Makes sense, right? That way, there’ll be nothing hanging over my head to finish when I get home, and I can enjoy at least a day or two of much-needed downtime.

Unfortunately, none of the transcripts are online yet, so you won’t be getting any exact quotes unless the fine folks in the transcription department manage to get them knocked out between now and 2:00 AM (that’s when I have to head down to the lobby), so you’ll just have to make do with a few random recollections for now, and I’ll play catch-up when I’m home, rested, and ready to write again.

Even before John Landgraf took the time to do a teleconference with TV critics to explain why FX had to cancel “Terriers,” I’ve thought he was one of the nicest and most approachable network presidents. Mind you, I blame this really just on one experience with him, when he made good on a promise to reveal the producer who was working on a rewrite of FX’s “Powers” pilot (Kevin Falls, who may or may not still be involved at this point), but the “Terriers” move was a classy one that just helped to underline how I already felt. He sounds hopeful that “Lights Out” won’t follow the same path in the ratings as “Terriers,” and, boy, so do I. I’ve seen the first five episodes of the show already, and I’m loving it.

Next up was Louis CK, who couldn’t have sounded more grateful about the way the critics have embraced his series…but, then, he was probably already beaming from the praise that had just been heaped on him by Landgraf in his introduction. We didn’t really get much of an idea what to expect from Season 2, which stands to reason, since he hasn’t even started production yet. The funniest moment came when FX exec John Solsberg invited all of the critics in the audience to visit the set, something which clearly hadn’t been mention to Louie, who shot him a tremendous “what the fuck?” look.

Even after talking to Elijah Wood at the Fox party the other night, I still couldn’t quite wrap my head around what to expect from his new sitcom, “Wilfred,” about a man who, when he looks at his neighbor’s dog, sees a man in a dog suit who talks in an Australian accent. (It’s based on an Australian series, with the same actor – Jason Gann – playing the dog in both.) Having now seen the pilot, though, I was rather surprised to find myself laughing a lot. It’s absolutely as ridiculous as it sounds, but Gann is hysterical, so I’m now curious to see if it’s going to be more than just a one-off. Of the panel, I really just have one immediate observation: Fiona Gubelmann is cute as a button and has legs that go on for miles.

The last of FX’s panels was for “Justified,” but even with a huge panel, I couldn’t help but notice one face missing: Elmore Leonard, the author responsible for creating the character of Marshall Raylan Givens. As it turns out, he’s been so inspired by the show that he’s now in the middle of writing a brand new novel entitled…you guessed it…Raylan. In his absence, though, Leonard offered a statement in which he raved about the show, particularly the performance of Timothy Olyphant as Raylan Givens. Funnily enough, though, Olyphant wasn’t asked a question until well into the proceedings, a fact which he noted with mock indignation. (“It’s like they got together and said, ‘Hey, nobody ask Walt (Goggins) or Tim a question. Fuck those guys. Fuck those guys. Nobody say anything to them.’”) I really need to finish catching up on this show before Season 2 kicks off, because I love all that I’ve seen thus far.

After FX’s panel, the network provided us with a free lunch, along with the opportunity to chat with several stars of the shows. I had ridiculously bad timing whenever it came to trying to grab members of the “Wilfred” cast for interviews, but I was pleasantly surprised to see Holt McCallany, who plays Patrick “Lights” Leary on “Lights Out.” Fantastic guy, and we had a really nice conversation about the show and how his character develops over the course of the episodes I’ve seen thus far. He swears the best is yet to come.

Okay, kids, I’m tired of waiting for the transcripts to come in, so I’m…

Dammit! That’s what I get for checking: they all just came in at once. Okay, fine, I’ll offer up a few quotes to close up my coverage. I hope you’ve enjoyed getting my perceptions of this strange event known as the TCA Press Tour. Stay tuned for my final wrap-up sometime soon…and look for further adventures during the 2011 Summer TCA Press Tour!

“What I felt about ‘Terriers’ was that the audience that was watching it, which included many of you and hundreds of thousands, actually, ultimately, in total viewers, millions of people at home, I knew they were going to be really disappointed it wasn’t moving forward, and I thought that they deserved as clear an explanation I could give them as to why it wasn’t, and a chance for you, as their representatives, to sort of have at me and ask why isn’t it coming back and for me to explain myself. I don’t know why networks haven’t done that before. I’ve never done it before. And I guess maybe it’s just that I’m now coming up on seven years in this job. And in seven years, you have some great successes and moments of exultation, and you have bragging rights, and then you have some failures. And I think you just get used to the rhythms of both in your work and eventually you get to the point where you’re capable of embracing your failures, learning from them, and talking about them. I think most programming executives are just fundamentally too insecure or too defensive to get to that point. And maybe I’m just old enough and I’ve been doing it long enough that I can take that tag.

“I think there’s always been a disconnect, unfortunately, between audience taste and critical acclaim. I think in those rare circumstances where you all have near unanimity and are willing to stand up on a table and shout, ‘This is the greatest show of all time,’ I think you guys can move the needle. But I think the reality is that you disagree with each other most of the time. Unanimity is rare, and most of you don’t feel you want to stand up on a table and shout even if you like a show, so you have to raise a huge din. You did raise a huge din on ‘Mad Men,’ and what that did — ‘Mad Men’ has become, by our analysis, literally the most critically acclaimed series in the history of television. (You have) taken it from a dismal ratings failure to ratings mediocrity.” – John Landgraf

“When you get divorced in your forties, you don’t have a role anymore on the earth. Roles make it easy for people to just sort of follow a template. I mean, so many people get divorced that there ought to be a template, but there isn’t. So I think it’s fun to watch frustration, too. So, like, the rule, sort of, that I have is Louie gets laid, but he never comes. That’s basically the way it works. I’ll probably stay that way. Nobody wants to see me come. That’s awful.” – Louis CK, “Louie”

“I get really, really fucking sick of my own face working on this show. I start to hate the sound of my voice. Once I’m editing episodes, I really want to vomit into a big basket with my face on it. I mean, baskets aren’t good for vomiting because it comes out the (holes). It’s actually great that I do all of it because it’s economical. I don’t have to argue with anybody, and also everything I’m doing I know, like, when I’m writing something, I don’t worry so much about how perfect the script might be because I know I’ll be on the set looking after it. So sometimes I’ll put in lines that don’t seem like such a good idea, but I don’t have to I know that, when I’m on set, I’ll remember that I didn’t really love that anyway. I just won’t say it. Then, when I’m shooting it, I know because I’m going to edit it, that I can just delete certain stuff or shoot extra stuff. It’s all kind of happening in my brain. Once I get a few episodes deep, it starts to get really hard. The acting probably suffers more than anything else because I give the least shit about it. So when I’m like producing a scene and directing it and setting up a shot and doing all this stuff, and then I sit in my role, and I go, ‘Oh, God, I have to say this stuff. This is me,’ and I usually don’t know my lines. It takes me the first two takes are worthless, and then I start to remember what I wrote. But I wrote it. So it’s not that hard.” – Louis CK, “Louie”

“I never actually used ‘Fight Club’ in the pitch meetings, but I knew that we had succeeded in communicating what we wanted when, after I pitched the story to John Landgraf and the other executives, one of the executives who hadn’t been involved at all said, ‘Oh, it’s ‘Fight Club.’’ And I was like, oh, perfect, along with other things. I mean, I kind of thought of it as ‘Harvey’ meets ‘Son of Sam,’ the takeoff.” – David Zuckerman, “Wilfred”

Q: There was, obviously, a point (on ‘Justified’) where you decided Boyd has to live. That’s integral to the series. What was that conversation like with Elmore? Was there a moment where you had to really steel yourself and say, “We’ve decided that he’s going to live”?
Graham Yost: No. Elmore was far more concerned about the hat. Right? I mean, we had things going back and forth and different hats and this and what kind of hat he should wear. Finally, Elmore said, ‘Okay. You do what you want.’
Timothy Olyphant: He didn’t like it.
Graham Yost: You know what, I think he understands, since we had to find the hat that looked good on Tim and looked good for the show I can’t believe we’re talking about the freaking hat after all this time but in terms of Boyd, no, because he saw the pilot, saw Walton and said, ‘Oh, God, yeah, that would be great.’
Q: So it wasn’t even a speed bump?
Graham Yost: No. We’ve mangled his work in far worse ways than keeping Boyd.

* The critical wars are going full strength at Cannes with the biggest love-it/hate-it proposition appearing to be Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Biutiful.” I haven’t seen the film, of course, but Iñárritu is most definitely my least favorite of “the three amigos” of Mexican/Spanish/U.S. cinema. (The other two being Alfonso Cuarón and Guillermo del Toro) and not only because his name is the most impossible to type. I mostly liked “Amores Perros” but his “21 Grams” and “Babel” struck me as exercises in touchy-feely realism that was a lot less real than it seemed to fancy itself.

Still, he’s working with different writers now and everyone seems to agree that the always great Javier Bardem is especially fine in it, so I suppose I should keep an open mind. Still, reading about the film, it’s hard not to side with the anti-faction when much of the commentary echoes my feelings about past films and when the pro-side is being taken by Jeffrey Welles, who really doesn’t seem to respond well when other people don’t love his favorite films. It’s a conspiracy, I tells ya!

In any case, David Hudson does his usual amazing job summarizing the critical reaction from a wide swath of the press; John Horn at the L.A. Times focuses on the reactions of big name critics.

* If there’s one project I personally would like to see made, it’s definitely a biopic about the founder of EC Comics and Mad, which started as an EC comic before becoming the magazine we still know today. Though there’s no mention of it in this short piece by Mike Fleming, Frank Jacobs’ biography of Gaines, The Mad World of William M. Gaines was something of a touchstone of my youth and contained fascinating information about the early and middle years of comics as well as the censorship madness of the fifties. It was a time when  reactionaries and left-liberals alike converged on the comic book field, deciding it was the font of all kinds of juvenile immorality.

John Landis — who might be just right the right guy for it — is shepherding the project as he readies the release of his new black comedy about notorious grave robber-murderers from history, “Burke and Hare” with Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis. I hope it’s more effective than the similarly themed but certainly more fanciful, “I Sell the Dead.”

* Seven figures for a live-action “Cinderella” pitch from Disney for writer Aline Brosh McKenna, and I can’t think of a decent Good Fairy joke.

* I missed the very important story last week covering the court order that documentarian Joe Berlinger received for six hundred hours of raw footage he made while shooting the oil industry expose, “Crude.” Anyhow, the Writer’s Guild is supporting his appeal of the decision.

* Terrence Howard seems primed to get back into the superhero movie business and I’m sure he’d be great as the bad guy in a Luke Cage movie. Still, for me, the man to play the Black Panther is clearly Chiwetel Ejiorfor, though I’m sure Howard could pull it off in a pinch. He’s also playing non-super hero, Nelson Mandela, in the upcoming biography of Winnie Mandella starring Jennifer Hudson. To my mind, the ex-wife of Mandela, who aligned herself with the most violent and radical factions of the ANC and was ultimately sent to jail on a case of kidnapping leading to murder and later on charges of fraud, is more villain than hero, but we’ll see, I guess.

* With “MacGruber” coming out this week, it’s not exactly a news flash that most SNL-derived movies aren’t the greatest, but they’ve often got their saving graces and they’re always fun to read about. Still, I don’t understand the acclaim “The Blues Brothers” gets in a lot of places. For me, it’s pretty much a mess with some cool musical moments thrown in.

* More on the revived “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” front. I’ve been failing to mention that, as noted by Empire Online today, Robert Duvall has been attached for a while as Quixote “and he can ride a horse” quips Gilliam. (The 1999 attempt at filming the screenplay fell apart when original star Jean Rochefort, a highly accomplished horseman, suffered from a herniated disk which precluded him from riding. The terrific documentary, “Lost in La Mancha” has the whole, miserable story.)

As Anne Thompson reports from Cannes, Gilliam is apparently in a jovial mood. I really, really hope it works this time.

* Octogenarian author Elmore Leonard, who has quite a history in the movies, discusses said history and the upcoming film version of his long delayed “Freaky Deaky.” He also discusses how, rather than updating the story, he decided it would be better — and more appealing to contemporary audiences — if he could actually set the story earlier and thereby make the characters somewhat younger. Charlie Matthau is directing.

* Director James Gray is not my idea of a modern day David Lean, but his newest project has Brad Pitt and is being compared to “Lawrence of Arabia” by the excitable folk at Cannes.

* Mike Leigh’s film “Another Year” has been generating a lot praise and just got picked up by Sony Classics. Kenneth Turan takes an intriguing look inside the director’s highly unusual method.

* Jean-Luc Godard’s “Film Socialisme” has been mostly baffling everyone and, somewhat understandably, angering many. Certainly, his decision to subtitle the film in “Navajo English” or, to use an SNL reference, Tarzan/Frankenstein/Tonto-speak, and making one of his most ultra-opaque films is kind of asking for that reaction. Todd McCarthy‘s take is definitely worth a read, and, again, David Hudson has excerpts and links to a lot more diverse reactions.

* So, we basically go fifty-six years between movies of of Jules Verne’s (public domain) 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and now we have two dueling versions, potentially. Why do movie producers pull this crap? (Anyone remember the two Les Liasons Dangereuse adaptations of 1988?) Also, I don’t know about you but, unlike Matthew Belloni and Borys Kit, I’ve always considered it science fiction, since I’ve always been aware that high-powered submarines didn’t exist in 1870 and I’m still pretty sure even the largest squid couldn’t destroy one.

*“‘Douchebag’ finally found a home.” I just like the sound of that.

* All things must pass, theme park department: Farewell, Star Tours.

* Matt Zoller Seitz solicited suggestions on Facebook for this nice feature on films directly inspired by the recently restored and re-released “Metropolis.” Guess which one I (and probably someone else) mentioned.

* FX pursued six pilots this time around – three dramas, three comedies – and they’ve already picked up two of those. The first is an animated series entitled “Archer,” which stars Aisha Tyler, Chris Parnell, and H. Jon Benjamin, and is set at ISIS, an international spy agency where global crises are merely opportunities for its highly trained employees to confuse, undermine, betray and royally screw each other. (I’ve seen the first episode and it’s very Adult Swim, but that’s to be expected from a show created by Adam Reed, the man behind “Sealab 2021” and “Frisky Dingo.”)

The second, “Lawman,” was developed by Graham Yost (“Boomtown”) and stars Timothy Olyphant (“Deadwood”) as Raylan Givens, a character created by Elmore Leonard in his short story, “Fire in the Hole.”

* The network is also working with Louis CK, is looking into “Terriers,” created by Shawn Ryan and Ted Griffin, and a pilot entitled “Lights Out,” which was written by Justin Zackham (“The Bucket List”) and stars Holt McCallany, Elias Koteas, and Melora Hardin.

* Landgraf was absolutely not surprised about the lack of Emmy nominations for “The Shield.” I find that sad.

* The current “Rescue Me” season,, which Landgraf says they are “unbelievably satisfied” with, will consist of 22 episodes, and FX has picked up 18 more for next season, though they are contemplating expanding that order. When the show returns next summer, it will probably be earlier than it was this year. (The delay was predominantly due to the writer’s strike.)

* “Testees” will not be back for a second season on FX, but it will have a second season…in Canada, where it was apparently more successful.

* Announcements regarding the cast of Season 3 of “Damages” will hopefully be made within the next week or two, and Landgraf says, “I don’t think anyone in this room would guess who they’re going to.” The network was naturally disappointed with the ratings of the series in Season 2, but he admits, “It’s a very demanding show. It’s one where you can’t watch 3, 5, 7 episodes out of 13. You’re either in or you’re out.” This obviously doesn’t fit the current mindset for TV viewers, who he describes as being “more interested in dating than marriage,” but the series is what it is.

“If we came back with ‘Damages’ and it was Patty Hughes as Perry Mason, and every year she broke someone down on the stand and got her man or woman, you guys would literally be eviscerating me,” said Landgraf. “And I would deserve it.”

Lastly, here are the premiere dates for your favorite – and soon-to-be-favorite – FX series:

“Sons of Anarchy,” Season 2 premieres on September 8th
“It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” Season 5 premieres on September 17th
“Nip/Tuck,” Season 6 premieres on October 14th
“Archer,” premieres in the fall
“Damages,” Season 3 premieres in January 2010
“Lawman,” premieres in the spring of 2010
“Rescue Me,” Season 6 premieres in the spring or summer of 2010

* Charlie Matthau is dipping into the frequently profitable writing well of the frequently adapted author Elmore Leonard, with “Freaky Deaky.”

* Entertainment newshound Nikki Finke has a funny idea of taking a vacation, because her blog is still being updated by her rather heavily for someone whose supposed to be taking it easy (well, you don’t get that famed $14 million pay day by being all easygoing). In any case, Finke is apparently happy to sorta be called “thuggish” by business writer David Carr in the New York Times. Good article, possibly slightly inaccurate editorializing aside. Pull quote: “I’m not mean, I just write mean.”

* The same folks who gave Ms. Finke her money are doing something similar for the lighter side of the showbiz fence and have brought on mega-gossip monger Bonnie Fuller.

* Consider yourself a cinephile or film geek? Really? Well, if so, Prof. Snape has a challenge for you but beware or it might be 200 points from Gryffindor.