of Peter Lik’s new series for The Weather Channel, and the whole thing wrapped up with ESPN’s presentations for “Year of the Quarterback” and the BCS title game.

No, wait, I forgot: after all of the panels had concluded, the Comcast networks threw us a cocktail party which was attended by folks from E!, G4, and Style series. By then, though, I was running on fumes, so all I really did was enjoy the food (petite filets, buttermilk mashed potatoes, turkey sliders, and deep-fried mac & cheese balls…mmmmmmm), throw back a few bourbons, listen to Chris Gore rant about how awful “Tron: Legacy” was, and talk to Bruce Jenner for 15 minutes about his acting work, including “Can’t Stop the Music.” Indeed, the only time “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” came up was when one of his daughters called to tell him that they’d won Favorite TV Guilty Pleasure at the People’s Choice Awards. (He applauded me for “going retro” with my questions.)

Also, somewhere in between all of those panels, I had a chance to ask Betty White a couple of questions, share an interview with Jane Leeves, and do one-on-ones with Wendie Malick, Henry Rollins, Phil Morris, and the anchors and executive producer of “Onion SportsDome.” Arguably my most impressive accomplishment, however, was talking to Jerry Rice, asking a question provided to me by David Medsker (and tightened up slightly by Anthony Stalter), and having him seemingly believe that I know something about sports when I absolutely do not.

I’ll be revisiting some of the individual panels on a case-by-case basis as time allows, but in the meantime, here are the top 10 quotes from Day 1 of the tour. Hope you enjoy them, and see you after Day 2!

1. “What is this Betty White business? This is silly. Really, it is very silly. You’ve had such an overdose of me lately. Trust me. I think I’m going to go away for a while. It’s hard for me to say no to a job because you spend your career thinking if you say no, they’ll never ask you again, and if you don’t take the job, you know, that may be the end of it, but my mother taught me to say no when I was a girl, but that wasn’t about show business. So the result is I’m trying to cut down. I really am.” – Betty White, “Hot in Cleveland” (TV Land)

2. “Betty White is in the building. Did you hear that? I hope I get to touch her. I just had cataracts, and I’m still adjusting, but what I see is looking pretty good.” – Ed Asner, “Working Class” (CMT)

3. “That mine (in Westchester, West Virginia) is a very complicated mine. It’s not as easy as it looks on TV. It’s 40,000 tons of steel, and it can run over you, and it can be on you in a heartbeat. Because I’ve been mashed by one before. And you really got to know what you’re doin’ working a coal mine. I mean, seriously, you really gotta know what you’re doing to be a coal miner. That’s the biggest thing. People think we’re ignorant. ‘They’ve got to work the coal mines because they can’t do nothing else.’ Well, me, I can do about anything. I can weld. I can…you know, I can do anything. But we’re not ignorant. We choose that life because we like to live in an area, and we want to make good money for our family, and that’s the reason we’re there.” – Robert Jerry “Wildman” Edwards, “Coal” (Spike TV)

4. “I don’t know why I get away with some things. But I’m not a misogynistic, racist person. Yet I do find those jokes funny, so I say them. And I try to say everything kind of in a good spirit. I’m not up there preaching, by any means. They’re not my beliefs. So…I don’t know. I’ve done standup solidly for 15 years, and I’ve always kind of said whatever I wanted on stage. And the audiences have been pretty receptive. My goal certainly has never been to offend people, but I just…I’m not going to hold back because I think, ‘Oh, that might upset somebody.’ There was…the transgender group was upset with us for a joke we did for a while, but then I gained them back by…I don’t know what I did. I did something that made them love me, because I love transgender people in general. I think that’s a good organization. Are they here? Which table are they at?” – Daniel Tosh, “Tosh 2.0” (Comedy Central)

5. “The whole thing about (the man in New Jersey who was eaten by his pet Nile monitor lizards), if you know kind of the ‘behind the scenes’ on that, it’s actually still thought that he had a heart attack. And those animals were left without food, and they will feed on carrion, and then they depredated him as a food source as a last resort. So my thoughts on that are you should probably keep those animals locked up. But dead is dead, so if he died from a heart attack and then he was consumed, I think Disney would say that’s the circle of life.” – Shawn Heflick, “Python Hunters” (Nat Geo WILD)

6. “Hollywood’s getting it wrong. There’s a lot of waste, not that I want to undercut anybody’s check, but there is a lot of fat that could be trimmed that brings these projects to market a little bit more economically, a little bit better creatively because you don’t have so many hands in the pie telling you what your vision can’t be. And I think that’s why the cable outlets are jumping on board. People want this. The audience aren’t the ones that didn’t want sitcoms. I think it was just the networks, and their paradigm was no longer appropriate for the dynamic, but audiences, especially African-American audiences, they want the whole ride. They want to laugh, cry, scream, shout, love. And shows like our show give them an opportunity to see themselves and feel that way. – Phil Morris, “Love That Girl!” (TV One)

7. “That is a total guy question (to ask if celebrities actually notice each other’s fingernails and toenails). Not to like point you out in the room, but it’s the guy in the middle right there, waving around his unmanicured hand. But it’s true. People are saying, ‘Oh, what is this? Is this going to be like a show where you just watch people’s nails dry?’ I’m, like, ‘It’s not like that.’ Nails are an accessory. It’s a six-and-a-half-billion-dollar-a-year industry, and it’s looked at like the black eye. And this is L.A., and I’m, like, ‘Why can’t it be fabulous? Why can’t it be like the hair salons, the boutiques, the restaurants? Why is the nail salon like the little dump in the corner where you just run in and you pay your 20 bucks and get yelled at, and then you’re kicked out?’ I think I can change that, and it’s definitely been working, and now we do have men. I mean, men aren’t afraid to come in. Granted, we do have free Jack Daniels. So if you’re going to have a free glass of whiskey, you’ll come in and get your feet rubbed for 20 bucks.” – Katie Cazorla, “The Nail Files” (TV Guide Channel)

8. “Speaking specifically first and foremost to the TV One audience, parts of (‘Way Black When’) were, like, really cool. Sometimes you did have guests that that everyone don’t know who they are, (but) black folks know. On our ‘New Jack City’ program, we had…and his name escapes me for the moment, I apologize…we had the dude that shot Nino Brown at the end (Bill Cobb). Every black person knows who that is. ‘You’re that dude that shot Nino Brown!’ Come to find out, this dude’s been in, like, 100 movies. You’ve seen him in a gang of things. So we get to celebrate. It wasn’t like it was huge part of the film, but very, very memorable and something that I know the TV One audience will really gravitate towards. ‘That’s that dude that shot Nino!'” – Chris “Kid” Reid, “Way Black When” (TV One)

9. “I was in diapers collecting jars filled with bees and getting stung over and over because I wanted to see what they felt like. I raised venomous snakes in my basement and lied to my mom about what they were. Yeah, it’s every mom’s dream, right? She expertly handles calls from the hospital.” – Pat Spain, “Beast Hunter” (National Geographic)

10. “Do you guys ask questions for a profession? You’re pretty good. You don’t look like much as a group, but…good questions.” – Steve Young, “Year of the Quarterback” (ESPN)

Bullz-Eye: Steven, you and I met in passing a few years ago at the “Jekyll” panel…a show which I loved, by the way…

Steven Moffat: Oh, thank you. Oh, good!

BE: …and, Mark, I didn’t realize it at the time, but I now know that you made an appearance in that series.

Mark Gatiss: That’s right!

BE: So, Steven, what do you enjoy about the challenge of contemporizing British icons? I mean, you can argue that Dr. Jekyll is an icon of sorts, but then you’ve got Doctor Who, and now Sherlock Holmes.

SM: Well, being honest, for me, there isn’t really…it looks like there’s a narrative through that, that I’m trolling for things, but I’m really, really not. “Jekyll” was a totally different experience to this, the one big difference being that it was a sequel set in the modern day. And, really, it looks as if I’ve just been doing that, but, really, seriously, it wasn’t that. This is a completely different experience, and the challenge of this…well, they’re just joys, aren’t they?

MG: It’s true, yeah.

SM: There are so many things that…well, once having started talking about this, we realized it was going to work, because he can still be coming home from Afghanistan, a flat share is what we now call sharing rooms, we’ve gone back to sending telegrams by sending texts…it’s just perfect.

MG: Going back to first principles, on that train journey where we came up with the idea for “Sherlock,” one of the most fantastic things about that whole experience was that, as soon as that idea occurs and it’s the best thing you can ever have, you go, “Oh! Ooooh! OHHHHHH!” That’s how you want ideas to come, because you’re suddenly thinking, “Oh, well, then we could…” It’s one simple, clear thing that leads to a whole universe of wonderful possibilities. “We could this, we could that, and what if we did this?” Like Afghanistan. That’s an amazingly straight way in.

SM: I loved the way you suddenly said, “Blog!” Because, you know, people used to keep journals, people didn’t keep journals for a long time, and suddenly we doing it again with blogs!

MG: It’s funny, isn’t it? Because in a way…I was talking to a friend of mine who’s a real Luddite about all kinds of things, and I said, “Isn’t it odd that people are now composing E-mails?” I mean, they may not even be able to pick up a pen anymore… (Laughs) …but they’re writing more, and you would’ve predicted from the age of the telephone, say, 20 year ago, that that would’ve been it.

SM: Letter writing has just completely come back, and until the internet, I had probably written literally three letters in my life. And, now, I probably write twenty a day from my E-mail.

BE: I actually have to practice my handwriting once in awhile. I do it so rarely now.

MG: Yeah, that gets a bit frightening. I had to do this book were you had to write a letter to your 16-year-old self, and it was a really interesting thing, but when I actually came to do it, I was… (Fumbles across the tabletop) I tried to do it too quickly, and I found I wasn’t actually forming letters anymore!

SM: It’s true. I can barely write a check. Seriously. The age of computer technology has turned us all back into typists… (Laughs) …which is an extraordinary thing.

BE: Now, when you guys were writing this series, I just have visions of you having The Sherlock Holmes Encyclopedia on a desk, flipping madly through the pages, going, “Oooooooh, we could reference this!”

SM: Nah. We’ve got it in our heads. This comes from a place of us being fans. This wasn’t a case of, “Let’s grab that off the shelf and update it.” It was, “We love this, we think everybody’s been getting wrong, and we think we can get it right.” Unless you think you’re correcting everyone else, you shouldn’t be doing something. You should be saying, “Now this is the way it should be done.”

MG: But it’s a funny thing. It sounds so heretical, and you’re always immediately prepared for it, but an interesting dry run happened, which was that I was asked to address The Sherlock Holmes Society of London. I’d been a guest the year before, and they asked me to do it. And, essentially, I made the speech full of Sherlock Holmes jokes, but the bulk of the spine of it was basically the pitch for this series, because it seemed like an interesting argument. Now, with this group, the oldest Sherlock Holmes Society in the world, you would think they would be the most dusty, fossilized, Inverness cape wearing conservatives, but, really, they loved it. Because they love Sherlock Holmes, and we do as well. What’s been so refreshing and thrilling about the reception we’ve had at home is that people who were very skeptical go, “Oh! You got me!” Because it’s all there, you know? And what’s there is Doyle and these characters.

SM: We sort of took the Victoriana out, but put Donald back in…who’s been curiously missing from Sherlock Holmes for a long while. No, seriously, he has been!

(Writer’s note: Not being able to match Moffat’s knowledge of Sherlock Holmes lore, I have no idea what he’s referring to here, so if someone can fill in this gap for me, I’d be highly appreciative.)

BE: How did the casting of Benedict and Martin come about?

SM: Well, the casting of Sherlock Holmes was hilariously easy, given that it can be very difficult. Sue (Vertue) and I had been thinking about just who should play the part, we happened to be watching “Atonement,” we saw Benedict Cumberbatch, and we said, “He looks like Sherlock Holmes. He’s perfect!” I mentioned him to Mark, and Mark knows him, and he said, “Yeah, that’s a good idea!” So we sent him the script, and he came in and read for it, and we realized after the reading…it was, like, what is the point in carrying on looking? It’s him. There isn’t going to be somebody else. And then the challenge became to get our Watson who could match up to that. And, of course, as we keep saying, it’s a double act. Both characters are equally important. It’s only within the fiction that one’s senior to the other. Within the mechanics of the drama, they are equals. So who is going to be the other one? A host of brilliant people came in as Watson. The first person we saw, oddly enough, was Matt Smith, who is the new Doctor Who. A few days later, he was cast as The Doctor.

MG: He had a good week. (Laughs)

SM: (Laughs) He had a very good week! And then Martin came in, and when we stood him next to Benedict, he just became Watson instantly, and he somehow altered the way Benedict played it.

MG: They also had an instant chemistry, and it’s very interesting that Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are like chalk and cheese, and, actually, Benedict and Martin are very different people who have very different approaches to their acting, but they just connected. They just have a spark, and you could see it in the room. The room lit up, and it just altered the way he was giving the lines. They changed. And…it was just there. It doesn’t very often. It’s a gift. I saw the other day where someone said, “Whoever cast these two should be showered with awards.” I thought, “Yes!” (Laughs) But, actually, I just liked the fact that they were pinpointing that. I thought it was great.

BE: Well, I must admit that I haven’t seen any more of the series than what was shown here today…

SM: …but those are the things that you will think. (Laughs)

BE: (Laughs) Probably. But something you touched on in the panel, and what was apparently in the clips, is that this plays very much like a buddy film of sorts.

SM: It’s even not “of sorts.” I really do think, as I said in the panel, that the real story of “Sherlock Holmes” is the story of the friendship, but nobody really talks about it because it’s told through the medium of detective stories. It really is. You warm to those two men, who…in different ways, but they’re quite difficult separately, and they adore each other, but…what’s the line you’re always quoting?

MG: I was just thinking that…because, of course, we’re always thinking psychically. (Laughs) I’ve forgotten the line, but Watson persuades him to go out for a walk because nothing’s happening, and he says, “We walked for the most part in silence, as befits two men who know each other intimately.” It’s beautiful. And then they come back, and it’s, like, “You bastard, I told you!” (Laughs)

SM: (Laughs) Yeah. And there are those details throughout it. Doyle, despite what people tended to say about him, didn’t do anything by accident. These are all very deliberate, cleverly written stories, albeit at the same speed. And the fact that it is a friendship is intentional, but there is that moment of total affection between them that happens once and is never repeated, and it’s there for a purpose. So when Sherlock Holmes works, it’s when you believe in the relationship between the two of them. Nigel Bruce departed a long way from the character of Doctor Watson in the stories, but why I absolutely believe those Rathbone / Bruce films is because they’re the two best friends in the world. They actually were best friends, Rathbone and Bruce, and it’s on the screen. You think, “They love each other!” Why do they live each other? Because they love each other.

MG: It’s also key to it…going back to “Doctor Who” or, really, any successful series or drama, you want to spend time with these people. And I think sometimes you can get very hung up on a kind of solemn, very grave version of Sherlock Holmes in which they’re getting the carpet details right but they forget to get people who actually like each other. (Laughs) And you find yourself not wanting to spend time with them, because they’re not having a good time. They look like they’re miserable!

BE: Lastly, talking about Rathbone and Bruce and, indeed, getting it right, are there any other incarnations of Holmes and Watson that either of you were particularly struck by?

MG: Oh, yeah. Jeremy Brett in the ‘80s…I can so vividly remember hearing that there was a new “Sherlock Holmes” series and being so excited, but for some reason, in my head, when I heard Jeremy Brett, I thought it was Nigel Havers. But I remember seeing the trailer, a big “coming soon” thing, and it was “The Speckled Band,” in which he’s wearing a sort of deer stalker, and Jeremy Brett had a proper hero close-up, and I was just like… (Gasps) “He’s got it! That’s Sherlock Holmes!” And that series has become an absolute icon for so many people. It’s a very interesting thing to do the stories much more as written, but without raining on anyone’s parade, there’s always an inherent problem, I think, in taking a very fast paced short story and making it an hour like that. And some of them do suffer just from, again, taking it too seriously. Well, taking it absolutely seriously, but taking it too gravely.

BE: As a teenager, I was always a fan of “Young Sherlock Holmes.” Not the best film in the world, but certainly an entertaining one.

MG: The other thing we must mention, because it’s absolutely key for us, is the Billy Wilder film “The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes,” which is a masterpiece and, in so many ways, is tonally what we’re trying to do.

SM: There are a lot of things that we’ve taken from that, and we can’t say what they all are, but one of the things that Wilder and Diamond got right was the humor. The banter between the two was spot on. And, again, that Colin Blakely (who played Watson in “The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes”) had as big a part and his stature within the story was every bit as big as Robert Stevens (who played Holmes). The two of them were equals. That’s always the case in the successful versions of “Sherlock Holmes,” in my view. I rather liked Ian Richardson as Holmes. I don’t think they were necessarily the best films in the world, but he got a lot of the humor rather well.

MG: Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? There are two hundred odd films and 75 Sherlock Holmeses between them. That’s in the Guinness Book of World Records. I was talking to someone the other day, and one of the researchers in a horror documentary runs a silent movie festival and asked if we wanted to go open a festival of silent “Sherlock” films. There are so many that I don’t think anyone can ever really know which is the best. Some of them are lost, they’re so long ago. You only know them from stills in old books. I remember once, one afternoon when I was off school, one of the Arthur Wontner films was on…I think it “Silver Blaze” or something…and it was, like, “Oh, my God, how old is this?” (Laughs)

That’s right, the summer 2010 press tour of the Television Critics Association – that’s TCA to you, see? – has come and gone, leaving in its wake a piece that I love to compile but hate to finish. It’s just that kind of experience: there’s always something else to write about.

I know I say this every time, so you’d think my mindset on the tour would’ve changed by now, but I still continue to get excited when I fly to California and spend the better part of two weeks ensconced in a hotel, watching and listening as closely as possible (which, admittedly, isn’t often as closely as I’d like) to various stars, directors, producers, and writers as they do a dog and pony show to promote their program. I know they get sick of it sometimes, but for my part, I still haven’t. I spend the better part of 48 weeks of the year in Chesapeake, VA, a place where I do not regularly cross paths with the people that you see on your TV screen. As such, I remain excited about the opportunity to participate in these ridiculously cool opportunities, and I still feel like I have to share the experience with you, the reader, lest they begin to seem normal to me.

It’s not normal.

It’s the TCA press tour.

And trust me, unless you’re actually in show business, life doesn’t get much less normal than this.

Most entertaining panel by a broadcast network: “Circus,” PBS. Given the subject matter of the series – yes, it really is about the circus, specifically what it’s like to be part of a traveling circus in 2010 – it wasn’t entirely surprising that the panel kicked off with acrobat Christian Stoinev demonstrating some of his gymnastic abilities, but that didn’t make his performance any less impressive.

Plus, he earned bonus points for incorporating a cute little dog named Scooby into the act, who jumped onto Stoinev’s butt, strolled down his back, sat on his feet, and looked as calm as possible as Stoinev balanced semi-precariously on his parallel bars.

Most entertaining panel by a cable network: “Kids in the Hall: Death Comes to Town,” IFC. When I walked into the ballroom and found that we’d all received autographed DVDs of the Kids’ latest endeavor, I thought, “Can it get any better than this?” (I’m a sucker for anything autographed.) Indeed, it could, as the Kids – minus Mark McKinney, who’d been called back to Canada because of a family emergency – held court and kept us in stitches.

Some of my favorite moments:

QUESTION: How long had it been since you had cross-dressed professionally before (“Death Comes to Town”), and was that sort of a difficult readjustment for any of you?
SCOTT THOMPSON: Define “professionally.”
QUESTION: With a large crew.
SCOTT THOMPSON: Oh.
DAVE FOLEY: Not just any exchange of money.
BRUCE McCULLOCH: So if you shoot porn with a small crew, that wouldn’t count…?
KEVIN McDONALD: That’s not cross-dressing professionally.
DAVE FOLEY: Yeah. If you put on a nice shirt and give a handjob at the bus station, that still is professional.
SCOTT THOMPSON: Yes, it is.
BRUCE McCULLOCH: And by “handjob,” we mean “Bible reading,” as we like The Bible.

* Dave Foley on the audience response to Scott Thompson’s cancer being in remission: “I’m getting a sense that a lot of these people are on the cancer side. Well, I hope you are proud of yourselves. ‘Oh, dammit, not another one beating cancer. Poor cancer. When will people learn to love cancer?'”

* Scott Thompson: “I had a much easier time making (‘Death Comes to Town’), even though I was fighting cancer, than I did with ‘Brain Candy,’ honestly. It was tougher to fight Paramount. Because, at least with cancer, you can win.”

QUESTION: Do you find that people, when they see you, wanted to just squash your head? Because, like, I’m sitting here, like, resisting.
DAVE FOLEY: Yeah, a lot of time it has no reference to that gesture. It’s people actually want to crush our heads.
KEVIN McDONALD: The first apartment I ever moved to in Los Angeles, 1996, I was in bed the first night, and a couple were having a fight in the floor above me. And he was crying, “I’m going to crush your head,” and I thought they were fans, but it turned out they weren’t.
DAVE FOLEY: Yeah, it was a bloody homicide.
KEVIN McDONALD: It was a bloody homicide, yes.
DAVE FOLEY: But still, you felt flattered.
KEVIN McDONALD: But still, I felt flattered.

* When asked about their current relationship with Lorne Michaels, who introduced them to the U.S., McCulloch said, “I watch him get a haircut once a year when I go to ‘Saturday Night Live,'” while Foley claimed, “I chill his Amstel Light.” (“And drink it,” added McDonald.)

* Kevin McDonald made the bold choice of using the word “guff” at one point, receiving no end of ridicule from his fellow Kids. “It’s a tough word,” said McCulloch,”I know it’s tough to hear.” Thompson gasped and shrieked, “You said ‘guff‘!” Foley, however, offered a practical solution to the assembled journalists. “You can put asterisks in that. Just G-asterisk-asterisk-asterisk for your print,” he said, adding, “Of course, you online media people can just change it to ‘fuck.’”

* “Death Comes to Town” was filmed in North Bay, ON, but Foley said that it was a rarity for locals to come up and acknowledge their recognition of the Kids. “Canadians don’t do that,” explained Thompson. “Yeah,” agreed Foley. “They’d just come up and start talking to you like they knew you. You know, you would be in the grocery store, and somebody would just come up behind you and say, ‘Special K is marked down today. I’m getting the Special K as well. What are you doing later, Dave?’ And that was how you knew they recognized you.”

* The miniseries features Foley playing “the kindly old town abortionist,” which made it a bit difficult to scout for locations. Foley said that they had to keep making up stuff to tell the people of North Bay, saying things like, “Yeah, this scene, it’s a gynecologist’s office,” or “Oh, it’s an obstetrician’s office.” Or, as Scott Thompson claimed, “It’s a very bad day care.” At this, the crowd of critics erupted with a mixture of boos and laughs. “That was good,” Thompson assured us. “That was bad,” Foley assured him. At this, Thompson nodded, grinned, and admitted, “Very bad.”

Most out-of-control panel by a broadcast network: “Raising Hope,” Fox. I’m not going to pretend that I didn’t laugh really hard at Cloris Leachman’s antics as she wrestled control of the panel away not only from her co-stars but, indeed, from the assembled critics as well, demanding that her chair be moved from one end of the stage to the other and requesting that those asking questions stand up and/or sit down.

At some point, though, I think most of us were left wondering how much of the chaos we were witnessing was intentional and how much was a woman not knowing when to stop trying to be funny. About halfway through, Leachman finally calmed down, going almost completely quiet and giving the others a chance to answer a few questions. By that point, it was very much appreciated.

Most interactive panel by a broadcast network: “Masterchef,” Fox. Last time, Gordon Ramsay had the assembled critics compete to see who could whip up the best topping for Baked Alaska.

This time, he tested our palates by passing out little cups of gazpacho to everyone and asking us to determine the ingredients contained within. The critic who determined the final of the 15 ingredients won a free dinner from one of his restaurants. Sadly, that critic was not me.

Guilty-Pleasure Panel of the Tour: “Jersey Shore 2,” MTV. Love them or hate them, the “Jersey Shore” gang are ubiquitous in any discussion of 2010 pop culture, so it was nigh on impossible not to at least be intrigued when MTV quietly added a “Jersey Shore 2” panel to their proceedings. But who, we wondered, would be in attendance? The answer: every last (CENSORED) one of ’em.

(Actual panel wardrobe not pictured.)

Inevitably, though, it was the one and only Snooki who pulled the best quote of the panel, adding a new word to the vocabulary of American and Canadian TV critics: “snookin’.”

“Snookin’ is when you’re lookin’,” she explained. “So if I say I’m snookin’ for love, I’m snookin’ for a guy. If I snooked the night, then I took the night. Get it?”

Um…

“My snooktionary is coming out, and you’ll understand my language,” she assured us…and, yes, she claims she’s serious about that.

5 Greatest Moments of Complete Honesty During The Tour:

1) Alex O’Loughlin on “Hawaii Five-0”: “If this one doesn’t go, I’m completely bewildered. I have no idea how television works at all.”
2) Carrie Fisher on how it felt to walk onstage wearing a Princess Leia wig: “Like an asshole. A complete, undignified jerk-off. But other than that, really good.”
3) Snooki on her run-in with the law: “Obviously, it wasn’t a good time, but, you know, I didn’t hurt anybody, and I just went out to have a good time on the beach, and you know, stuff like that happens in Jersey. I was in the drunk tank for a little bit. I had too many tequilas.”
4) Billy Gardell (“Mike & Molly”) on his waistline: “I think I’d like to lose some weight. I mean, everybody’d like to be a little bit better than they are, you know, but everybody has a different tick, man. Mine just happens to be pizza. It’s okay. You can laugh at that. I’ve got a mirror. Lighten up.”
5) David Cross on poor decisions he’s made in his life: “I shit myself one time. I mean, it wasn’t a decision. I just thought it was going to be a fart. So it turned out be a bad decision. What’s another poor decision? Oh, telling the thing about shitting myself. That was stupid. Why would I do that? It was unnecessary.”

Most common recurring question during the panels: I’m pretty sure that every single actor whose ancestors can be traced back to India in any capacity whatsoever was asked for their opinion about NBC’s “Outsourced.”

Most awkward segue into an equally awkward question: During the panel for TV Land’s “Harry Loves Lisa,” the reality series starring Harry Hamlin and Lisa Rinna, a critic casually brought up the fact that Prop 8 had been repealed, then added, “Which reminds me of ‘Making Love,’ with Harry and Michael Ontkean. What are your thoughts about maybe a sequel to that movie with Michael? And Lisa, when you see that movie, what do you think? Does it get you going?”

The “So, Paul, What Do You Hear About Ringo’s New Album?” Award: During the panel for “Mr. Sunshine,” Matthew Perry…and, indeed, virtually the entirely assembly of critics, I’d have to guess…was left dumbstruck when he was asked, “Do you ever see David (Schwimmer), and does he talk to you about his goals?”

Strangest rant by a panelist: Yoko Ono. This probably isn’t too much of a surprise, given the widow Lennon’s tendency toward eccentricity, but many critics – including myself – were left flabbergasted by her explosion over one critic’s innocuous question about why she decided to remain in the Dakota after John’s murder. First, she declared it to be “a slightly racist remark, and maybe sexist, too,” but then she really went off.

“You guys are doing that, but when somebody like me, who is probably not part of your culture, how you think, ‘Why she still living there? We wouldn’t live there. Well, maybe because she has a different tradition and she doesn’t care about the fact that he died there.’ You know, something like that. A little bit more barbaric or something. No. I think that you would want to live there, too, because you cherish the memory of that person. That’s one. But also the other thing is, for you to be able to say something like that, ‘How dare she’s living there?’ is sexism, because I know that all guys wouldn’t care. They would just live in the house, you know,whatever happens. They may not even care that they got a divorce or whatever happened. They would just live in the house, and no one’s going to comment. No one’s going to comment that you would go to maybe a whorehouse or something like that right after your wife died. ‘I’m so sorry. He must be so sad.’ I was still sad, so I’m still living in that house. Do you mind?“

I felt so bad for the guy who’d asked the question, who – once he could get a word in edgewise – explained, “Okay, I did not mean to be racist nor sexist, and I don’t know where whorehouses got into this conversation, but when my dad passed away, my mom wanted to go live in Florida, and it’s just…people grieve differently.” Yoko halfheartedly tried to backpedal, saying, “I was being a little bit facetious, I’m sorry,” and she probably was. But, wow, talk about lashing out…

Panelist most likely to have one of his comments thrown back at him when his series premieres: Joseph Fiennes, who plays Merlin in “Camelot,” Starz’s new take on the classic Arthurian legends. Fiennes said of his character, “I think of Merlin as a sort of cross between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Donald Rumsfeld.” This, of course, resulted in an immediate follow-up question, requesting a bit more clarification on the resemblance to Rumsfeld. “Well, I don’t want to draw too many parallels and be boxed in a corner too much,” Fiennes replied, “but I just think it’s really about political agenda.” Toward the end of the panel, the matter was brought up again, leading him to muse that he’d basically shot himself in the face by having made the comparison in the first place. Muttered executive producer Chris Chibnall, “I knew that was going to get us in trouble…”

Panelist who looked the least thrilled to be in attendance: Maura Tierney, “The Whole Truth,” ABC. I’m sure it was mostly because she wasn’t looking forward to people quizzing her about her health, but she looked perpetually like she was going to burst into this song:

Cable series with the least sense of history: “Mad Genius,” Fuse. Any music fan worth their salt would be intrigued by a show which, according to the network’s description, “delves into the minds of musicians, the eccentricities, the world view, the influences of some of the major artists in the world and connects them to their artistic contributions to the groundbreaking music that they create.” We’re sitting around thinking about the possibilities: Syd Barrett, Roky Erickson, Peter Green, Brian Wilson, and the like. Who does Fuse cite among the show’s subjects? Britney Spears and Li’l Wayne. Wow. Just…wow.

Most unintentionally off-color moment from a broadcast network panel: During the “$#*! My Dad Says” panel, executive producer Max Mutchnick had a moment of uncertainty about the proper verb to describe the process of sending out a message through Twitter and accidentally referred to “Dad” creator Justin Halpern’s “beautiful Twat.” Realizing his slip of the tongue, Mutchnick stammered, “I don’t know how you say it,” but not before William Shatner shook his head with mock dismay, saying, “That’s twisted.”

Later, Shatner used the phrase “people who Twit,” after which executive producer David Kohan smirked and countered, “I think it’s Twat.” A chagrined Mutchnick suggested that the proper verb was “Tweet.” Shatner snapped back, “Well, I know it isn’t ‘Twat’!”

Best use of a panelist’s absence: Peter Tolan. It’s not like his cohort Denis Leary was supposed to be there for the lunchtime “Rescue Me” session, but the fact that he wasn’t gave Tolan the opportunity to relish the solitude of the stage. “I’m so glad to be here by myself and not with Denis Leary,” he said, “because he is an attention hog, and the secondhand smoke, really, I’m lucky to be alive, frankly, at this point. It’s been seven seasons, and of course “The Job,” the show we did before, which was my idea, as was ‘Rescue Me.’ I am really lucky to be alive. I’m sure there are tumors just waiting to take me pretty much after this lunch.”

Most promising new cable program that I didn’t know much about before going into the tour: “Teen Wolf,” MTV. Turns out it’s being executive-produced by Jeff Davis, the man behind “Criminal Minds,” so suffice to say that it’s darker than the original film. Bonus: the pilot was directed by Russell Mulcahy, who’s had an affiliation with MTV since the day the network began…literally, since he directed this video:

Least promising new broadcast network program that I didn’t know anything about before going into the tour: “My Generation,” ABC. It always takes me forever to check out ABC’s new series, as I hate watching screeners on my computer (the network stopped sending out DVDs of its programs long ago), so I hadn’t investigated “My Generation.” Turns out it’s a look back at a high school class from 2000 and how they’ve changed since they graduated. As I said to a compatriot during the panel, “I’m pretty sure the only thing that’s going to make me want to tune into this show is if a killer starts picking off the twentysomethings one by one.” Mind you, I haven’t seen the pilot yet, but the trailer pretty well served to cement my theory.

Coolest anecdote(s) from a press scrum: Actually, it was less a scrum than an impromptu roundtable, but after PBS’s “Pioneers of Television” panel, my esteemed peer Marc Allan invited me to grab a chair and join the conversation he was having with Martin Landau, and others soon had their recorders out as well. It was Marc, however, who asked the two big-money questions.

First, Marc asked Landau if he had ever had the opportunity to meet Bela Lugosi, who he portrayed (and won an Oscar for doing so) in Tim Burton’s “Ed Wood.”

“No, I never met Lugosi,” replied Landau. “But I met Karloff…and had tea with him! I was doing some post-synching on a television show, and we both left our respective studios at the same time and met in the hall. At the time, Jack Nicholson was actually my student. Jack studied with me for three years, and Jack had just finished a picture for Roger Corman with Karloff. Jack wasn’t very good in it. He was much too contemporary. But, anyway, I saw Karloff in the hall, and we greeted each other. I said, ‘You just worked with a friend of mine.’ And he said, ‘And who might that be?’ And I said, ‘Jack Nicholson.’ And he said, ‘Oh, yes. Poor boy. Where are going now?’ I said, ‘Home.’ He said, ‘Would you like some tea?’ I said ‘yes,’ and we went to the commissary and had tea and little sandwiches, and I got to spend a little time with him.”

Then, as if psychic, Allan asked Landau about the one project I’d been chomping at the bit to hear his recollections about: “The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island.”

“I had a good time doing that!” said Landau, offering surprising enthusiasm as he reminisced about working with “Chick Hearn and a bunch of robots, noting that it was the last time he’d worked with ex-wife Barbara Bain, who’d been his co-star on “Mission: Impossible” and “Space: 1999.” “People say that it was the worst moment in my career,” he said, with a laugh, “but I actually had fun on that show. The first day I was on it, though, was the day that Reagan was shot, so when we got to the set, everyone was…well, you know. So I told about three or four jokes and loosened everyone up, and from that point on, we had a good time.”

Really, I could go on about the conversation for several more paragraphs, since the next topic of conversation was how he was offered the role of Mr. Spock on “Star Trek” before Leonard Nimoy. Suffice it to say that I hope to get a one-on-one with Mr. Landau one of these days…but if it never happens, sitting in on this one was still pretty damned cool.

Favorite one-on-one interview at a TCA function: Tom Selleck. I’d been trying to confirm or deny the possibility of talking to Tom about his new CBS series, “Blue Bloods,” but it was all very sketchy about how long he’d be at the CBS evening event. I therefore set up camp near the front door of the function, waiting for him to arrival. When he did, I followed behind him and his publicist, and once they reached their table, his publicist turned, saw my nametag and recognized my name, and waved me over to him. Tom smiled at me beneath his mustache and said, “No one will sit with me. Will you sit with me?” So I sat with him…and he was just as nice a guy as you’d want him to be.

Favorite one-on-one interview which took place elsewhere: Brad Meltzer. I’ve been a fan of Brad’s thrillers for several years, and when he made the jump into writing comic books, by God, I was right there with him. I’ve even traded the occasional E-mail with the guy. This, however, was the first time I’d ever actually met him. It was worth the wait.

Most intimidating one-on-one interview: Spike Lee. Spike seems like someone who could be a prickly pear if you don’t know what you’re talking about, so I blew off a concert by Vinyl Candy (sorry, guys) in order to make sure I’d seen his new HBO documentary, “If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise,” before our conversation. Fortunately, it paid off: Spike was great.

Best party: CBS. These guys almost always take home the gold. Not only does lots of their talent show up, but they always hold them somewhere that you can actually move around without feeling like you’re bumping into someone or on the verge of knocking someone down.

Worst party: Sony. It was a tremendous turnout of talent, so much so that in another locale it might’ve ended up being cited as the best party, but it was so freaking packed that you could barely move and rarely hear anyone well enough to do a decent interview.

Party that I usually don’t enjoy but this time did: Fox. They like to use their “American Idol” money to rent the Santa Monta Pier for the night and let us and their talent go nuts with the food, the drinks, and the rides. Normally, I complain about how it’s not terribly conducive to doing interviews, what with the loud music and the noise of the rides. This time, my wife was there with me. I still didn’t do many interviews…but I did get to ride the Ferris Wheel with the woman I love. Yeah, yeah, we’re disgustingly cute. Get over it.

My 5 Favorite Cheap Thrills of the Tour:

1. Getting a hug from Jayma Mays of “Glee.” Yes, my wife was standing right there. (So was Jayma’s husband, Adam Campbell, for that matter.) But even my wife thinks she’s cute.
2. Talking to both David Cross and Bob Odenkirk on the same tour. Hopefully, there are “Mr. Show” fans out there who will appreciate this accomplishment as much as I did.
3. Telling Tom Hanks that I really loved “Mazes and Monsters” / Having Tom Hanks use me as a prop while telling a story (TIE). This was the third time I’d met my generation’s Jimmy Stewart, and each time I’d told myself that I was going to bring up the classic TV movie from early in his career, but when my fellow Bullz-Eye buddy Ross Ruediger broached the subject of “Splash!” and got five minutes worth of stories about working on the film, I decided that this was my time to shine. All I got for my trouble was a smirk, followed by a look that may or may not have been pity.

In retrospect, I probably should have just stuck with my Hanks encounter from earlier in the evening, when he’d been telling some story or other and, since I was closest to him, used me to illustrate how the person in his story kept poking someone in the chest. Anyone who tells you that I was considering getting a tattoo of the resulting bruise is a dirty liar. (That was just drunk talk.)
4. Bill Lawrence telling my wife that I’m awesome. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve talked to Bill Lawrence on the phone and in person, but my wife had never had the pleasure. At the ABC party, however, she spotted him holding court and decided to approach his assistant just to see if she could slip in long enough to introduce herself. She hadn’t gotten past the words “my husband is Will” before she was informed that “we love Will” and quickly hustled over to Bill for introductions, where the good Mr. Lawrence echoed his assistant’s statements. I should clarify that it’s not the compliment itself that made for the cheap thrill but, rather, the fact that Bill Lawrence made my wife feel good about her lot in life. I mean, she’s married to a TV critic, fer crissakes. She needs all the reassurances she can get.
5. Having William Shatner abruptly end our interview by clapping me on the shoulder and saying, “Thanks for your time.” Ah, it wasn’t going that well, anyway. And, besides, who cares? Captain Kirk touched me!

Cast most likely to get me into trouble: “NCIS.” I don’t know what it is about Michael Weatherly and Pauley Perrette, but I always end up finding myself on the verge of breaking some rule or other when I’m around them.

With Michael, he loves to tell stories when he knows you’re not recording him, and they’re invariably filled with some tidbit or other where you’d feel guilty running them intact. As such, I can’t tell you about what happened when he gave Robert Wagner’s E-mail address to Roger Moore…but if you ever meet Michael, ask him about the time he and Jessica Alba met Elvis Costello and Peter O’Toole. It’s a good’un.

As for Pauley, it’s become a TCA tradition that we take a picture together whenever we see each other: she holds the camera in front of us and takes the picture herself, and heaven help anyone who tries to take it for us. Unfortunately, as I learned after my first tour of duty with the TCA, it’s a no-no for members of the organization to take pictures with the stars. Pauley knows this. She just doesn’t care. This time, she assured me, “It’s seven years bad luck if we don’t take one every tour!” I’m pretty sure she didn’t have any documentation to back this up, but she took the picture anyway. Seriously, the woman’s a force of nature. Fortunately, I think everyone in the TCA knows this about Pauley, so I think they’d probably see her as an exception to the rule…but, just in case, I’m keeping the picture to myself.

Most awesome visit to the set of a network show: “Friends.” Don’t get me wrong, visiting Wisteria Lane is cool whether you watch “Desperate Housewives” or not, and the intricacies of the “Parenthood” set were remarkable to behold, but the power of pure sentimentality trumped them both. No, it’s not where the show actually filmed, but it’s all of the original items, and they look exactly like they did when they originally filmed the show. What I’m saying to you is that I stood in the middle of Central Perk. It doesn’t get much better than that.

Most disappointing visit to the set of a network show: “Undercovers.” This new NBC series has a certain amount of potential, and in fairness, the sets – one of which is a working kitchen – did look pretty cool, but the fact that none of the cast nor the producers could be bothered to make it to our visit ultimately made it feel like a bust.

Most pleasant reminder that, once in awhile, you make enough of an impression on the people you interview on the phone that they actually still remember you when you meet them in person: A month or so ago, I interviewed Nate Torrence in conjunction with “She’s Out of Your League” hitting DVD, and when he mentioned that he was in the cast of ABC’s “Mr. Sunshine,” I said, “Well, then, I’ll look for you when I’m at the TCA tour.” Flash-forward to ABC’s post-panel party, where I see Nate and go up to introduce myself, but before I can finish reminding him who I am, he quickly lets me know that he needs no reminder. “I get up there for the panel,” he said, “and I’m, like, ‘No one is going to ask me anything. I’m just going to sit here.’ But then I go, ‘Hey, wait a minute, what about the guy from Bullz-Eye? I think he said he was going to be here! Maybe he’ll ask me a question!’” Of course, when he said this, I immediately felt awful that I hadn’t actually asked him a question…

Most unpleasant reminder that, no matter how much you’ve enjoyed someone’s work on television, they still see you as a journalist and therefore don’t really want to talk to you if they can help it: Chandler was always my favorite Friend, I really liked “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” and unlike some of my peers, I laughed pretty hard at the pilot for “Mr. Sunshine,” but I can’t say that I’m as thrilled with Matthew Perry as I used to be.

I tried to be as polite as possible while waiting to chat with Perry during the ABC party, but on two separate occasions, although he clearly knew I was loitering in his vicinity for that purpose (the recorder in my hand was, to my way of thinking, kind of a dead giveaway), he pointedly opted to continue conversations with co-stars and friends rather than acknowledge me. One of my peers stopped by during my lengthy loiter and told me that I had the patience of a saint to wait the guy out, but in the end, even Francis of Assisi would’ve given up on Perry: once he finished the conversation, he turned to try and leave without turning toward me. Before I could stop him, though, the writer standing next to me snared him, then kindly gestured in my direction and said, “I was waiting for you, but he’s been waiting even longer.” Perry endured questions from both of us for a few minutes, but then he said, “I’m going to walk away now.” And he did.

I know the guy’s dealt with plenty of these TCA parties during the years that he was part of the NBC family, but given that he’s not only the male lead in “Mr. Sunshine” but also the creator and one of the show’s writers, I really expected him to be more enthused about the chance to promote the series.

I should add, though, that my wife – simply by speaking the truth – ended up kind of getting the last laugh on Perry. At the Sony party, she was talking to Megyn Price (“Rules of Engagement”) when Perry came up and started talking to Pryce. My wife waited politely for Perry to finish, but when he did, he turned to my wife and, with a decidedly dejected look on his face, said, “I suppose you want to interview me.” She looked right back at him and said, “Oh, God, no!”

Admittedly, all she meant was that she was just a guest at the party and therefore wasn’t doing interviews with anyone, but I am assured that the look on Perry’s face was priceless nonetheless.

Most awesome live performance of the tour: Michael Feinstein jazzing it up and occasionally even kicking out the jams with his 17-piece band as part of a dinner-and-a-show performance to promote his upcoming three-part PBS miniseries, “Michael Feinstein’s American Songbook.” I’ve respected Feinstein’s work since I heard him cover “Both Sides Now” on an Elektra Records compilation entitled Rubaiyat, and somewhere around here I’m pretty sure I still have a copy of his Isn’t It Romantic album on cassette, so I figured I’d get a polite but somewhat easy-listening performance that would make for a nice wrap-up to the evening.

My bad.

My jaw was left on the floor by how much energy the man put into the seven songs he played for us, which began with “The Lady Is a Tramp” and ended with “For Once in My Life.” Suffice it to say that I became the proud owner of Feinstein’s The Sinatra Project the next time I visited a record store…which, as it happens, occurred only a few days later.

Best off-site visit that was in no way connected to the tour: Amoeba Records. I usually make a point of swinging by my favorite Hollywood record store whenever I make it into town, but my schedule in January didn’t lend itself to a visit, so it’d been a year since my last dig through Amoeba’s always-awesome bargain bins.

Unfortunately, when I arrived, I found that what would’ve otherwise been a pretty cool coincidence – Elijah Wood was doing a DJ set for the store – totally screwed up my fun, as they’d set up a barrier to keep people from getting too close to Elijah as well as to keep too many people from rushing the DJ booth…and it was right in front of the store’s fabled $1 bins. So if you happened to be there that day and heard a bearded and bespectacled gentleman grumbling, “Fuckin’ Frodo,” now you know why.

Best piece of swag: HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire” flask. I think this is actually the third flask I’ve gotten in the last year: The CW gave them out last summer with the “Melrose Place” reboot, possibly because I needed a lot of alcohol to make the show endurable, and then Fox sent one out in conjunction with “Family Guy” not terribly long ago. What made this one so special? It was all in the presentation. Everyone was presented with a copy of The Anti-Saloon League Yearbook 1920…and when you opened it, you found a flask-shaped hole carved into the pages which housed our gift. How awesome is that?

Worst trends of the tour:

1) Networks attempting to squeeze as many panels into one day as possible. In fairness, CBS and Fox were fantastic with their respective families of networks, dividing their presentations into two days. Not so NBC-Universal, who forced us to endure a single day of panels and even between-panel events in order to cover series from NBC, SyFy, USA, Oxygen, Bravo, and MSNBC. And as an FYI to the Discovery Networks, if you’ve got things scheduled so that, after two questions, the moderator has to say, “We’ve got time for one last question,” you’ve got things scheduled way too tightly.

2) Networks neglecting to include panels for existing shows. It makes sense, given the tight quarters on the schedule, but it’s no less disappointing. CBS gave us a “Big Bang Theory” panel, The CW offered “Gossip Girl,” and Fox gave us “Glee,” but for the most part, existing series were relegated to between-panel events in the lobby of the ballroom. Sure, it’s nice to have coffee with the cast of “Modern Family” in theory, but the end result is lots of scrums and limited opportunities for one-on-one questions. I’m not saying I’m the most gregarious when it comes to asking questions during the panels, but it sucks to not even have that chance.

3) Networks missing from the tour altogether. AMC made a major splash at Comic-Con with “The Walking Dead,” and, hey, fair enough, the show’s based on a comic book. Similarly, Matthew Weiner seems to be pretty pissed at the press right now, so that’d probably explain the lack of a “Mad Men” panel.” But given that other members of Rainbow Media family of networks were in attendance (IFC and WeTV), it felt like a slap across the face that we didn’t even get a state of the union address from an AMC exec, especially when they announced their new series, “The Killing,” a mere three days after the tour wrapped. And wherefore art thou, Turner? All of those new series on TBS, TNT, Cartoon Network, and the like, and we don’t get a single panel for any of them? I know Conan doesn’t really need more promo for his new show, but it sure seemed like an opportunity missed.

And, as ever, we wrap things up with a bitch session…

Most annoying moment of the tour: having my request for a one-on-one chat with Tony Danza declined because, as his personal rep purportedly said, “This isn’t his kind of interview.”

Now, granted, this came through channels rather than directly from the rep, and I can’t imagine that Tony Danza himself has anything to do with declining the interview, but that’s the reason that was cited in the E-mail from A&E, home of Danza’s new reality series, “Tony Danza: Teach.”

As someone who’s the son of a retired teacher and the husband of a woman who works with autistic students, I’m well aware of the importance of education and how students affect the lives of teachers just as much as teachers affect the lives of students, so I was immediately intrigued by the concept of the series. Additionally, one of my friends had once had dinner with Danza and had nothing but nice things to say about the guy. No surprise here: I put in for an interview.

Now, please understand that I’ve been turned down for more than a few interviews in my time, and I’ve come to accept the heartbreak of rejection when it comes to an actor’s busy schedule, even when it’s patently clear that “busy” translates into “he only talks to the bigger, better-known outlets, and, frankly, I’ve never even heard of your site.” In the end, it really all comes down to this: I’m someone who needs closure on things, and if a rep is going to tell me that their client is opting out of talking to me because “this isn’t his kind of interview,” then I don’t think it’s too much to ask why it isn’t his kind of interview. I mean, maybe it’s something I can change, y’know? So I asked. But I never got an answer.

Do you know why? If so, drop me a line…or, better yet, if you’re already that deep into the Danza camp, anyway, then go ahead and tell Tony that I’d still really like to talk to him. After hearing him talk during his panel, there’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that this teaching gig was a full-fledged life-changing experience for the guy. As such, I’d like to do whatever I can to help promote “Tony Danza: Teach”…and, yes, even after all of this whining, I do still think you should watch it when it premieres on A&E on October 1st.

Well, maybe you do…and if you do, then I’ll be glad to give it to you, since it’s never too late for a TCA member to delve back into the archives and produce the highlights of the tour’s various panels.

In the meantime, though, here’s a quick list of what was covered during the course of PBS’s two days of the tour, along with what the network itself has to say about the programs in question. If you want a straighter strain of dope on any of them, just say the word…

* American Experience: Freedom Riders:

Award-winning filmmaker Stanley Nelson returns to the Sundance Film Festival with his latest documentary “Freedom Riders,” the powerful, harrowing and ultimately inspirational story of six months in 1961 that changed America forever. From May until November 1961, more than 400 black and white Americans risked their lives—and many endured savage beatings and imprisonment—for simply traveling together on buses and trains as they journeyed through the Deep South. Deliberately violating Jim Crow laws, the Freedom Riders’ belief in non-violent activism was sorely tested as mob violence and bitter racism greeted them along the way.

Says Stanley Nelson, “The lesson of the Freedom Rides is that great change can come from a few small steps taken by courageous people. And that sometimes to do any great thing, it’s important that we step out alone.” (Winter / Spring 2011)

* American Masters: LENNONYC:

This fall, as the world remembers John Lennon on what would have been his 70th birthday, and the 30th anniversary of his death, American Masters airs “LENNONYC,” a new film that takes an intimate look at the time Lennon, Yoko Ono and their son, Sean, spent living in New York City during the 1970s. “New York became a part of who John and I were,” said Ms. Ono. “We couldn’t have existed the same way anywhere else. We had a very special relationship with the city, which is why I continue to make this my home, and I think this film captures what that time was like for us very movingly.”

Lennon and Ono also bonded with millions of their fellow New Yorkers in their experience as immigrants. The film traces their struggle to remain in the U.S. when the Nixon administration sought to deport them, supposedly based on a narcotics violation, but which Lennon insisted was in response to his anti-war activities. “LENNONYC” features never-before heard studio recordings from the Double Fantasy sessions and never-before-seen outtakes from Lennon in concert and home movies that have only recently been transferred to video. It also features exclusive interviews with Ms. Ono, who cooperated extensively with the production and offers an unprecedented level of access, as well as with artists who worked closely with Lennon during this period, including Elton John and photographer Bob Gruen (who took the iconic photograph of Lennon in front of the skyline wearing a “New York City” t-shirt). (Nov. 22, 2010)

* The Cat in the Hat Knows A Lot About That!

Voiced by award-winning actor Martin Short, Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat guides friends Sally and Nick – with a little help from the Fish, Thing 1 and Thing 2 – on fun-filled adventures where they make natural-science discoveries, from how bees make honey to why owls sleep during the day. Filled with both adventure and silliness, “The Cat in the Hat Knows A Lot About That!”, based on the acclaimed The Cat in the Hat’s Learning Library book series, will appeal to preschoolers’ natural curiosity, and engage them in the process of scientific exploration and discovery. The series, created in response to recent findings that children graduating from kindergarten are less prepared to learn about science than about other subjects, supports young children’s science learning by introducing scientific inquiry skills, teaching core science concepts and vocabulary, and preparing preschoolers for kindergarten and first grade science curriculum — all in whimsical style.

A team of science and early childhood experts developed the curriculum for the first season’s 40 episodes, each of which begins with a question posed by Sally or Nick. Although the Cat knows a lot of things, his insatiable curiosity to learn more about the world leads to adventures with Sally and Nick in his one-of-a-kind Thinga-ma-jigger, a marvelously Seuss-ian contraption that sprouts wings, pontoons, booster rockets, skis, and just about anything else needed to find the answer. The inquisitive gang travels to the bottom of the sea to observe giant sea worms, zips to the rain forest to visit animals living in Kapok trees, and shrinks to bee-size to visit a hive and learn how honey is made. Guided by the Cat, the kids figure things out by observing, collecting and managing clues, making connections, constructing and evaluating theories, and having discussions — all in a preschool-appropriate manner. (Premieres Sept. 6)

* Circus:

For centuries, the circus has captivated and delighted audiences around the globe, becoming a cultural phenomenon. Now, for the first time, step inside the ring, where the stories are true and the magic is real, for an intimate look at the mystery and thrill of it all with “Circus,” a multi-part documentary. Over the course of six dramatic hours, Show of Force, the production company whose founding partners were two of the key creative visionaries behind the Emmy Award-winning PBS series “Carrier,” turns its lenses on the world-renowned Big Apple Circus. “Circus” follows the company on an unforgettable journey from the big top to the “back lot,” where nail-biting drama unfolds both high in the air and down on the ground and the real heart of the circus beats, going behind the scenes to explore a distinctive world with its own rules and lingo and no fixed address. It reveals the sights, sounds and stories of the circus’ fascinating cultural legacy in unprecedented breadth and scope as viewers escape into a place of passion, excitement, perseverance and even heartache. From the training and rehearsals to the bravery and the intensity of life — and work — in the circus, the cameras capture it all.

“Circus” is a never-before-seen look into how a traveling big-top show functions. Constantly in motion, startlingly insular and completely interdependent for months on end, the circus community demands a uniquely high level of sociability, diplomacy and flat-out patience. Audiences will quickly discover that running away to the circus does not always guarantee one’s troubles won’t eventually catch up. (Nov. 3, 2010)

* Michael Feinstein’s American Songbook:

Produced and directed by Amber Edwards of Hudson West Productions, the three-part series embarks on a dynamic road trip through the glorious history of American song by the acclaimed musician and five-time Grammy®-nominated vocalist. Viewers accompany Feinstein on-stage and backstage, hear him interpret great standards, listen in on personal stories about the songwriters and entertainers he’s known and worked with over three decades, and join him on his quest to find and preserve rare treasures of classic American music.

In all aspects of his life, Feinstein is a historical sleuth, obsessively seeking out and saving priceless musical rarities (alternate lyrics, long-lost arrangements, and unreleased recordings) from destruction. In addition to footage that documents Feinstein’s fabulous but exhausting life on the road, “Michael Feinstein’s American Songbook” uses prized archival audio and film footage to tell its story. The clips, narrated and contextualized by Feinstein, reveal the social and historical forces behind the music, which helped to shape the style, attitude and self-image of America for more than a century. Filled with generous portions of live performance past and present, the series offers both an intimate portrait of a unique entertainer and a history of 20th century popular culture. (Oct. 6, 2010)

* God in America:

How has religious belief shaped American history? What role have religious ideas and spiritual experience played in shaping the social, political, and cultural life of what has become the world’s most religiously diverse nation? For the first time on television, “God in America,” a presentation of “American Experience” and “Frontline,” will explore the historical role of religion in the public life of the United States in the six-hour series, which interweaves documentary footage, historical dramatization, and interviews with religious historians. “God in America” examines the potent and complex interaction between religion and democracy, the origins of the American concept of religious liberty, and the controversial evolution of that ideal in the nation’s courts and political arena.

The series considers the role religious ideas and institutions have played in social reform movements from abolition to civil rights, examining the impact of religious faith on conflicts from the American Revolution to the Cold War, and how guarantees of religious freedom created a competitive American religious marketplace. It also explores the intersection of political struggle and spiritual experience in the lives of key American historical figures including Franciscan Friars and the Pueblo leader Po’pay, Puritan leader John Winthrop and dissident Anne Hutchinson, Catholic Bishop John Hughes, abolitionist Frederick Douglass, Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, reform Rabbi Isaac Meyer Wise, Scopes trial combatants William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow, evangelist Billy Graham, civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Moral Majority’s Jerry Falwell. (Oct. 11, 2010)

* In Performance at the White House: A Broadway Celebration:

“A Broadway Celebration: In Performance at the White House” is a PBS music special in the East Room of the White House; WETA Washington, D.C., will produce the television program in association with Margo Lion, Ltd. and 101 Productions, Ltd., and it will be directed by Broadway luminary George C. Wolfe. President and Mrs. Obama will host the event on Monday, July 19.

It will feature a series of performances by major Broadway artists and new talent, presenting selections from American musicals that reflect the spirit, energy and ambition of America. The evening will include Nathan Lane, Idina Menzel, Brian d’Arcy James, Audra McDonald, Chad Kimball, Marvin Hamlisch, Karen Olivo, Tonya Pinkins, Assata Alston and a youth ensemble from the Joy of Motion Dance Center. (Oct. 20, 2010)

* Independent Lens: Bhutto:

A portrait of one of the most fascinating and complex figures of our time, Bhutto is the epic tale of the life and tragic death of Benazir Bhutto, who broke the Islamic glass ceiling as the first woman leader of a Muslim country. Beloved by the people of her native Pakistan, she was reviled by the nation’s military establishment and male-dominated ruling class.

More than two years after her death from a suicide bomber, Benazir remains a divisive figure, a symbolic metaphor for the fight between terrorism and moderation. That struggle continues today in Pakistan, the world’s most strategically important country and the Muslim world’s sole nuclear power. (March 2011)

* Independent Lens: Reel Injun:

Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond takes an entertaining, insightful, and often humorous look at the Hollywood Indian, exploring the portrayal of North American Natives through a century of cinema and examining the ways that the myth of “the Injun” has influenced the world’s understanding—and misunderstanding—of Natives. Narrated by Diamond with infectious enthusiasm and good humor, “Reel Injun: On the Trail of the Hollywood Indian” is a loving look at cinema through the eyes of the people who appeared in its very first flickering images and have survived to tell their stories their own way.

“Reel Injun”’s humor and star power is balanced with insightful commentary from film critics and historians, including CBC film critic Jesse Wente; Angela Aleiss, author and scholar of American Indian Studies; and Melinda Micco, associate professor of ethnic studies at Mills College, California. The film also explores the range of non-Native actors who have portrayed Natives onscreen and reveals the bizarre secret identity of the iconic “weeping” Indian, Iron Eyes Cody. (Nov. 2010)

* Masterpiece – Wallander II: Faceless Killers

Kenneth Branagh returns to his remarkable Emmy and Golden Globe-nominated role as the soul-searching Swedish cop created by bestselling novelist Henning Mankell, on “Wallander II,” three gripping new Kurt Wallander cases based on the books that launched the craze for Nordic thrillers. “Wallander II” has Branagh back in top form in a performance greeted by rapturous UK critics as “a revelation” (The Telegraph), “close to perfect” (The Sunday Times), and “one of the great treats of contemporary television” (The Evening Standard). The British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) could not agree more, honoring him with the Best Actor Award for 2010. Set in the Swedish port town of Ystad, a crossroads of international crime and home-grown misfits and psychopaths, the series pits Wallander against serial killers, vigilantes, organ harvesters, and sadistic armed robbers.

Branagh is joined by David Warner as the elder Wallander, a painter who is losing his mind to Alzheimer’s, but worries about his son’s soul; Tom Hiddleston as Wallander’s fellow cop Magnus, a crisp professional who both admires and resents his colleague’s chaotic style; Jeany Spark as Wallander’s long-suffering daughter, Linda; and guest star Rupert Graves as a wealthy philanthropist, whose altruism seems too good to be true. The new season finds the down-at-the-heels sleuth nearing the end of his emotional rope—at odds with Linda, his father, his gyrating blood sugar, and coming to terms with having killed a man. It’s almost more than a self-doubting crime solver can stomach, but circumstances throw the following cases into his lap:

Faceless Killers – An elderly couple on a farm are tortured and murdered in a way that suggests the killers were trying to extract information. The woman’s dying word to Wallander: “foreigner”—or something like it. Unfortunately, this uncertain testimony leaks to the press and a vigilante campaign against migrant laborers begins—with deadly consequences. Wallander faces his own conflicting attitude toward foreigners when Linda begins dating a Syrian doctor. Racism, revenge, greed, and the search for justice prove a volatile mix, as the darker side of human nature erupts. (Oct. 3, 2010)

The Man Who Smiled – Scarred by the experience of shooting a man and on the verge of resigning from the force, Wallander is approached by an old friend. The man’s father has just died in a suspicious car crash. Distracted, Wallander refuses to investigate, but then his friend is found hanged. Both father and son have the same unusual injury to a bone in the neck, indicating murder. This double homicide soon points to a heinous conspiracy, where Wallander’s chief informant is a resentful former Ystad cop who was fired for wrongful death. (Oct. 10, 2010)

The Fifth Woman – An elderly widower and birdwatcher is tortured and killed with shocking barbarity. Then, it’s the turn of a flower shop manager. Yet another older man dies hideously before Wallander begins putting the pieces together, pointing at an avenging angel who is dispensing justice for past wrongs—terrible wrongs. Complicating the picture is Wallander’s ailing father, turning the crumpled cop into an emotional wreck as he races to save the “angel’s” next deserving victim. (Oct. 17, 2010)

* Masterpiece – Sherlock:

Blowing away the fog of the Victorian era, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic detective Sherlock Holmes enters the 21st century in a thrilling contemporary version. Starring Benedict Cumberbatch in the title role, Sherlock premieres with three criminally clever whodunits on “Masterpiece Mystery!” Created by the celebrated story-telling team of Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, Sherlock co-stars Martin Freeman as Dr. John Watson, Holmes’s best (and only!) friend. Just as in the Conan Doyle original, John is a retired army doctor, wounded during service in Afghanistan. A chance encounter brings him into the strange and thrilling world of Sherlock Holmes whose cases he begins to write up – as online blogs.

The UK press greeted the new Sherlock with open arms and rave reviews: “Sherlock is a triumph, witty and knowing, without ever undercutting the flair and dazzle of the original,” wrote The Independent. “Meet the new Sherlock,” announced The Daily Telegraph, “an electrifying sociopath.” And The Times (London) proclaimed, “Sherlock makes every other crime caper on television look thin.” This is a brand new Sherlock made by people who love the original stories, so each adventure is packed full of details, places, idiosyncrasies, plot elements, phrases, each with its own 21st-century twist. For example, the first episode, “A Study in Pink,” includes the clue, “Rache,” which was pivotal in the first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, published in 1887. But beware! Each mystery is fiendishly new. The cast also features Rupert Graves as Inspector Lestrade—the best Scotland Yard cop there is, but a man wise enough to know when to call in the consulting detective his staff call “freak.” In an age of forensic detection, it is still Sherlock’s brilliant brain and powers of deduction which crack the following baffling cases:

A Study in Pink — A wave of suicides grips London, but Sherlock suspects the victims are not, as the police believe, voluntarily swallowing poison capsules. “We’ve got ourselves a serial killer,” he declares. “I love those!” With his newfound friend and flat mate, John Watson, he seizes on the minute details of the most recent victim, a lady dressed entirely in pink, to reveal a mastermind with the perfect cover—and a diabolical motive. But can Sherlock escape becoming the next “suicide”? (Oct. 24, 2010)

The Blind Banker — A banker and a journalist recently returned from the Far East are both shot dead by a killer who can seemingly walk through walls. Sherlock and John follow the trail to London’s Chinatown, where an ancient Chinese puzzle, an antiquities curator on the run, and a mysterious book that everyone in London seems to own hold the solution to the murders. Meanwhile, John’s new love interest finds herself caught in the middle of a very memorable date! (Oct. 31, 2010)

The Great Game — Sherlock pits his wits against a devilishly clever bomber, who straps explosives to innocent people and has them call the detective with a series of baffling mysteries to solve. A twenty-year-old murder; a blood-soaked car; a lost painting worth millions of dollars – it’s just the kind of adventure our hero relishes, but who is the evil genius behind this deadly game? (Nov. 7, 2010)

* Nature: The Born Free Story: 50 Years Later

The year 2010 marks the 50th anniversary of Joy Adamson’s milestone book, “Born Free,” a book that forever changed the way we think about wildlife. The dramatic story of Joy and George Adamson becoming surrogate parents of an orphaned lion cub named Elsa and her eventual release back into the wild sold millions of copies around the world, and the extraordinarily successful film based on the book went on to win two Academy Awards. It was one of the earliest representations on film of animals as individuals and had considerable repercussions in the world of conservation. The idyllic story portrayed on film was far from reality. Behind its romanticized depiction of Elsa and the Adamsons is the compelling story of the daring and controversial life two lovers of wildlife chose to live. But it is also a celebration of how a simple act of kindness taught us all how to see animals in a brand-new way.

In a dark twist ending to the Adamsons’ extraordinary lives, Joy was brutally murdered by a disgruntled staff member at her reserve. And nearly 10 years after Joy’s death, George was gunned down by poachers and bandits who wanted to shut down his camp. Since the heyday of “Born Free,” experts estimate Africa’s lion population has plummeted by 80-90 percent, partly due to the ever-increasing human population that shares their habitat. But their loss will have an impact across the ecosystem, and with only about 20,000 lions left now compared with 200,000 just 20 years ago, the pressure is on to save them. Despite criticism of their work, the Adamsons developed intriguing insights about animal behavior and laid the foundation for future conservationist efforts. Before them, no one had attempted or knew how to rehabilitate a domesticated wild animal. Their ground-breaking experiment with Elsa profoundly transformed our view of the natural world. (Winter / Spring 2011)

* Nova: Making Stuff Stronger, Smaller, Smarter, Cleaner

Invisibility cloaks. Spider silk that is stronger than steel. Plastics made of sugar that dissolve in landfills. Self-healing military vehicles. Smart pills and micro-robots that zap diseases. Clothes that monitor your mood. What will the future bring, and what will it be made of? In NOVA’s fascinating new four-hour series, “Making Stuff,” popular New York Times technology reporter David Pogue takes viewers on a thrilling tour of the material world we live in, and the one that may lie ahead—offering viewers a behind-the scenes look at scientific innovations that are ushering in a new generation of materials that are stronger, smarter, smaller and cleaner than anything we’ve ever seen. From the Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age to more recent periods dominated by plastics and silicon, materials have defined the progression of humankind.

Now, we are once again poised on the verge of a materials revolution, as researchers around the globe push the boundaries further than ever before, using biology and chemistry to imbue materials with new qualities that are expanding our technological frontiers. For thousands of years, humans have been manipulating the elements and the world’s raw materials. Now, scientists are generating new materials that function differently and stronger, smaller, smarter, and cleaner than ever. Expected to revolutionize medicine and technology, these innovations are likely to result in an unprecedented trove of nifty new stuff that is sure to transform the way we work and play and live.

Making Stuff: Stronger: What is the strongest material in the world? Is it iron? Are Kevlar and carbon nanotubes the way of the future, or will the powerful properties discovered in natural spider silk one day replace steel? NOVA begins the ambitious four-hour program with a quest for the world’s strongest stuff. Host David Pogue helps viewers understand what defines strength, examining everything from mollusks to a toucan’s beak and testing the world’s strongest materials. Pogue travels from the deck of a U.S. naval aircraft carrier to a demolition derby to the country’s top research labs to check in with the experts who are re-engineering what nature has given us to create the next generation of strong “stuff.” (January 2011)

Making Stuff: Smaller: How small can we go? Could we one day have robots taking “fantastic voyages” in our bodies to kill rogue cells? The triumphs of tiny are seen all around us in the Information Age: transistors, microchips, laptops, cell phones. Now, David Pogue takes NOVA viewers to an even smaller world in “Making Stuff Smaller,” examining the latest in high-powered nano-circuits and micro-robots that may one day hold the key to saving lives and creating materials from the ground up, atom by atom. Pogue explores the star materials of small applications, including silicon, the stuff of computer chips, and carbon, the element now being manipulated at the atomic level to produce future technology. “Smaller” and more portable stuff has already revolutionized the way we live. The nanotechnology to come could change the face of medicine, with intelligent iPills that know what medicine to release into the body and treat patients from the “inside” based on changing needs; robots that repair damaged body parts; and more. (January 2011)

Making Stuff: Smarter: What can nature teach us in building smarter materials? Can we create materials that sense and respond? “When describing ‘smart materials,’ one analogy scientists give is the evolution from the first Terminator robot, a machine made of metal and circuitry, to the shape-shifting ‘liquid guy’ in Terminator 2,” said Making Stuff producer Chris Schmidt. Smarter looks into the growing number of materials that can shape themselves–reacting, changing, and even learning. An Army tanker trunk that heals its own bullet wounds. An airplane wing that changes shape as it flies. Clothing that can monitor its wearer’s heart rate, health, and mood. For inspirations and ideas, scientists are turning to nature and biology and producing some innovative new developments in materials science. The sticky feet of geckos have yielded an adhesive-less tape. Studying the properties of skin has led to the development of self-healing protective foam. And Pogue literally goes swimming with sharks to understand a different kind of skin that is intriguing scientists. Scientists are modeling a material after sharkskin to develop an antibacterial film that, when sprayed in hospitals, could eliminate MRSA and other anti-biotic resistant bacteria from clinging to surfaces. Pogue also visits a scientist who has created a material that can render objects invisible. “Smarter” concludes with a vision of the future, the ultimate in “life-like” stuff: programmable matter that could create a duplicate of a human being. (January 2011)

Making Stuff: Cleaner: Most modern materials are dangerous to the environment, but what about cleaning up our world? Batteries grown from viruses, tires made from orange peel oil, plastics made of sugar, and solar cells that cook up hydrogen–these are just a few glimpses of a new generation of clean materials that could power devices of the future. In Making Stuff Cleaner, David Pogue explores the rapidly developing science and business of clean energy and examines alternative ways to generate it, store it, and distribute it. Is hydrogen the way to go? One scientist is even using America’s abundance of chicken feathers to create a cheap way to make hydrogen cars safer. What about lithium batteries? Does this solve an energy problem or create a new dependency–in this case, on South America for a different kind of limited resource than oil? Can scientists instead develop a process in which batteries run on molten salts found in cheap abundance in the U.S. or on genetically engineered viruses? Pogue investigates the latest developments in bio-based fuels and in harnessing solar energy for our cars, homes, and industry in a fascinating hour full of the “stuff” of a sustainable future. (January 2011)

* Pioneers of Television:

They were the stars of the small screen in the early years of television, and much of the nation came to a halt whenever their shows aired. They strolled, sprinted, fought, laughed, cried and loved through worlds that took viewers to places past, present and future. As the originators of these innovative television formats, they provided an essential escape for millions of viewers who eagerly waited to watch them each week. “Pioneers of Television” returns to PBS for a second season in winter 2011, offering the inside stories of these formidable visionaries who recall the fledgling medium they shaped with their creativity, foresight and wisdom. This four-part series once again transports viewers behind-the-scenes for a revealing look at the inception of four of the most popular genres in television: science fiction, crime dramas, local kids’ TV and westerns.

The first season of “Pioneers of Television,” which aired in 2008 on PBS, explored the early years of sitcoms, late night, variety and game shows. Utilizing new interviews with legendary stars and program creators, never-before-seen images and timeless footage that still entertains decades later, each landmark one-hour episode brings to life the fascinating history of some of the most successful and beloved shows in television history. Stars such as James Garner, William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Nichelle Nichols, Angie Dickinson, Bill Cosby, Robert Culp, Stefanie Powers, Martin Landau, Peter Graves, Robert Conrad, Linda Evans, Mike Connors, Fess Parker and writer Stephen J. Cannell are among those interviewed whose imprint on these iconic genres still impact the medium today. “Pioneers of Television” depicts the epic beginnings of the four featured television genres and explores the stories and influences of these groundbreaking television pioneers. The episodes are:

Science Fiction: Storytellers Gene Roddenberry, Irwin Allen and Rod Serling created the storylines and characters behind the best-loved futuristic television of their time. But as Roddenberry’s “Star Trek” competed for ratings with Allen’s “Lost in Space,” each show’s creator aimed for a very different direction. This episode explores how Roddenberry and Serling (of “The Twilight Zone”) used the future as a stage for modern morality plays, and William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Nichelle Nichols and other science-fiction stars describe how they prepared to interact on-camera with a malevolent alien force … or, perhaps, a giant radish. (Winter 2001)

Crime Dramas: As viewers reveled in being transported to shadowy underworlds, creative geniuses emerged in the forms of Jack Webb (“Dragnet”), Desi Arnaz (“The Untouchables”) and Bruce Geller (“Mannix” and “Mission: Impossible”). Groundbreaking actors Bill Cosby (“I Spy”) and Angie Dickinson (“Police Woman”) reveal the methods behind their successes as the first African-American and breakthrough female lead characters in a television series. Barbara Bain and Martin Landau share the secrets behind the success of the innovative hit “Mission: Impossible,” while the evolution of Peter Falk’s amazing characterization in his role as “Columbo” is recalled. And James Garner, in his only recent interview, along with series creator Stephen J. Cannell, recounts the success of the “The Rockford Files’” reluctant crime solver. (Winter 2001)

Local Kids’ TV: In the early years of television, local kids’ programs shaped the childhoods of millions of American children. Performers such as Willard Scott, Ernest Borgnine and William Shatner all honed their skills performing on live TV with small budgets and little support. With the flimsiest of second-hand store costumes and their own imaginations, they learned how to make their audience laugh, smile and think. One early talent, Stan Freberg, got off the bus in the middle of Hollywood, became a cartoon voice talent and created “Time for Beany” — a show that captured seven out of 10 viewers, including Albert Einstein, during its run in Los Angeles. Freberg’s story is told along with the story of legendary Muppets creator Jim Henson (who started at age 16), animator Bob Clampett (co-creator with Freberg of L.A.’s “Time for Beany”), actor Chuck McCann (originator of New York’s famous “Puppet Hotel”), performer Pat McMahon (a star of Phoenix’s “Wallace and Lamdo” — the most popular kids’ show ever) and Nancy Claster, who developed the Baltimore kids’ series “Romper Room” — the first franchised show in television history. (Winter 2001)

Westerns: Known everywhere as the quintessential American cultural identity, Westerns filled small screens across the country night after night and were some of the most successful television shows in history. Fess Parker’s portrayal of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett channeled the bravery, independence, honesty and rugged individualism of a young nation — and made Walt Disney enough money to build an empire. Westerns also gave viewers James Garner, who starred in the giant television hit “Maverick,” where he developed the reluctant hero character that would cement his successful TV and film career. Parker and Garner tell their stories, and Linda Evans recalls how two strong female characters emerged with her onscreen interaction with Barbara Stanwyck in “The Big Valley.” This episode also examines the success of Robert Conrad in “The Wild Wild West,” the popularity of “Bonanza” and the creation of the classic series “Gunsmoke” with James Arness — one of the longest-running television series of all time. (Winter 2001)

* POV: In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee:

In 1966, Cha Jung Hee was an 8-year-old girl at Sun Duck Orphanage who became one of the thousands of Korean orphans adopted by Americans in the years following the Korean War. U.S. military presence, Cold War politics and the realities of a war-torn society still struggling to climb out of the ruins made Korea the primary source for international adoptions by Americans, and it would remain so for many years. All such adoptions can present daunting challenges to adoptees as they come of age and try to understand their split heritage. But this story had a further twist, as seen in Deann Borshay Liem’s “In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee.”

For Cha Jung Hee, the good fortune of being whisked away to an affluent country by loving new parents masked even more troubling questions. For one thing, Deann Borshay, as little Cha Jung Hee became known in America, wasn’t an orphan. As related in Liem’s earlier documentary, “First Person Plural,” lingering memories led the filmmaker to discover that her birth family was still alive. And there was another buried memory. Liem wasn’t Cha Jung Hee at all. She was Kang Ok Jin, another 8-year-old girl at Sun Duck Orphanage. Her identity had been switched with Cha Jung Hee’s just before the latter was to be adopted by the Borshay family in California. She’d been instructed to keep that secret even from her adoptive parents. But why was the switch made? And what became of the real Cha Jung Hee? (Sept. 14, 2010)

* POV: Off and Running:

“Off and Running” is an American coming-of-age story. But it is one shaped by the new realities of an increasingly diverse American population, especially as those realities affect family life. Brooklyn teen Avery Klein-Cloud is the African-American adoptive daughter of white Jewish lesbians. Her siblings, also adopted, are an older black and Puerto Rican boy and a young Korean-American boy. Avery has grown up loved, supported and happy. Off and Running opens with the popular high school track star in her junior year, looking forward to college and a successful life.

But the outside world, with its deep concerns about race and identity, begins to intrude upon this happy family. Avery’s upbringing in a Jewish household and her distance from black culture were not issues for her during childhood, but as she approaches adulthood, she grows more troubled by her ignorance of her own roots. With the support of her parents, she decides to learn about her past by writing to her birth mother. The result is a crisis whose depth takes Avery, her parents and the filmmakers by surprise — a crisis that threatens to sweep away the teen’s promising future. (Aug. 31, 2010)

* POV: Wo Ai Ni (I Love You), Mommy:

From Donna Sadowsky’s departure from her Long Island home, through 10 hectic days in China arranging the adoption of 8-year-old Fang Sui Yong and on through the girl’s first year and a half in the United States, “Wo Ai Ni (I Love You) Mommy” is an intimate account of a global phenomenon — transnational and transracial adoption. Little Sui Yong’s adoption takes place against a background of more and more Americans adopting overseas, especially in China. Since the Chinese opened their doors to foreign adoptions in 1992, some 70,000 Chinese children have been brought to the United States, making China the top choice for international adoptions by Americans. The trend has even spawned a stateside support organization, Families With Children From China.

The huge number of adoptions underscores the importance of investigating the varied motivations of the Chinese and of the adoptive parents, the attitudes of society toward multiracial families and the special challenges transracial adoptees face. Those challenges can be daunting and a lot to fall on the shoulders of an 8-year-old adopted girl. And Fang Sui Yong — who learns a few minutes after meeting her mother, Donna, for the very first time that her new name will be Faith Sui Yong Sadowsky — reacts as any self-respecting little girl would. She is alternately withdrawn, petulant, cute, rude, demanding, endearing, needy, manipulative, tragic, happy, loving, not so loving, confused, surprisingly perceptive about her situation — and a natural in front of the camera. (Sept. 7, 2010)

* The President’s Photographer:

For 50 years, presidential photographers have covered it all: upheaval, tragedy, joy — often developing friendships with the presidents they serve. Acting as both visual historians and key links between the public and the presidents, for these photographers no day is the same — whether they are aboard Air Force One, backstage at the State of the Union or in the heart of the West Wing. As the 44th president’s chief photographer, Pete Souza is never far behind President Obama. Now, in the new National Geographic Special, “The President’s Photographer: 50 Years in the Oval Office,” viewers get to follow Souza, and those who came before him, for a behind-the-scenes look at the everyday grit of the American presidency. It’s a chance to see what it’s like to cover the most powerful man in the world, for history.

The pictures serve as a visual tool that will help future historians understand what went on during the presidency; so far, eight professionals have served as official White House photographers. The idea of shooting for history took hold almost 50 years ago when President Johnson hired the first official presidential photographer, Yoichi Okamoto, known as Okie. He set the gold standard for presidential photography, and he did it on the strength of his unique access. To a documentary photographer, every presidency has defining stories, and those images are often how we remember a president. For Johnson, it was civil rights and Vietnam. President Reagan is forever tied to the end of the Cold War. President Clinton pursued peace in the Middle East. History has yet to define the Obama administration, but Souza is there to document it, every step of the way. (Nov. 24, 2010)

* The Tenth Inning:

Thousands of bats, three home run records and one “curse” have been broken since Ken Burns last explored the history of America’s national pastime with his landmark 1994 PBS series “Baseball.” Now Burns and co-director Lynn Novick bring the series to the present with “The Tenth Inning.” The program is directed by Burns and Novick and written and produced by David McMahon, Novick, and Burns, telling the tumultuous story of America’s national pastime from the early 1990s to the present day, introducing an unforgettable array of players, teams and fans, celebrating the game’s resilience and enduring appeal, and showcasing both extraordinary accomplishments — and devastating losses and disappointments. The film highlights dramatic developments that transformed the game: the crippling 1994 strike that left many fans disillusioned with their heroes; the increasing dominance of Latino and Asian players who turned baseball into a truly international game; baseball’s skyrocketing profits, thanks to new stadiums, interleague play, and the wild card; the rise of a new Yankee Dynasty; the Red Sox’ historic World Series victory; the astonishing feats of Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds; and the revelations about performance-enhancing drugs that cast a shadow on many of the era’s greatest stars and their accomplishments.

Combining extraordinary highlights, stunning still photographs, popular music of the period, and insightful commentary by players, managers, experts and fans, “The Tenth Inning” interweaves the story of the national pastime with the story of America. In an age of globalization, deregulation and speculation, the film demonstrates that baseball has continued to be a mirror of the country — at its best and at its worst. “The Tenth Inning” also movingly shows that when America felt most threatened, following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, baseball offered common ground, providing Americans with solace, distraction, and the hope that things could one day return to normal. A number of familiar faces from the first nine installments of the series add their welcome perspectives on events of the last 15 years, including writers Roger Angell, John Thorn, George Will, Gerald Early and Doris Kearns Goodwin, as well as broadcaster Bob Costas. The film also features revealing interviews with Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig, managers Felipe Alou and Joe Torre, players Pedro Martinez, Omar Vizquel and Ichiro Suzuki, broadcaster Keith Olbermann, writers Marcos Breton, Tom Verducci, Selena Roberts, Mike Barnicle and Howard Bryant, and other players, writers and fans from across the country, as well as overseas. (Sept. 28, 2010)

* Wild Kratts

Animals can take you anywhere in science! Creature teachers Chris and Martin Kratt will take 6- to 8-year olds and their families along on extraordinary animal-powered adventures in “Wild Kratts.” The show transforms the Kratt Brothers, creators of the award-winning “Kratts’ Creatures” and Emmy-winning “Zoboomafoo,” into animated versions of themselves, allowing the real-life zoologists to visit wild animals in their little-seen habitats and showcase key science concepts along the way.

From elephants using physics to suck gallons of water with their trunks to a fleet of peregrine falcons that harness the force of gravity to speed through the air, each of the 40 new half-hour episodes of “Wild Kratts” presents age-appropriate science inspired by the natural abilities of the animals that the Kratt brothers – and young viewers – meet. (Jan. 3, 2011)

Executive Session

Your personal mileage may vary, but for my money, John Landgraf is one of the nicest network heads currently in the game. He’s very low-key, but he’s always ready to give you a quote when you’re looking for one. Today, he offered up the following bits and pieces about the future of FX.

* “Louie” has been renewed for a second season of 13 episodes.

* Ben Garant and Tom Lennon, late of “Reno 911!,” are going to do a pilot for FX called “The USS Alabama.” It’s another partially-scripted, partially-improvised series, and, according to Landgraf, “It takes place in space on the USS Alabama with a crew of spacefarers who might not be too much brighter than the cops in ‘Reno 911!’”

* There are two other pilots in the works as well, the first being “Outlaw Country,” which will star Mary Steenburgen. “Some really talented young actors have joined that cast,” said Landgraf. “That goes into production in, I think, six weeks. It’s a fantastic script. Something we’re really, really excited about.” The other is “Wilfred,” a comedy pilot based on an Australian comedy series, which completed principal photography last week.

* The “Damages” deal done with DirecTV is different from the one that was done with “Friday Night Lights” in that FX will not be offering up the episodes after they’ve run on DirecTV. “The season that has aired, which was the third season of ‘Damages,’ is the last season it will air on FX,” said Landgraf. “For us, we’re also producers on ‘Damages.’ We’ve been co-owners and co-producers through FX Productions, and DirectTV felt very strongly. They were willing to underwrite it, and to a very substantial amount financially, they enabled it to move forward. That was the deal that Sony worked on very aggressively, but they wanted it exclusively, so this was really the best and only way for ‘Damages’ to move forward. So we stepped aside as a network entity, and we’re still involved as a production entity.”

Sons of Anarchy

I don’t know that there’s any series currently on the air that I feel worse about not watching than “Sons of Anarchy.” Everyone tells me it’s fantastic, I have every reason to believe that those people are right, and yet I just haven’t had the time to go back and revisit the show’s first two seasons. But that won’t stop me from bringing you the info that creator Kurt Sutter and his cast provided to us during the show’s panel, of course.

As far as the “big bad” for Season 3, as it were, Sutter says, “We have a couple dual storylines going in Charming and as well as in Belfast, but I guess if you had to pin it down to one specific adversary, I would say that it’s probably the Titus Welliver character, Jimmy O.”

What of the theme of the new season? “I don’t know if there’s one specific overriding theme,” said Sutter. “I think the theme is always about family and Jax sort of defining his role as a father and as a partner and as a son and as a member of this club, and the Abel storyline drives us through pretty much the entire season, and…I don’t want to give anything away in terms of what that means and where that takes us, but, you know, the thing is our seasons, the actual span of time within our seasons is very short. It’s potentially a couple, two or three weeks. So there isn’t a lot of time that passes where you can have a lot of things unfold organically. So it is a very concentrated period of time which I think helps feed, I think, the sense of urgency for the tasks that they have at hand this season.”

Sutter also tackled the question of where Chief Unser would be heading this season. “I think we’ve defined this relationship between Unser and the club as being…you know, it’s not so much that Unser is in Clay’s pocket, it’s that they’ve made this deal a long time ago where they would each would do their part to keep Charming safe,” he said. “I think what happens is that gets turned on its head a little bit this season and the nature of the violence that happens is perhaps what neither the club or Unser had in mind. I think that relationship will be tested in a very heated way this season.”

“I’m in a bit of a pickle is the way the season goes,” clarified Dayton Callie, with a grin.

Maggie Siff, meanwhile, addressed the future of her own character. “Tara’s decided to stay, and she’s decided to be in this relationship and be a part of this family,” she said. “And yet everything sort of just when she makes that decision, everything falls apart. So there’s a kind of chaotic commitment to being there. And it’s been very satisfying as an actor, actually, because it’s a lot more fierce, you know. It feels like she’s taking a stand in the world, and yet the world has completely fallen apart around her, and she has very little to hold onto. It’s just a fierce chaos.”

That’s really all that was said about Season 3, but I’ll close with the decidedly entertaining comments made by Sutter and the cast when they were asked about the dearth of Emmy nods received by the show.

“Can I first say that — and not just to kiss all your asses because we’re out here, but — I so appreciated and it was so important to me to get the TCA nomination for the show and for Katey,” said Sutter. “It was just one of those moments where I said, ‘Okay, I’m not fucking crazy,” you know, that we are actually doing good work, that there is some recognition to that. And, you know, all I’ll say about the Emmys — and clearly I’ve had a very specific opinion – is that 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. So to me, perhaps that suggests that the system is somewhat flawed. And that’s all I’ll say.

“I would just say that it’s the reaction of the people,” said Mark Boone Junior. “When I hit the streets, you know, it’s amazing, the reaction. Emmy or no Emmy.

“Yeah,” agreed Tommy Flanagan. “Emmy-shmemmy.”

“Fuck ‘em,” said Ron Perlman.

Charlie Hunnam’s mindset was clearly in line with Perlman’s. “I would just like to say, honestly, and this is kind of controversial, and I’m sure I’ll garner a little bit of disappointment or confusion from colleagues, but I personally was really happy,” he said. “I don’t subscribe to Emmys or awards or any of that shit. I think it’s all a crock of shit. And I think it’s corrupting. And I was happy that we weren’t on the receiving end of a force that could change the dynamic that we have, because I think it’s working, and it’s an environment where we’re able to do good work and feel fulfilled as artists. And all of that crap, I just think, is secondary and completely unimportant…but it does have the potential to ruin a good thing. So like he said, fuck ‘em.

“Fuck ’em,” repeated Perlman.

Katey Sagal, meanwhile, merely shrugged, smiled, and said, “You asked.”

Terriers

There are so many reasons to like this show that it’s hard to know where to begin, but since we’ve got to start somewhere, let’s go with Donal Logue first. If I listed off all of the projects he’s worked on over the years that I’ve loved, we’d be here all day, but just the trio of “The Tao of Steve,” “Grounded for Life,” and “The Knights of Prosperity” are enough to keep him my good graces for the long haul. Put him into a series created by Shawn Ryan (“The Shield”) and Ted Griffin (“Ocean’s Eleven,” “Matchstick Men”), and you’ve definitely got my attention, but then you throw into the mix that Logue met his co-star, Michael Raymond-James, when they both appeared on NBC’s late, lamented cop drama, “Life,” and, baby, I am sold.

“Michael did an episode (of ‘Life’), and it was one of those all-night-shoot-til-6-in-the-morning things where by the end of it, it’s, like, ‘I’ve met a new best friend for life,'” said Logue.

“He was walking around carrying a copy of Kerouac’s ‘Big Sur,'” said Raymond-James.

“That’s how we started talking: about Jack Kerouac,” said Logue. “Michael and I became kind of good friends over the course of that night, and then I came in to meet Ted and Shawn and Craig Brewer, who directed the pilot, and was lucky enough to be asked to be part of this thing. So I became part of the casting sessions for the show, and, of course, you know, the really tricky one was who was gonna be Britt, and then I remember going in for the first set of auditions with a bunch of guys sitting around waiting to go in, and I saw Michael, we gave each other a hug. And then…you could see the deflation (in the room). ‘Oh, great, man. They’re fucking best friends! I told you this kind of crap would happen.’ But then when Michael and I did the show, we ended up renting a house together in San Diego, so it was kind of on 24/7 the whole time. I actually think that our friendship and just even the amount of work we did kind of when we weren’t working on the show…I don’t know, it really helped the kind of endeavor we had.”

“My big concern when they told me they were going to live together during the entire shoot…I was, like, ‘Please don’t hate each other by the end,'” said Ryan. “In fact, it seems like it brought you guys closer together. It’s such a great story that these guys would work 13 hours a day. There’s barely a scene in the entire series that doesn’t include at least one of them, and oftentimes both of them. We work them really, really hard, and then for them to sort of drive back to the same house…”

“It really made it a lot better,” said Logue.

“A lot better,” said Raymond-James. “It also helps that we shared an addiction to carne asada burritos.”

“San Diego was fantastic, too, by the way,” Logue added. “And I think it was such a great idea these guys had to go down there, because there’s something about San Diego that is quite different than Los Angeles, and something specifically about Ocean Beach’s community that we shot in, that it’s still this kind of working-class enclave that’s right on the beach that really fought hard against having big, kind of corporate condo development, no-Starbucks-type stuff, and it’s really — it really gave us this kind of foothold to create this universe in.”

Although Logue is ostensibly best known for his work in comedic roles, he explained that it was a career direction that had less to do with personal desire as it did the luck of the draw with what projects proved to be the most successful.

“To be honest, when you’re young and when you watch ‘The Deer Hunter’ for the first time, that’s when you’re, like, ‘That’s what I want to do,’” said Logue. “To be that guy to slap Robert De Niro…? That’s what I meant. But what happens is all of a sudden you have some success in comedy. I ended up doing these weird MTV shorts with my friend improvising this cab driver thing, and then at that point, you’re kind of like, well, that’s what this guy does. And you always want to do everything. I think, though, that I’ve been lucky enough to kind of go back and forth, and there was something about this, though. There was something about that form of comedy that…it’s just difficult. It never really felt like you could just fully commit to just all the kind of colors that you carry with you. I did a pilot for HBO called “1 Percent” that they didn’t end up picking up, but it was a pretty intense and dramatic piece, and there was just something about it that felt really right at that time in life. I feel more comfortable in this milieu.”

“I love doing comedy,” Logue continued. “I think our show’s quite funny in a lot of ways, but I love not feeling this hydraulic pressure that you have to create this kind of comic moment within every scene. You can just play it as it is. This is kind of where I vibrated towards for a while. I don’t know where else it will go, but I feel actually quite blessed that I can actually balance between the two worlds, that I can do ‘Grounded for Life’ and then do ‘Zodiac,’ because I think a lot of really talented actors I know, they end up getting set in a certain category, and no one will ever buy that they can exist outside that category, even though you know full well that they can, but it’s just difficult for people to be able to cross those fences, so I feel pretty blessed that I’ve been able to.”

Although Ryan certainly has a solid history on FX, it wasn’t necessarily where he first envisioned the show ending up.

“When Ted first talked about the idea of doing a PI show, dollar signs started ringing in my head,” he said. “‘Man, I got the guy from ‘Ocean’s Eleven.’ We’re going to be able to go out on the town and sort of sell this PI show, and ABC’s gonna want that. NBC’s gonna want that. We’re going to make a killing.’ He was like, ‘I really want to do it at FX. I don’t really want to do it anywhere else.’ And which was fine by me. But then I said, ‘How is it going to be different? How is it going to be different than the USA stuff? How is it different than that?’ And he went away and came back with these pages that I read, and was like, ‘Oh. That’s how it’s different.’ And so for me, it was the joy sort of accepting the idea of how to do a PI show that isn’t going to seem like it could be anywhere else other than FX.”

Lights Out

I’m not a sports guy and never have been, but for some reason, I still enjoy films and television series about sports. Go figure. Less easily swayed by the genre, however, is my wife, but she nonetheless found herself caught up in the pilot for “Lights Out,” which revolves around a former heavyweight boxer who finds his financial opportunities drying up, leaving him to pursue slightly unscrupulous options to make ends meet and support his family. “It’s kind of like ‘Rocky,'” said my wife, and there were indeed some similarities to the more desperate times in Mr. Balboa’s career, but what’s particularly interesting about “Lights Out” is that, rather than existing in a vacuum, it acknowledges the existence of boxing in popular culture.

“There have been a lot of movies about boxing,” admitted executive producer Warren Leight, “but I don’t know that there have been that many TV shows about it. So when we prepped, we watched, I’d say, dozens of mediocre and maybe a dozen great boxing movies and just tried to understand. And, also, there’s not just great boxing movies. There’s great boxing literature. It’s been one of the places writers have gone to prove themselves in a way. So we tried to draw on all of that, and what the advantage we have is almost every boxing movie – except for ‘Rocky,’ which kind of went on and on and on — it’s a one-off. And to serialize a story about the life of a boxer and what it’s like to try to put food on your family’s table when times have changed, to serialize that story over time really allowed us to open it up. The great challenge was to avoid the cliches and make the world come to life. And, of course, there’s usually some truth to the cliche. I hope and think we pulled it off, but we were aware we were walking where others had walked before.”

Indeed, a member of the cast is one of those who’d done some of that walking: Stacy Keach, who starred as a boxer in John Huston’s “Fat City,” which he described to us as having been released “some years before you were all born.” (He was close: it was only 2 in 1972.)

“Jose Torres was my trainer at the time,” said Keach, “and it was a great eye-opener for me because I had never had this kind of close-hand experience with the boxing community, and my respect for boxers and what they go through in order to perform what they have to perform in the ring just grew enormously. I had no idea what kind of emotional and physical stamina is required in order to sustain the beating that you take when you go into the ring. I was in the best shape of my life in those days, and it was thanks to Jose Torres, mainly, because he drove me. He pushed me, and I think that one of the most important things about successful fighting is the will to win. You’ve got to be able to survive and sustain the tremendous amount of punishment and still come back and do your job.”

So that’s one cast member with boxing street cred. Plus, Holt McCallany – who plays Patrick “Lights” Leary, the aforementioned boxer with financial woes – played a boxing trainer in “Tyson,” and his brother was a former Golden Gloves champion, both of which ought to count for something. In fact, Leight said that he was shocked at how easy it was to find people for the show who could both act and box.

“Actors will always rise to the occasion,” said Leight. “Holt was a gift, and I think Holt is the reason the series was picked up, but Holt has a nemesis in this show played by Billy Brown who plays ‘Death Row’ Reynolds, and that guy is a terrific actor and was not an experienced boxer when the show began but became a terrific boxer. It was an odd experience for us because we stage fights in the course of the season, and to find people with that physical skill set who can deliver emotional truth at the same time would seem to be daunting, but I guess if you can box, you have the nerve to act, and if you can act, you have the nerve to box. It worked out. I think Holt can speak to some of the guys he got in the ring with.”

“Yeah, you know, we definitely wanted guys who were going to be able to deliver on the physical side of things as well,” said McCallany. “Warren was very adept. When I first come in the room to audition, it’s a bit like asking actors, ‘Have you ever ridden a horse?’ A hundred percent of them will say, ‘Of course, I rode horses all my life as a boy. Did I box? Yes, I boxed, yes, back in summer camp when I was 14.’”

“They do all lie to your face telling you they box,” admitted Leight. “And I’m thinking, ‘You’re going to have to go in the ring with Holt!’”

Rescue Me

We weren’t expecting to get a “Rescue Me” panel this tour, and, really, we only just barely got one as it was, since it was thrown into the mix as part of our lunchtime and therefore didn’t last as long as most panels. Don’t worry, though: series co-creator Peter Tolan is a man who knows how to make the most of his time.

“I have nothing really to say,” began Tolan, “except I’m so glad to be here by myself and not with Denis Leary, because he is an attention hog, and the secondhand smoke, really, I’m lucky to be alive, frankly, at this point. It’s been seven seasons…and, of course, ‘The Job,” the show we did before, which was my idea, as was ‘Rescue Me.’ I am really lucky to be
alive. I’m sure there are tumors just waiting to take me pretty much after this lunch.”

The reason for the panel was to give Tolan the chance to discuss the impending final season of “Rescue Me,” which is set to end at approximately the same time as the 10th anniversary of 9/11. He took full advantage of the opportunity, so if you’re a fan of the show, you’re going to love reading this stuff.

“Denis and I had talked about how the series would end,” said Tolan. “Initially, around…let’s say, the fourth season or fifth season…when we had those conversations, they would sometimes go to a dark place where Denis was saying, ‘I think Tommy goes and he gets in a fire, and I think he just sort of sits down in the middle of a room on fire, sits in a chair, and that’s how it ends.’ I’m like, ‘I don’t know if that’s going to really work. I don’t think that’s going to work for us.’ Because, obviously, you create a series that lasts this long, there’s gotta be some reason at the end why people watched it. Otherwise, they will feel like they’re maybe watching ‘The Sopranos’ again. I’m just kidding, of course. That was very, in its own way, an inappropriate finale.

“So we kept thinking about that, and we thought about…you know, we thought at one time that he was going to end up with Maura Tierney’s character and find some sort of happiness, and she had a house by the beach, and then one day he sort of takes his clothes off, goes down to the water’s edge, and just keeps swimming out. And that’s the end of the series, like he’s going to commit suicide. That’s probably not going to do it either. And in the end, what we came to right around the time we started the sixth season was something that would justify the reason that people had sort of stuck with the series all that time. And we actually found a hopeful place for that character, and I think sort of a positive message in terms of…the idea of the entire series is will a person succumb to the pressures created by living through a life-changing experience. I mean, is that going to destroy them or are they going to overcome it? And I think at the end Tommy does overcome it.

“You’re actually seeing now, just in terms of where the show is right now, because the fifth episode of the sixth season…the fifth episode was the turning point for everything that happens from this point on. People always wondered if Tommy Gavin was going to hit bottom, and last week was it when he loses his daughter after a night of drinking, the two of them, and that really gave us sort of a starting point almost for the end. So I think all of the episodes, from 605 all the way to 709 follow a really strong line that ends in a very hopeful place. And actually, in a much lighter place than I had imagined. Even in writing it, I thought, ‘Oh, it’s 9/11, and it’s the end of this era for these characters, and it’s gonna be very profound,’ and we wrote a version that was that. But in the end, it didn’t turn out to be there. It turned out to be much lighter, and actually much more life-affirming and about the resiliency of people in the face of a tragedy. So maybe all those things don’t sound like ‘Rescue Me,’ but that’s what it turned out to be.”

This lengthy speech inevitably led to someone asking Tolan if the show’s relatively kinder and gentler conclusion proved creatively problematic for him, given everything that has come before.

“It was not a problem, but it really was a surprise,” he admitted. “The way we wrote the show was there were really only three writers. It was Denis, myself, and Evan Reilly. Those were the only three guys who wrote that show. And many times, especially in the later seasons, you know, the day would come where you’d have pages that you were going to shoot, and we’d go, ‘Are we really going to say this? What’s the quicker way, or what’s the funnier way, or what’s the way that’s a left turn that people won’t expect?’ And I think I went into the finale thinking, oh, this is very important now. If you love the show and you love the characters, you want that thing to be a great experience for you, forgetting about your viewing audience. You want it to be good for you and you want to do right by the characters and the cast and the crew and everybody, really. You wanted to have it be a good experience. And like I said, there was some writing in that finale that was just was a little bit more momentous. You know, it was more like, ‘Look at this moment and the time and how we’ve survived this and how this series is coming to an end.’ And the day came and we threw it out, and what replaced it was much lighter and much more life goes on. And I had a moment. I really had a moment, because I directed the episode, where I was like, ‘Boy, this is so not what we wrote,’ and I went, ‘But it’s right. It’s right. Let’s get off the soapbox and let’s not make a big speech about it.’ It was right, but it was a little daunting in the moment.'”

You’ll be able to see what Tolan is talking about next year, when the nine episodes of the seventh and final season of “Rescue Me” premiere.

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia

Although it’s never been must-see TV for me, “Sunny” is definitely one of those sitcoms I can always count on for a laugh when I need one, so it’s good news that, even though the series is heading into its sixth season, the cast still seems to be enjoying themselves.

“The good news is we actually still like each other,” said Glenn Howerton. “So even though it is a ton of work, we actually enjoy each other’s company throughout the process, for the most part.”

“It seems that our audience is growing at such an accelerated rate for the past few years and so many people are new viewers,” said Rob McElhenney, “and it’s sort of coinciding with us, I think, crescendoing in with our greatest creative season, and feel like, as long as new viewers keep showing up to watch, we’ll keep doing it.”

And how much longer will that be?

GLENN HOWERTON: Ooohhh.
ROB MCELHENNEY: It’s hard to say.
GLENN HOWERTON: Tough to say. We’ll take it year by year.
ROB MCELHENNEY: Yeah.
GLENN HOWERTON: We’ve got at least one more year for sure after this.

As far as what to expect from this season, Chase Utley and Ryan Howard of the Phillies, along with Tom Sizemore, are guest-starring in an episode where the gang dares to go on an adventure outside the city…to the wonderful state of New Jersey!

I have to admit to you, however, that for as funny as “Sunny” is, the panel for the show was somewhat of a letdown. One of my peers commented that it’s amazing just how seriously comedians take their art, and I have to agree: I’d even suggested to my wife that she might want to stick around, figuring it would be non-stop hilarity. It was pleasant enough, but I definitely wouldn’t say it was more than that.

Still, there was a lengthy but interesting discussion that arose from someone asking how the group felt about the fact that, although “Sunny” began as somewhat of an envelope-pushing comedy, it now feels almost tame when compared to a show like, say, FX’s own “Louie.”

“Well, it was never our intention necessarily to push the envelope,” said McElhenney. “Our goal is always to do what’s not being done elsewhere. And something that we’re really proud of and something that I think that the true fans of the show really understand that a lot of people don’t know is that we are not simply just going out and trying to push the envelope for pushing the envelope’s sake. We’re trying to introduce into comedy a part of the national conversation that we hear and see people talking about behind closed doors, but aren’t doing in public. I’ve never seen an episode of any show that deals with gay marriage, and we decided that that was something that we wanted to do. And we’re going to do an episode about that this year. We felt like we could have a very distinct and different take than any other show on television. And sometimes we do dick jokes. And, honestly, I feel like there’s a happy medium in there, and I think that if you do just go out and go for the low-brow or you are just pushing the envelope for pushing the envelope’s sake, that ultimately people are going to get bored with it and they’re going to move on. I think if you are building a foundation of a show that is a part of the national conversation and then you also can bring in some base humor, I think it cannot only appeal to a larger audience, but also can have some sort of setting in real life.”

“Yeah, and has a certain social relevance,” said Howerton. “That’s not to say that all those other FX shows are doing that. I mean, I happen to be a fan of ‘Louie’ also. I mean, I think that show is really smart, and I think it’s really funny. And I think with our show and with that show, if something happens to be shocking or, you know, crossing a line, so to speak, it’s not ever good if it’s just for the sake of crossing the line.

“It’s based in something else that’s smart,” said Kaitlin Olson.

“Also,” added McElhenney, “if you remember, the pilot of ‘The Shield,’ which was done many years before us, a cop kills another cop. I mean, that’s pushing the boundaries…and that’s your main character. And Vic Mackey’s one of the greatest characters in television.”

“But it’s like Rob said: we’re just trying to do something different that we haven’t seen, that we aren’t seeing, something that we would want to watch as viewers,” said Howerton. “And then oftentimes that happens to be something that pushes the limit or crosses a line or whatever it happens to be. But I mean, personally I think that’s just what makes something good.”

“You haven’t seen it before, a lot of times,” said Olson.

“It needs to be surprising,” said Howerton. “It needs to be shocking a little bit. That’s why I watch television, to see something I’ve never seen, to watch something unfold that surprises me and shocks me. And whether it makes me laugh or it makes me cry, that’s what is effective in telling a story, I think. So we’re always coming at it from the standpoint of telling an interesting story that you haven’t seen.”

The League

When I first heard about “The League,” I thought, “I know the cast of this show is funny, but…how much of it am I going to appreciate if I’m not into sports?” It didn’t take very long into the panel for the series before creators Jeff Schaffer and Jackie Marcus Schaffer thoughtfully provided me with an answer to my question.

“The first thing is – and this is one of the challenges of the show – telling someone else about your Fantasy league is like telling them about your dreams: people just don’t care,” said Jeff. “That was an original challenge of the show. But as we started to write the show and we started to shoot the show with these guys, the audience and us loved hanging out with them so much that the Fantasy Football is just a prism through which we see their lives. It’s all really about how they interact with each other.”

“Also, people that do tune in to watch the show, we want to make sure that we don’t disappoint the Fantasy fans as well,” said Jackie. “If we naturally feel like it makes sense to have our characters sort of go “Crimson Tide” and start speaking submarine-talk version of Fantasy, we let them do it, and that we just let it feel natural and hope that the audience enjoys that and catches up and feels like it’s authentic.”

“The other thing about that is it’s Fantasy Football, not Fantasy j’ai lai,” added Jeff. “It’s, like, 30 million people do play Fantasy sports, so while we don’t want to drown people in it, and while it’s not the sort of focus of the show- I think the focus is the dynamics – we’re never afraid of doing it, because I think a lot of people in our audience has said, even if you’ve never been in a Fantasy Football league, ‘Oh, my God. I know someone like that. I know someone who acts that insane on Sundays,’ and I think the other thing that we always say is to enjoy the show, you don’t have to know anything about sports. You don’t have to know anything about Fantasy Football. You just have to have friends that you hate.”

“It’s such a fun world, because really, you know, the language is just part of it,” said Jackie, “but it really is sort of the social structure for so many men and women of how they get together on a regular basis. Jeff used to say that my book club had nothing to do with the book, that basically the book was a coaster.”

“For the wine glass,” said Jeff, with a smirk.

“It’s the same thing in Fantasy sports,” said Jackie. “Yes, people are very passionate about the sports. They’re very passionate about following the games, but they’re as equally passionate about using it as a time to get together and crush one another. So we would like to think we just are giving people an opportunity to sort of see great comedic talent in our cast sort of as an example of the kind of league that either they’re in or find entertaining to watch.”

“And I think for us, the question is, ‘How can we do a show about Fantasy Football?’ Well, we couldn’t believe there hadn’t been one. There are shows about people who make wedding cakes and there are shows about people who drive trucks on icy roads, and I don’t know anybody who drives a truck in the Yukon, but I know a lot of people who just lose their minds every Sunday in the fall.”

Archer

If you’ve watched “Archer,” then you already know that, although it’s animated, it’s definitely not for kids…but just because it has a tendency to be filthy doesn’t mean it can’t be intelligent, too.

“I read about three pages of the pilot for this show and said yes because it was so funny and it was so filthy,” said Aisha Tyler, who voices Lana Kane on the show. “I felt as if the heavens had opened and a pony had fallen into my lap, and then the pony was a script for this show. Do you know what I mean? It’s a dream show for me, and it has that combination of what we used to call when I did talks, sort of ‘the thinky and the stinky.’ It’s an intellectual show, and it’s also really, really dirty, and it’s for grownups. And I think it’s about time that you have a show that’s sophisticated and elegant and smart and referential and also, you know, really saucy and bawdy, and I think, you know, it’s really rare to be surprised by anything in television ever. Ever. So the fact that we get these scripts that are surprising and shocking and wonderful and terrible, and they make you cringe and make you laugh and make you call your friends and go, ‘You have to watch this.’ I’m really, really, really, really proud of it, and I’m not saying this because I’d like to be written more lines.”

“And I invariably have to look up a word or several words in the script because I don’t know what they are,” said Chris Parnell, who voices Cyrill Figgis. “Adam (Reed)’s a lot smarter than I am.”

“You don’t get a lot of farrier jokes in regular TV shows,” said Matt Thompson, executive producer.

“We had a long conversation about the Stuven reference last night at dinner,” said Tyler. “It’s a really smart show. It’s rare that you learn from a show. There’s also referencing statutory rape in a really bold way, and then you learn something, and don’t we all?”

“I think there’s a joke that you guys just recorded,” said Thompson. “There was an argument between the difference between ledger domain and bailiwick.”

“We did,” agreed Tyler.

“And, you know, in the next sentence, it’s like, ‘Hey, you really shouldn’t be raping that 16-year-old girl,'” said Thompson.

“And, boom, magic unfolds immediately afterward,” said Tyler.

Unlike a lot of ostensibly “adult” animated series, “Archer” has and will continue to have an over-arcing storyline.

“God bless it, you know, I love the shows like ‘The Simpsons’ and ‘Family Guy’ and stuff, but that’s not this show,” said Thompson. “I hope that you won’t come back a year later and say, ‘I am completely bored by Archer. He’s just doing the same thing over and over again.’ So there has to be change that goes along into it. For example, for Judy’s character, how much further can we go with her getting off on being choked while she’s having sex? Only so much. So it does have to kind of constantly evolve, and what it fits in best with is an over-arcing plot line.”

So what sort of storylines can we expect to see this season?

“There’s a couple,” said Thompson. “One of them is Archer gets an illegitimate baby. And also finding out about Archer’s father. And, lastly, it hasn’t been written yet, but it’s been talked about a greatdeal with the FX executives and such, is a huge love interest for Archer with a femme fatale Russian spy. And as far as Cyril and Lana going, it’s kind of open-ended, you know. Adam is up to the sixth script, kind of playing around with it. Right now, we’re focusing on Cyril having sexual addiction and Lana being completely mad at him and wanting to punch him in the nuts.”

“She’s awesome,” said Tyler.

“One of the cool things about the newseason for us is we have more people in our staff of drawers,” said Thompson, “and stuff has gotten better. So I think it’s actually going to be a better-looking show, and we’re going to be able to see a lot and do a lot more action. The show that we showed at Comic-Con had a third act, which was entirely a snowmobile chase. And this isn’t a large-budget show, and we’re going to have to watch what we’re doing. And I think this season is going to look…well, I think it’s going to look awesome, at least according to me, unless somebody can tell me and hurt my feelings.”

“It looked amazing,” confirmed Tyler.

“It…it wasn’t great,” said H. Jon Benjamin, to much laughter.

To close, I’ll just offer up the cast’s response to being asked to compare their first TCA experience – which took place back in January – to their first Comic-Con experience, which took place last month.

MATT THOMPSON: You guys are a lot more handsome. A lot more handsome.
AISHA TYLER: The first TCA was just Jon and Adam and I. So we talked amongst ourselves on a podium while people ate croissants with chicken salad inside.
H. JON BENJAMIN: Most people left. They didn’t stick around.
AISHA TYLER: And people slowly streamed out, checking their watches.
H. JON BENJAMIN: Yeah.
AISHA TYLER: And then we went to Comic-Con, and there was, like, a thousand nerds crying and screaming, a lady who was pregnant and is naming her baby Archer, right? Stormtroopers who threw money at us and one white lady who looks alarmingly more like Lana than I do. It was awesome. It was great. And it was so nice to watch the show in front of a crowd, because I think the show is hilarious. I mean, I really love this show, and I would watch it even if I wasn’t on it. But, you know, you’re watching it with your friends or whatever. You’re watching it with your husband over and over again and making him pick out your favorite line. To see it in front of a crowd of fans, I think we heard about a third of the jokes because they were laughing so hard that, like, only every third joke landed.
H. JON BENJAMIN: In fairness, there’s at least 300 nerds here.

Well, when he’s right, he’s right.