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.

You’ll get more details about the show in due time, since there was a “Running Wilde” panel as well, but for now, I’ll just mention that two other individuals affiliated with the show made unexpected appearances at the early check-in: executive producer / co-creator Jim Vallely and co-star Peter Serafinowicz.

I didn’t really get a chance to chat with Russell (she was pretty well surrounded from the moment she arrived), but I did talk to Arnett for a few minutes. Thanks to my wife, though, I ended up having a relatively lengthy conversation with Serafinowicz and Vallely. I knew I’d recognized Serafinowicz, and he quickly reminded me why: he had his own series in the UK, one which many YouTube clips reveal to be extremely hilarious. Indeed, he’s the one who told me I should check them out, particularly his Beatles-related parodies, of which he’s quite proud. No wonder he was cast to play Paul in Robert Zemeckis’s “Yellow Submarine” remake.

In a strange “small world” moment, I also learned that Jim Vallely is the father of Tannis Vallely, the actress who played Janice, the glasses-wearing, cello-playing prodigy on “Head of the Class.” She’s now on the casting side of the business, having worked on such films as “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” “Oceans’ Thirteen,” and “It’s Complicated.” Eventually, my wife and I grew tired and retreated for the evening, but it would only be a few hours until we were back in the thick of it again, this time for the real beginning of Day 7.

Breakfast was brought to us by the casts of “Human Target” and “The Good Guys,” shows which, back in the days when the networks weren’t too cheap to spread their series across a two-day period, would’ve earned their own panels. Instead, we had to settle for chatting with them over bacon and eggs, bagels or donuts, and that sort of thing. In truth, the only person I really had the chance to speak with was Jackie Earle Haley on “Human Target,” and that was mostly because I feel like I kinda sorta know him (he’s friends with Bullz-Eye’s own Ross Ruediger and, as a result, has come to recognize me on sight as “Ross’s friend”), but as you can see, everyone was in the house from both series.

Soon enough, the actors headed out to start their own days, and having finished our breakfast, we took our seats and prepared for the first panel of the morning to begin.

Lone Star

“Lone Star” is a great FX series. Unfortunately, it’s on Fox, and I’m not entirely sure that broadcast audiences are going to be willing to sit still for a show which moves at a such a slow, studied pace…but, hey, I’m a TV critic. It’s my job to get the word out on a series like “Lone Star” and tell you to watch it. The premise finds James Wolk playing a second-generation conman who’s living two lives, with a woman he loves in each of them, and has a crisis of conscience that makes him unwilling to give up either of them. Despite the fact that it doesn’t have anything even remotely resembling an in-your-face vibe, there’s always a chance that audiences could come for the cast – which includes Jon Voight, David Keith, and Adrienne Palicki – and stay for the drama.

That’s certainly what Fox is hoping for, anyway.

“My understanding was that (FOX) were looking to try a cable show on network,” said executive producer Kyle Killen, “and if we signed up with them, they would give us the leeway to really try that. You know, when you go out and you pitch shows, the truth is the things that you watch, the things that you love — ‘Breaking Bad’ and ‘Mad Men’ — they’re dirty words in pitch meetings because they’re shows that have a number of viewers that would not — it would get a show canceled on the network. So even if you respect them creatively and you want to say, ‘This is what we hope to be. This is what we want to put on air,’ your people will tell you, ‘Talk about ‘Dallas.’ And I think at FOX, it wasn’t a dirty word. At FOX, they felt like the only reason those shows aren’t more popular is because they’re not on FOX and because they don’t have this machine. They don’t have this opportunity behind them. And I think we’re going to get that.”

When asked how long “Lone Star” could sustain itself with its current one-man-two-families premise, executive producer Amy Lippman admitted that the show would need to reinvent itself periodically, not entirely unlike…you guessed it…”Breaking Bad.”

“We look at shows that start with a very strong premise and by Season 2 have turned it in some way,” said Lippman. “I think that’s our challenge: to keep it going, to keep it fresh and not to replay the same dynamic over and over again. We certainly have a sense of where we’re going this season with it, with the understanding that, if we’re lucky enough to be back in front of you next year, that something will be significantly changed in the show.”

“Also, the show has a lot of different levels to it,” said executive producer Chris Keyser. “There’s no question that the con is going to run all the way through. In fact, there are a number of cons that you’ll see played out, but the truth is also that we have a very broad, I guess, traditional soap canvas as well. There are two full families, and I think when Kyle wrote the pilot, he constructed in a lot of really clever television ways those triangles that give you a lot of plot to play with. There are three children whom Clint Thatcher has to deal with. There are two wives. There’s a triangle there. There are two fathers. So we have a lot of things we need to deal with. If anything, I think we’re finding that, as we begin, there’s so much to do, that we need to parcel it out from episode to episode.”

“I think we want to err on the side of being aggressive with plot and having things change and feel dynamic as opposed to feeling like we are treading water episode after episode,” said Killen. “The things that you’re interested in, the questions you want answered, I think that we want to be aggressive about taking them on. At the same time, it really is at its heart not just about the Swiss-watch mechanism of it all. It’s about these characters and the fact that the situations that they’re in they approach like real people would. So I think that’s where the soap side of it comes in. It’s not just giving people their fix. That’s actually what’s important, so that you understand why they do what they do with respect to the cons that move forward.”

James Wolk is no doubt going to be labeled one of the fresh faces of the new fall season, since he’s really only known for his work in the TV movie “Front of the Class,” where he played a teacher with Tourette’s Syndrome, an experience which kinda sorta put him on the map. (“Maybe I was a like small city you’ve never heard of,” he said with a grin, “but on the map.”) He loved working on that project, and he’s equally psyched about the prospect of tackling “Lone Star.”

“’Front of the Class’ was a true story. This is not necessarily a true story, but the role is just as rich, and the world is just as real,” he said. “So I’m really excited to sink my teeth into this with this truly exceptional cast and everyone involved, with the writers and directors. As soon as I read the script, I knew that this role had something very special in it. Originally it was written a bit older, so it was a question of, ‘Can I be honest and true in this role? Can I really do justice to an audience that would watch it and actually believe in it?’ And it was a really interesting ongoing conversation between myself and people that help me make decisions and these wonderful people you see behind me, and we figured out after a few auditions that, yes, this could work, and I was elated. I was so excited because I thought that this role is something that could really continue to challenge me, and it’s a really wonderful role. It was on the page. Kyle wrote a script that it was clear, I think, with all of our characters that there was some real stuff to play here, which I think is what ignites this cast and excites us that we’re going to go into a series where we’ll be challenged every day.”

Running Wilde

I try to avoid putting chunks of the transcripts from these panels into my coverage, but sometimes a panel demands that you offer your coverage that way, just so you can get a feel for the rapid-fire back and forth going on between the panelists…like, say, this one:

Q: I have a question in the back, in the right. Keri (Russell), what inspired you to do a sitcom?
MITCH HURWITZ: Don’t be thrown by the way he said “sitcom.”
WILL ARNETT: But really run with the “inspired” part.
Q: A half-hour comedy, scripted show.
MITCH HURWITZ: Yeah, why did you decide to do a “crapcom”?
Q: I wasn’t implying…
MITCH HURWITZ: No. I’m sorry. Of course I did. It’s self-hatred. I’m sorry.

If you’d asked me after the panel, I couldn’t have told you how Russell answered the question, but the word “crapcorm” has stuck with me ever since.

(For the record, Russell replied, “I just wanted to be interested, and it was interesting to me. I’ve been reading a lot of film scripts that were kind of more of the same, and the type of movies I really did want to make weren’t being green-lit, and this came my way, and it was just too good to pass up. And then I flew out and met these guys, and they were so wonderful. It was fresh and exciting, and I thought I’d try it.”)

Hurwitz is excited at the prospect of working with Arnett on a show where he’s more central to the series, as opposed to “Arrested Development,” which was obviously more of an ensemble situation

“This is a true romantic comedy,” said Hurwitz. “He really does have great skills as an actor and can play a wide range of things, but because he is so funny, and funny is such a striking quality, people tend to use that quality of his in movies and in guest spots on things, and you know, the fun for us in working with Will is finding those levels and finding those surprises and those dramatic moments, just like the fun with Keri is finding those moments where she’s more comedic, where she’s not the voice of reason. She has such a likability and such a relatability that I think there’s going to be a lot of fun to be had with playing against types for both of them.”

Hurwitz is, of course, aware that critics will be unable to resist making comparisons between “Running Wilde” and “Arrested Development,” especially now that it’s been announced that David Cross will be joining the cast in a recurring capacity.

“I think we very much loved doing ‘Arrested’ and do miss it, and it’s why we do want to make the movie still, but this is a different project,” he said. “It has just a different set of rules to it. I think there’s real peril in trying to repeat yourself and trying to apply rules that applied to something else to a new project. I will say Kevin Reilly has been unbelievably helpful in helping us ground this, and I really feel like he is helping me get out of my comfort zone, and it is kind of easier sometimes to write those dislikable characters because they do funnier things. And the next step for me is to try and go past that a little bit and have some courage about stepping into a new area.”

Okay, time for another transcript excerpt. This one took place when Stefania Owen, who plays Russell’s daughter on the series, was asked what it’s like to serve as the voice of reason on the show.

STEFANIA OWEN: Well, in “Running Wilde,” everyone is kind of, like, childish, and I’m the one that kind of gets them to…I’m sort of the mature one, and everyone is stupid and immature.
MITCH HURWITZ: You’re not just talking about people on this panel, right? You’re talking about the characters.
STEFANIA OWEN: Um…
Q: Are you like that in real life?
STEFANIA OWEN: What do you mean? Mature?
Q: Ultra-mature while people are stupid around you.
STEFANIA OWEN: I can be stupid too. But sometimes if…if it’s, like, serious, then I am mature. And it depends.
MITCH HURWITZ: There’s something about…I think she and the Steve character have the most in common in a way.
WILL ARNETT: They’re both raised in very protected environments and kind of secluded.
STEFANIA OWEN: And they all want the spotlight to be on them…
WILL ARNETT: (Interrupts) I was talking.

Unsurprisingly, “Arrested Development” continued to be brought up throughout the panel, but Hurwitz offered a particularly telling response when asked if he’s worried about bringing yet another series with a unique comedic sensibility to Fox.

“I personally worry about success, that having to continue doing it is far more perilous for me than the fear of it being canceled,” he said. “I guess I would describe as a hope of it being canceled. I don’t sound sincere when I say this, but I really am sincere in saying ‘Arrested’ was an amazing experience and an amazing opportunity, and I’m very grateful to FOX and 20th for letting us do it for three years. When I look at the climate of television today, I don’t think you could do it. Maybe you could do ‘Arrested Development,’ but you couldn’t necessarily do a show that took as many risks right off the bat, and that they gave me a lot of room to play, and I never had any entitlement or expectation that I deserved to just keep that on the air forever. They stayed with it for a long time.

“I’m certainly happy to be back at FOX,” Hurwitz assured us. “I think they do some very interesting and adventurous things, but on top of that, you know, Kevin Reilly has just really been terrific to work with. As we’ve all experienced this, the three of us wrote this together. And we went through nine, ten drafts of this thing, and every time Kevin would give us some very specific idea, and we would curse, and we would gnash our teeth, and then we would say, ‘He’s right. It’s getting a little better. It’s getting a little better.’ We are still reshooting the pilot. We’re going to go off and reshoot about half the pilot because of some very insightful comments that he’s made and some recasting and things like that.

“We were very rushed in making a very ambitious pilot, and we were rushed because our favorite directors, the Russo brothers, were doing another show, which got picked up at ABC, so we didn’t have them until the last minute. We didn’t have a lot of prep, and I think we had like six or seven days of post from the end of shooting to deliver the thing. It’s a very short amount of time. And that affects everything. That affects casting. That affects how much time you get to spend with the characters finding it. So, you know, we threw a lot of stuff out there very quickly, and we were able to look at it and say, ‘You know, here’s where we’re not as invested in the characters.’

“But even as we were writing it in the original drafts, it always kind of bumped us,” added Arnett. “One of us, at some point, would be, like, ‘Is this really the thing that we wanted? Is this really working?” And at the time when you’re under all this pressure and you don’t have the time and/or the money to change it, it’s hard to sometimes identify exactly what those problems are.”

“Hopefully, the show will be very funny,” said Hurwitz. “A lot of what we’ve already written and our reshoots…just to look at Will alone, everything this guy does is going to be funny. But it’s different. I think there’s a burden associated with ‘Arrested Development’ that it’s a…what’s the phrase when it’s a high-class problem to have? You know, we’re glad to be working. We’re glad to be trying to do something that appeals to a wider audience. I think if we can make that move, if we can get a big audience interested in the show, more and more of our subversion, hopefully, will be able to come out.”

Executive Session

The Fox executive session is always good for a few interesting announcements and/or news briefs, so when Peter Rice, Chairman of Entertainment for the Fox Networks Group, and Kevin Reilly, FOX President of Entertainment, took the stage, we were all keeping our fingers crossed for some good material. We had resigned ourselves to little or no insight on the new season of “American Idol,” and that’s what we got, but Rice was at least kind enough to kick off the proceedings by addressing the recent changes with the series.

“In early June, I met with Ellen,” began Rice. “We talked about the season and her feelings about the season, and, really, the idea that she wasn’t comfortable. She didn’t feel like it was a good fit for her. I tried to persuade her that it would be different in the future, but ultimately we came to an agreement that we would begin to look for new judges. We were doing that anyway because Simon was leaving. And as that played out over the course of the summer, that we would come to an agreement to either say to her we can’t replace you or to say that we feel that we can move on without you, so that’s sort of where we got to last week. It was precipitated in great part by this morning. We felt confident that we could come up with a panel that didn’t include Ellen as a judge. And at the same time, we knew we were coming here on Monday, and I thought it would be very disingenuous to sit here and to talk about Ellen being on IDOL next year when we knew that wasn’t going to be the case. So we decided to announce that last week. That created another round of speculation about who would be replacing Ellen and who would be replacing Simon on the judges’ panel next year.

“The only thing I can tell you with absolute certainty right now is that no one has signed a deal yet on either side of the camera to join ‘American Idol’ next year who wasn’t on it last year. And I know that that is it’s not particularly a fun announcement. It’s certainly not the choice I would have made, but it is the truth as we sit here today, that there are no signed deals with anybody. There has been tremendous speculation, and we live in a world where you guys are tremendous at the job that you do and you find out information, as you should, as journalists. And then we have to respond to that information. I can tell you that much of the information that has been written is accurate. And some of the information that has been written is wildly inaccurate. I’m not going to get into either confirming or denying which ones they are, but it does make it difficult for us and the job that we’re trying to do and the business that we’re trying to run. And at times, that is in conflict with the business that you’re trying to run. You’re trying to break stories, and we’re trying to run a television network and work with producers on television shows. And when we’re working with the No. 1 television show in America, that scrutiny is enormous. So I wish I truly wish that we were going to walk out a panel of judges for next year and that that could be a celebration for us and we could engage with you on that. I’m really sorry that that’s not going to happen. If we had signed deals, we would have done that. I can imagine that there are a tremendous amount of follow up questions to that which might be fantastic questions, and I’m not going to get into that speculation and I’m not going to live in sort of a fish bowl of a blow by blow account of casting the show right now, however much fun that would be for you or for your readers, which I recognize is the truth. So I’m sorry if that might lead to an endless round of, you know, “I’m not going to speculate on that,” but it is the truth that we are, sitting here today, dealing with.

“We start the auditions with the judges in mid September,” Rice concluded. “We certainly plan to have a judges’ panel in place and signed by then, and as soon as we have that, we will announce it.”

Okay, now that that’s out of the way, we can talk about something besides “American Idol”…or, at least, we could if that hadn’t continued to be the predominant theme of the panel. At the time, Rice refused to confirm or deny the return of Nigel Lythgoe as producer of the show (it has since been announced that, yes, Lythgoe will be back in the fold come next season), nor would he be tempted into saying anything at all about Kara DioGuardi’s fate. There were many more questions about the show, but none of it was terribly illuminating. Ultimately, we’re going to have to do exactly what Lee had been indicating all along: wait.

In the end, the only thing that *I* really cared about during the session was when the topic of conversation shifted over to the potentially-awesome sci-fi series, “Terra Nova,” which we’ll be seeing on Fox sometime next year…and by “next year,” we don’t mean January. They’re actually going to hold the series until next fall, though the talk is that they’ll do something like they did with “Glee,” where they tease viewers with the pilot in the spring and then make ’em wait for the series ’til the fall.

“It was mainly due to the scope of what this show is going to take,” Reilly said of the delayed premiere. “You know, we got into it knowing it was going it be ambitious, knowing that we had enormous you know, some groundbreaking digital effects we were bringing to it. We had to create an entire world and mythology. But frankly, even locking in a location has had a unique set of challenges. A lot of the world will be created digitally, but we’re trying to find a prehistoric world. We’ve explored everywhere from Louisiana to Hawaii to Australia to Orlando. Each has had its pluses and minuses. We’re getting very close to locking in a location. It’s actually been very, very exciting. We’ve got a great team. We’ve seen a lot of design work. It really became apparent, to do this show right, we were going to need the time. So we decided to make a virtue of it, slow it down for this season.

“The two advantages of doing the spring are the following: we’re going to be able to do the pilot right, have an enormous jump on that on the marketing side, hopefully recreate the same thing we did with ‘Glee,’ let people understand the show, give them materials over the summer that we’ve already shot, invest them in it. Secondly, in success, this is a show that needs to be ahead in cycle. This is not a show where they can finish on one week and three weeks later, it’s on the air. That’s just not going to be possible. We need to be ahead of it. This cycle sets us up for that.”

“One of the other things about that is — and this tends to be more of an issue for movies than for television — when you’re doing something which has a tremendous amount of the visual effects in it, if you’re trying to then sell it and you’re trying to sell something of scale and spectacle and the visual effects aren’t done, it’s hard to say, ‘It’s this huge adventure,’ and the images you’re showing are not large in that same way,” said Rice. “I think that, by slowing it down in that way, we will be able to present the images and the spectacle to the audience in a way which reflects the show that we’re going to be making.”

“We have our team of writers, we have Jon Cassar, who was our in-house director of ’24,’ joining us,” said Reilly. “So we’ve got really the A-team on it, doing a lot of work right now, generating stories and scripts and material and prepping location. Alex Graves is going to direct. All the elements that have come in have been top-notch. So hopefully, this will be better for it.”

American Dad

Time for lunch…and for a table read from the voice cast of “American Dad,” featuring Seth MacFarlane, Matt Weitzman, Mike Barker, Scott Grimes, Wendy Schaal, Dee Bradley Baker, and Erik Durbin. I’m not a huge “American Dad” fan, but if previous TCA tours have taught me nothing else, it’s that table reads are fun whether you like the show they’re reading from or not. You just kind of get caught up in the laughter around you. Plus, this was a slightly unique one, in that they actually brought the animation for the final act of the episode and showed it to us because they were so proud of the animation. I don’t want to spoil it for you, but suffice it to say that it’s a Christmas episode – title: “For Whom The Sleigh Bell Tolls” – and involves a stand-off with Santa Claus. Good times.

Arguably the most surprising revelation to come out of the session is that “American Dad” is working almost a year and a half ahead of schedule, with their table read for next year’s Christmas episode set for next week, but we also got word about several guest stars who’ll appear in the upcoming season, including Burt Reynolds, Anjelica Houstin, Hayden Panettiere, Jason Alexander, Carl Reiner, Ed Asner, Grace Park, and Lou Diamond Phillips, who’ll be playing Stan’s half-Native-American brother in the Thanksgiving episode.

Raising Hope

Fact: there is a moment within the pilot of “Raising Hope,” Fox’s new sitcom about a young man having to suddenly adapt to the responsibilities of being a father, that made me laugh harder than anything I’ve seen on television in probably two years. That alone made me want to make sure that I’d be in attendance for the show’s panel, but I was further sold on being there when my wife and I spotted Cloris Leachman playing piano in the lobby of the Beverly Hilton. It was a rather surreal experience to see her sitting there, tinkling the ivories for any and all in attendance. Little did I know that Ms. Leachman’s appearance on the panel would ultimately prove to be an even more surreal experience.

QUESTION: Were you guys afraid when you were conceiving this premise that, you know, the mom being executed with the baby present and all that fun little setup might be a touch too dark?
CLORIS LEACHMAN: We think it’s funny.
GREG GARCIA: I checked with Cloris, and she thought it was funny. We had different versions. We had versions where she got executed, electrocuted, but it didn’t take and then she stayed alive, and then we toyed around with different things. It’s dark, but I thought it was dark in a funny and absurd way, and it seemed like an interesting way to get this family a baby, so I figured we would go for it.

CLORIS LEACHMAN: Is she killed or not? I don’t know.
GREG GARCIA: She’s no longer with us.
CLORIS LEACHMAN: Over?
LUCAS NEFF: Yeah.
CLORIS LEACHMAN: That’s sort of dark, isn’t it?

No, “sort of dark” is the original title of the show, which was “Keep Hope Alive.” (The baby’s name is Hope.) But I digress. You can tell from the above excerpt that, yes, Cloris Leachman is still hilarious and remains a master of comedic timing. The problem is that she’s prone to eccentric tendencies that she sometimes takes beyond the point of being funny, and we were witness to such an occasion a few minutes later, which went a little something like this…

Q: This is for Cloris Leachman.
CLORIS LEACHMAN: She left.
GARRET DILLAHUNT: She left years ago.
CLORIS LEACHMAN: She had lunch first. Then she left.
Q: I’m way over here if you want to make eye contact.
CLORIS LEACHMAN: Could you stand, please, and say your name? Stand up, please.
Q: Hi.
CLORIS LEACHMAN: What’s your name?
Q: I’m Ed.
CLORIS LEACHMAN: Who?
Q: Ed.
CLORIS LEACHMAN: Ed?
Q: Ed.
CLORIS LEACHMAN: Ed? Sit down, Ed. Next question. I’m not comfortable here. I have to sit near you… (Gestures to Greg) …or I won’t be happy.
GREG GARCIA: Want to come down here?
GARRET DILLAHUNT: (Shaking his head) Every day.

(At this point, Cloris stood up and Dillahunt carried her chair down to the other end of the stage, next to Garcia. Predictably, it was at this point that she changed her mind about where she wanted to sit.)

CLORIS LEACHMAN: You sit there. I would — you sit near him. I would rather sit near her. (Gesturing to the seat next to Martha Plimpton, which is where Dillahunt had been sitting)
GREG GARCIA: When the music stops, you have to be in a chair.
CLORIS LEACHMAN: Ed, the next guy left, so you have to ask your question. Stand up, please.
Q: Seriously?
CLORIS LEACHMAN: Get up.
Q: All right. Yes, ma’am.
CLORIS LEACHMAN: Take a breath and just relax.
SHANNON WOODWARD: Cloris, I’m not sure if I should be insulted that you wanted to move.
GREG GARCIA: This is why I told the studio we need 14 hours a day to shoot.
Q: I’m afraid this question is going to be entirely fruitless. You’re going to answer however you want. Can I sit down?
CLORIS LEACHMAN: No. You stand and ask the question.
Q: Make sure to make everybody else stand too. Anyway, your character in this program seems to sort of drift in and out of senility, which I don’t think you’re doing on stage, but…
CLORIS LEACHMAN: That wasn’t funny. He was not funny.
Q: …but are you hoping to get a little bit more to do in future episodes?
CLORIS LEACHMAN: No. I just love it like this.
Q: To sort of parade around in your bra?
CLORIS LEACHMAN: I like to stand near him when he’s just about to enter in the kitchen while she’s putting on some dreadful, but carefully picked out, frozen food for the rest of them. What was the question?
GREG GARCIA: We have lots of fun stuff planned for Cloris’ character. It’s not just — she’s not just going to be in and out of being lucid. There’s a lot of fun stuff, and we find out some history of her character, and we’re going to find some really fun stuff for her to do.
GARRET DILLAHUNT: Sit down.
CLORIS LEACHMAN: Did you sit down yet?
Q: Yes.
CLORIS LEACHMAN: Thank God.

Okay, enough borrowing from the transcript. You get the idea: Cloris can be crazy. Not everyone thought it was as funny as I did, but I laughed pretty hard…up to a point. She stayed on a roll for a few more minutes, with the highlight being the frustrated declaration, “I’m so sick of Betty White,” but after a misguided attempt at getting a little blue with her material (one which Plimpton decried as “makeup trailer talk”), Leachman wisely let her castmates and series creator Greg Garcia have a chance to take center stage.

The big question to Garcia was in regards to the similarities between this show and his previous series, “My Name Is Earl,” which he didn’t hesitate to address.

“I think there’s some things that are similar and a lot of things that are different,” he said. “I feel like the way it’s shot and the look of it will be somewhat like ‘My Name Is Earl’ because I kind of fell in love with that style. I like very much to try to do a little movie every week, so we’ll continue to try to accomplish that. Other than that, I think that it will be more grounded in spots. It’s similar. But this is a lower-middle income family whereas ‘Earl’ was thieves and criminals and such. So it’s slightly elevated from that.”

Masterchef

I know what you’re thinking: just how many shows does Gordon Ramsay need, anyway? Hey, I don’t blame you. But if you’ve ever been in the room with the guy when he’s holding court (and I realize most of you haven’t), he never fails to be an entertaining speaker…and, you may be surprised to hear, he’s impeccably polite, making sure to thank everyone for their questions, often going so far as to praise them.

The fact that are so many different faces of Gordon Ramsay led one critic to ask him if he ever gets tired of having to put on an act – if, indeed, it is completely an act – for his various series.

“It’s a very good question,” he said. (See?) “I think what we have to do is understand the different situations in terms of ‘Kitchen Nightmares’ is something that, in our minds, you know, throwing the last lifeline in a way that we help try to turn these places around. ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ is professional chefs. This is something that is completely different in terms of it’s an amateur king foodie that wants to step into the world of food on a bigger platform, and there’s no service connected. We’re high-pressure at moments with the wedding, for instance, and we’re very fortunate to go off and cook for the guys and girls at Camp Pendleton for their last meal before they go back to Afghanistan. We put them in those kinds of situations, and it’s not running a service or handling a service of a restaurant because I don’t think everyone on ‘Masterchef’ wants to go and open a restaurant.”

“Can I comment on that?” asked “Masterchef” judge Joe Bastianich. “I think that, in the past, Gordon has dealt with professional cooks and chefs, as he said. And they need to be treated in a certain way, and that’s the way we do in our profession. I think in ‘Masterchef,’ with amateur cooks and truly home cooks, you see a side of Gordon…you see probably Gordon as husband, father, home cook. How does he interact with his family? How does he cook at home? And I think that that’s more the nurturing sensibility that he has and is what transmits itself in this show.”

“Trust me, if they felt they weren’t giving their all as contestants or they were taking the easy option out, he would let them know,” said executive producer Mark Koops. “The honesty and integrity that all of them brought then was to judge the dish as a dish and judge them on were they doing the best they could each and every time. So with that sometimes came praise, but sometimes with it came criticism and stern words.”

“Absolutely,” agreed Ramsay. “When it goes wrong, it goes wrong, and let’s be honest: even when we make mistakes, it’s in the process of learning, so we can’t be as hard on them because they’re not getting paid $60-, $70,000 as a line chef working for Wolfgang Puck. These are individuals that are dying to do well in this industry but have never been given the chance.”

When asked if he was eager to have that softer side come out on the show, however, Ramsay answered the question by launching into an anecdote.

“Joe summed up one challenge,” he began. “We had a wedding, and I thought we were going to make history by cooking for the wedding and having the divorce on the same day. Because the main course wasn’t coming out, and things were going seriously tits up. However, we turned it around, and Joe turned around and said, ‘My God, you know, I’ve understood you properly now. You’re like a fine wine. The longer you leave him, the more mature he gets.’ So, you know, we do have good days as well where it runs to perfection, even on ‘Kitchen Nightmares’ and even on ‘Hell’s Kitchen.’ So it’s not all shouts and screaming.”

The “Masterchef” panel wrapped up with Ramsay testing the assembled critics to see which one of them had the most discerning palate by asking us to determine the ingredients contained within a batch of gazpacho that had been whipped up for us. The winner would receive a free dinner at one of Chef Ramsay’s restaurants. Suffice it to say that I did not win, but for what it’s worth, it’s not like the person who did win necessarily had the most discerning palate, either. They just happened to be the person who named the final ingredient…which, for the record, was vegetable stock.

From there, it was time for a sundae break brought to us by Fox’s Sunday Night Animation Domination block of programming. I must admit, however, that I had to bail out of the proceedings for the sake of my own well-being: I was so tired and worn out that my hands were shaking, and I absolutely had to take a nap, lest I literally pass out in my chair. But thanks to Fox Publicity, I do have a photo from the event…

…and thanks to the TCA, I have a transcription of the subsequent event – the “Glee” panel – and can therefore still bring you the highlights:

Glee

First off, Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan – the show’s co-creators, writers and executive producers – were asked how they envisioned the show’s future insofar as dealing with the progression of the students through the school. Would it be a case of treating each season as a year of school, consistently ending with the glee club going to finals?

“We haven’t thought about that,” admitted Murphy. “We obviously have to deal with the cast and the fact that, you know, the show will hopefully go many, many years. We’ve sort of mapped out the first four years with our original cast. But I think, you know, we have an obligation to be true to the high school experience. I don’t want to sort of do a thing where we wake up and Episode 5 is five years in the future and they’re all living in the same condo complex. I don’t know. We haven’t really talked about that.

“We know the first four years,” he said. “The thing about the show is you do sort of have a set of competitions that are true. You have sectionals and regionals and nationals, and then one year we want to go to Copenhagen or Moscow for the International Show Choir Competition. Beyond that, we just have the first four years mapped out.”

Executive producer Dante de Loreto discussed the trials of securing song clearances for the show. “We always have a fair amount of lead time to clear the music,” he said, “but even still, there are some songs that have such complex titles that it can take more time to clear than we actually have…although we rarely run into that. For the most part, everyone’s been very enthusiastic about how respectfully we use the music. It’s a show about music and about arts education and about arts in the school. And I know Ryan has received some fantastic mix tapes.”

“Yeah, I got a mix tape from Paul McCartney a couple weeks ago,” revealed Murphy. “It was amazing. I thought I was being punked.”

He wasn’t.

“It just sort of came out of the blue,” Murphy said, “and it was in a package and it was sort of handwritten, and it was two CDs and it said, ‘Hi, Ryan. I hope you would consider some of these songs for ‘Glee,’” and then it said ‘Paul.’ And I opened it up and I think that it was ‘Michelle’ and it had, like, these huge songs. But I know that he is — so I’ve heard through our wonderful people at FOX, Geoff Bywater – is a fan of the show and just admires and loves that it’s about art education. I mean, I was gobsmacked. I grew up with that guy. So, of course, we are going to do something with…I don’t think a whole episode, but something with him.”

(Note to Murphy: Seriously? Paul McCartney’s a fan and you’re not sure you’d dedicate a whole episode to him?)

As far as future guest stars, Murphy revealed that Cheyenne Jackson will be appearing as the coach of Vocal Adrenaline, John Stamos will be coming on the show to serve as Matt Morrison’s rival, and Kristin Chenoweth will be making a return appearance as well.

Indeed, Murphy was surprisingly forthcoming about what we could expect to see in Season 2 of “Glee,” though the revelations often came in conjunction with reflections about Season 1.

“I think we had such a whirlwind of a year,” he said. “We didn’t know what we were doing when we started. We were kind of making it up as we went along. But the one thing that really clicked for me is when we went on tour, which was instantly sold out, which was amazing, and all the kids were there, and they would come out. Some of them would have two lines, three lines, and they got these huge ovations, and they had their sort of mini fan clubs, and I felt instead of going bigger and overstuffing Season 2, which I think people would expect us to do, let’s go under it. Let’s really sort of dwell on a lot of these supporting characters like the Santana character, the Brittany character and the Mike Chang character and the Tina character. So we’re giving all those actors big storylines this year because I think people want to know about them. And last year because we were with IDOL in the second half of the season, I personally kind of blew it out. Like that Madonna episode had nine numbers, which was insane. So we’re scaling back a little bit and concentrating a little more on the stories, and now I think we’re going to do five or six songs, but that’s just because I thought we were learning as we went.”

The season premiere will be called “Auditions” and focuses on the idea that daily life is an audition for everyone, not just high school students, while the third episode of the season is faith-focused and finds the “Glee” kids discussing what God means to them. There will be a Britney Spears themed episode at some point, with one other themed episode set for after the Super Bowl, though Murphy will only describe it as “a tribute to a musical artist that we’re in negotiation for.” Similarly, Murphy is attempting to wrangle Susan Boyle for this year’s Christmas episode, though she’s apparently not been locked in yet. There’s also going to be an episode during the second half of the season which will feature original songs, something which comes about when the students get an assignment to write their own music.

Bring it on, Murphy. We’re ready.

Give Kevin Brockman, ABC’s head of publicity, full credit for getting the first big laugh of the day: he walked onto the stage holding a giant stuffed pink elephant named Binky, allowing him to be flanked by the real elephant in the room while addressing the metaphorical one, which was the somewhat unexpected departure of Steve McPherson, the network’s former President of Entertainment.

“On Tuesday, we issued a statement announcing Steve McPherson’s resignation from ABC Entertainment Group,” said Brockman. “I realize you all may have questions, obviously. That is what you do for a living. But to save us some time and hopefully make this as productive as possible, I just want to say that Tuesday’s statement still holds. It is literally all we are going to say on the subject. So you may ask, but you will get the same answer. So I’m just saying please know that is the statement. We have given it. We will give it again if we need to. But in the spirit of trying to make things as productive today, just realize that that’s where we are. We really have nothing more to add.”

And, indeed, they did not. Someone tried a bit later in the morning to get Paul Lee, McPherson’s hastily arranged replacement, to say something on the matter, but…well, we’ll get to that in a moment. First, let’s talk about the panel that preceded Mr. Lee’s executive session.

Detroit 1-8-7

Can it really be possible that “Detroit 1-8-7” is the first police drama to be set within the city of Detroit? That would seem to be the case, and yet it seems like such an incredible oversight that it’s never been done before. More impressive, however, is the fact that the show is actually being filmed in Detroit.

“There are a lot of benefits to shooting in Detroit,” said producer David Zabel. “Included in that is that there is a bit of an infrastructure forming of crew. We are filling out our crew with a lot of locals. A lot of locals are working on the show, and hopefully in the long run what will then happen is that a lot of the locals who are working at mid-level positions are going to get better at these jobs and rise up and be doing more of the key department-head work as well. Overall, they’ve been doing quite a bit of feature work in Detroit, so there’s some aspects there that are well in place, but there are some things that are a little bit of a learning curve, and we’re sort of going through that together. A lot of the key department heads are from Los Angeles for now, but the vast numbers of the crew are largely local hires. In certain key departments we had to bring from L.A. in order to have qualified people so that we could deliver the show. Also, they are shooting seven features right now in Detroit, so even the talent pool that exists locally in Detroit is spread a little thin right now. But as the series goes on, I think we’re going to get more and more people that are local working on the show.”

As happy as I am for Detroit that they’ve got this series filming in their fine city, I must say that I got more than a little bored with the plethora of questions about that particular aspect. I was much more interested in the fact that the original conceit of the series as seen in the pilot which was screened for us in advance of the TCA tour – the detectives were being filmed as part of a documentary – has been thrown out the window due to the fact that, as a result of an unfortunate event in Detroit, the city has banned documentary filmmakers from following police officers around. With that having been put into play, they couldn’t exactly show such a thing going on within “Detroit 1-8-7,” now, could they?

Fortunately, Zabel is convinced that the show can rise above this change in format.

“We have this tremendous cast, and hopefully we’re going to have great writing and great directing,” he said. “We have it so far, and we hope we’re going to keep having it. In some ways, while the documentary conceit was very interesting and compelling as a pilot, in the ongoing series in the long run, we were actually going to feel a little hampered by that and hemmed in, and it certainly was going to limit the ability that we had to sort of send characters into different directions and explore different character arcs and emotional lives and what the actors were going to be able to do. So it freed us up as storytellers, writers, directors, and actors to explore a lot more than, I think, in the long run we would have been able to do had we stuck with the conceit of the overt documentary.”

They’re now in the process of doing the re-shoots for the pilot which were necessitated by the change in format. Zabel estimates that they only needed to adjust 15% of the show, but in some cases they had to rewrite, redirect, and re-shoot an entire scene just to eliminate one little moment where somebody looked at a camera. Ugh.

Given that Michael Imperioli is in the cast, the question was posed as to whether he would be forced to hide his decidedly New York tendencies in favor of going a bit more Detroit-ian with his vocabulary. “My character was in New York before he was in Detroit,” explained Imperioli. (Hey, what luck!) “He has been on Detroit homicide for 10 years, and he spent time working as a detective in New York, and something happened there that hasn’t been really specified. I just read Episode 3, and I learned a little bit more. I learn a little bit more about this character every two weeks as the scripts come in, but something happened that is obviously dark, and it brought him to Detroit, and either he’s escaping something, or it propelled him to go, but he’s not necessarily native.”

Although he’s played both cops and criminals, Imperioli hesitated at the suggestion that there are similar motivations behind following both occupations, though he admitted that their origins may be related.

“In New York, which is the city that I know the best, and where I grew up in New York, which is very close to the Bronx, Mt. Vernon, New York, people who lived in the same neighborhood could have gone in either direction,” he said. “You know, they might have been brought up with the same traditions. And in my neighborhood it was Italian-American. And they may have had similar…you know, they went to the same schools, maybe economically they were on the same level, and socially they were on a very similar level, but because of certain influences and causes and conditions, one goes this way, one goes that. I think the motivation to be a police officer is very different than the motivation to be a criminal. I mean, what I’ve noticed, doing research into police and detectives, is that they really believe in what they do and they want to make their city a safer place to live for the citizens.”

To bring this thing full circle, I’ve got to close by mentioning the jab one of the critics made at poor James McDaniel regarding one of the previous occasions in which he played a cop. Perhaps you’re familiar with a little show called…”Cop Rock”? McDaniel grinned at the reference to the series, but it sounded like he might be getting serious for a moment when he first began to talk.

“A lot of people talk about Detroit, and they haven’t been there, yet they have a negative impression of it,” he said. “I’m from Harlem. I moved to Harlem in 1985, and people would say, ‘Oh, you live in Harlem. You know, I can’t go above 110th Street.’ They’ve never been there. Well, a lot of people talk about ‘Cop Rock’…”

That’s when we knew he was teasing us.

“They talk about ‘Cop Rock’ and they tear it apart, but a lot of them have never seen it,” said McDaniel. “It’s the Detroit of series. But i’s the little engine that could…and my heart will always be with ‘Cop Rock.'”

ABC Executive Session

Normally, the reason I write about a network’s executive session is because there’s a series of random comments and announcements about various programs within their roster, be it upcoming guest stars, special events, or even new programming for the midseason, but in the case of ABC’s executive session, all anyone really wanted to know was what Paul Lee, a.k.a. the new guy, was going to be bringing to the network. The problem was that the poor fellow had only been in his new position for all of 36 hours and simply didn’t have a great deal to offer in the way of specifics insofar as what’s coming up for his reign at the top of the network food chain.

Make no mistake, though: Lee wanted to be here.

“I was on vacation with my wife,” he began, and I shaved off the vacation beard this morning, because I’ve been, I think, about 12 years in the U.S., and I’ve done probably more than 20 TCAs, and I do have to say that I really don’t think the success of either BBC America or ABC Family would have been anything that they were without sort of the debate and the controversies and the buzz and the interest that comes out of this room. So I wanted to thank you guys all for that.

“I’m clearly very excited with this opportunity,” Lee continued. “As far as I’m concerned — and you can probably tell from my accent — at least 12 years ago I was an outsider. This is one, in my view, of the premier, iconic American storytelling brands. I grew up watching this on far-off shores, and it’s a great honor to be a part of that. So I am, as you can probably guess, super unprepared. I’ve been in the job for 36 hours. I apologize in advance if I don’t have all the answers to all the questions. I’m looking forward to rolling my sleeves up and getting those answers over the next few weeks.”

Unfortunately, he didn’t actually have any answers…and, really, why would he? But since the remainder of the panel was really just a lot of hypothetical questions followed by best-guess answers with no assurances of accuracy, there’s little point in wasting any further time here, except to wish Mr. Lee the best of luck with his new gig…because – all together now – he’s going to need it.

Mr. Sunshine

It’s a good time to be a former member of the “Friends” cast: Courtney Cox has a hit series with “Cougar Town,” Matt LeBlanc and Lisa Kudrow both have series coming to Showtime, and Jennifer Aniston…well, her movies might not be great, but you can’t say she isn’t keeping busy. If Matthew Perry’s of a mind to make a comeback, now’s certainly as good a time as any…and since he’s actually the one who came up with the idea for “Mr. Sunshine,” one would presume that he is recovered from the disappointing showing of his last series, “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” and ready to take on television once more.

“One of the things that I came away from that show and watching Aaron (Sorkin) and all those brilliant people writing it is that I thought I wanted to take maybe a shot at writing something,” said Perry. “Actually, the reason that my character is selfish and has only thought about himself is because I know somebody, you know, who that was the case for for a long time. So to take a comedic look at that, I thought, was interesting.”

As the panel progressed, Perry eventually clarified that the character was, for all practical purposes, based on the man he used to be.

“I like to say that this character is me, like, five years ago before any possible enlightenment could have come into my life,” Perry said. “But, you know, I’m very in touch with that kind of drive. You know, a selfish guy trying to have a better life and how confused a selfish person would get if he were told that the way to have a better life was to just be nicer to people and care about people. You know, that kind of person is confused when the answer is, like, ‘Be really nice to Nate, and ultimately you’ll be happier.’ I don’t know that that’s for all people. So that’s a character that I thought would be fun to explore in a sea of sort of dysfunctional people and a fun arena in which for it to take place.”

So you’re really nice these days, huh?

“Me?” asked Perry. “I’m much nicer.”

In “Mr. Sunshine,” Perry’s character runs a sports arena, a job we haven’t really seen before on television. In order to get a feel for the position, Perry spent a day with the gentleman who does the same job for the Staples center. (“I will continue to bother this guy throughout the process,” he assured us.)

“You know, what drove us to want to do a show at this place was, if you have sort of a dysfunctional family working in such a huge venue, what if we had cameras on how crazy some of these people who are, but they have to get it together every night because 18,000 people are showing up. As a kid, I was just real excited and thrilled to go to any of those places. When I was a kid, it was The Forum, and I just had this feeling of just sort of excitement, and the people work there must feel that, too. We were just trying to think of a place where kind of the most interesting, insane things can come in. So, you know, the first few that we’re talking about is…you know, there’s a Bruce Springsteen concert, but the next night, there’s a lingerie football game, and that’s actually an episode that I’m very much looking forward to shooting. Because they’re women. And they’re wearing lingerie. And they’re playing football…which gives a whole new meaning to the term ‘illegal use of the hands.'”

After a charity laugh from the crowd, a dejected Perry claimed, “I worked on that all the way here.”

I promise you, the show’s funnier than that. Or, at least, I thought it was, anyway.

Body of Proof

It seems all too easy to look at the visions of gorgeousness that are Dana Delaney and Jeri Ryan and make a joke about how they put the “body” in “Body of Proof,” and yet throughout the panel it was all I could think of. So let’s just pretend that I’ve made the joke, and that way we can just move on with our lives, okay?

Dana Delaney is coming off a pretty decent couple of years, having spent some time on Wisteria Drive as a cast member of “Desperate Housewives,” then turning in a great guest appearance on “Castle.” Frankly, it’s about time she got her own show, and from what I’ve seen of the pilot of “Body of Proof,” it seems to have the potential to succeed as a Friday night series. But, then again, I thought sure that “Women’s Murder Club” would pull an audience then, too, and that thing sank like a stone, so you might not be able to trust me on this. Either way, though, she’s excited about playing the role of Megan Hunt, a former neurosurgeon who, after being injured in an accident, becomes a coroner.

“She’s complicated, she’s smart, and she’s definitely complex,” said Delaney. “I just met and had dinner with a female neurosurgeon, and she said she watched the pilot with trepidation because nobody ever gets it right, but she was really pleased. It’s very rare for a woman, especially at my age, to become a neurosurgeon. It’s a lot of years of work, a lot of years of school, and you’re not really allowed to have a personal life, so I kind of see her as an addict that was addicted to the job, addicted to the power, addicted to all that kind of thing, and then she lost it all. She lost her husband. She lost her child, and lost her job. It’s almost like she’s now needing to redeem herself. It’s basically like the character Charon, where the River Styx and carrying the bodies over. I think she sees this now as her redemption. That that’s what she’s doing.”

As far as Kate Murphy, Jeri Ryan’s character in the series…well, actually, I wasn’t really even going to talk about her, since Dana’s really the thrust of the pilot, but why miss an opportunity to offer up a picture of Jeri Ryan, y’know? Besides, the producers talked about her character, anyway, so we might as well.

“We actually wrote the role for Jeri,” said executive producer Matthew Gross. “Originally, the character was of Indian descent. But when, you know, she came across our eye, we felt that we had to have her in the show because she does add another element to the chemistry, as you put out, and what’s interesting about the show and the dynamic between the two is that Jeri’s character, Kate, is basically going on the same track that Megan went on in terms of putting career first, about identifying herself through her job, and Megan’s going to try and impart and imbue in her the mistakes that she made in the past, and of course, she’s not going to listen.”

“At first,” added executive producer Christopher Murphey. “The pilot is so centered on Megan’s character, and the rest of the characters in the pilot seem basically there to service her, but I think it’s our obligation in telling our stories that are multilayered and complicated that we open up the universe in which Megan is the center of. Peter (Dunlop, played by Nicholas Bishop) is her right-hand man medical investigator. Kate is her titular boss, but they will all be part of Megan’s journey, and they will have journeys of their own as well. I think the idea is to have a rich, fully sort of fleshed-out world and the characters that lived in it.”

My Generation

When I first watched the trailer for this series, which takes a faux documentary format as it takes a look at a high school class ten years after its graduation to see where the students are today, my first reaction was to lean over to one of my fellow critics and say, “The only way I want to watch a show about this bunch of twentysomethings is if it involves them getting picked off one by one.” Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen…although it looks like at least one of them bites it, so, y’know, you take your solace where you can find it.

“My Generation” comes to us from Noah Hawley, whose previous series, “The Unusuals,” I liked better than this one…although, yes, I know, it’s a little early to start throwing stones at a show when its pilot technically still isn’t even intended for review purposes yet. Fair enough: I’ll put a moratorium on making any further comments and just let Hawley tell us the origins of his new series.

“The show was born in Sweden, as all great shows are,” explained Hawley. “There was a half-hour program in Sweden called ‘On God’s Highway,’ which Warren Littlefield found and brought to ABC, and they brought it to me. It was a half-hour. It was more of a mockumentary, basically following these three guys in high school and then coming back, in their case, 15 years later and just seeing what that gap was. It was a really funny show, but there was also a poignancy to it because of the time gap and what they thought they would be when they grew up and sort of how they turned out, and it seemed like a really fascinating premise to me, the ‘Seven Up!’ series premise with a lot of inherent drama in it, but also comedy as well.

“In terms of why you would make it an hour,” Hawley continued, “what justified turning it into a drama instead of just a comedy, there were two things in the coming up with the American version of it. One was that we would use the documentary format in a different way. Instead of making it a classic mockumentary, which is basically just some verité-style filmmaking with some interviews, we would make an investigative documentary. We would use a lot of the tools of great documentaries, ‘Capturing the Friedmans’ to be one of them, where you really are investigating who these people were and what their journeys are, sometimes pushing these characters further than they want to go. There’s a feeling that you’re invading their privacy a little bit and that, as a viewer, you’re seeing stuff that they don’t necessarily want you to see. And then the other element of it was in shortening the time frame between the year 2000 and the present day and making it 10 years, we sort of looked at the sea change that had occurred around the world in the last 10 years. And that seemed like really fertile ground as well to tell stories not just about these characters’ personal lives, but putting it in the context of the larger world around them.”

Additionally, the documentary style gives Hawley the flexibility to move around chronologically with a little bit more freedom as the series progresses.

“Hopefully you’ll see the show for a few years,” he said. “We had to decide, in going forward in the series, what the present is versus the past because the past is that this documentary film crew shot for a year in the year 2000 and followed the senior class of the high school. Now coming back 10 years later, we’re saying that the first season takes place over three months, basically from April 2010 to June 2010. And what this allows us to do is not only contextualize the past in terms of real-world events, but also to tie the episodes in the present to sort of real days, you know, and to real events so that we can tie it in. This also allows us, at the end of the first season going forward to the next season, to jump ahead a year.

“Let’s say that we hypothetically with two characters who are going to be getting a divorce at the end of Season 1,” said Hawley. “But then you could come back in Season 2, it’s a year later, and maybe they have a child. And you’re like, ‘Well, what happened?’ Because this show is kind of based on the idea of character mysteries. How did the overachiever in high school turn into the surf bum 10 years later? And how did the woman who was going to go off to Hollywood and be famous end up as sort of the real housewife of Austin, Texas? By jumping ahead a year, you know, we’re able to sort of refill that well. What it also allows us to do is hopefully, by Season 3, we don’t really have to tell high school stories anymore because where the past is kind of moving forward. So really in a ‘Seven Up!’ kind of way, we’re watching these characters grow up.”

In truth, I do like the idea of this show. It may just be a generational thing, where I’m looking at these twentysomethings with the eye of a 39-year-old, thinking, “These kids are going to be complaining about how bad they’ve got it, and they have no freaking idea how much worse it may yet get for them.” Hopefully, the show will rise above that, though. We’ll just have to wait and see.

No Ordinary Family

Now this is what I’m talking about! Yeah, I know, selling me on a superhero show is like shooting fish in a barrel, but I watched the pilot, and I just thought it was loads of fun. There’s no attempt to set a dark tone, a la “Heroes.” Instead, it offers a look at how a real family might deal with suddenly finding themselves in possession of superhuman abilities. Yes, there’s a slight resemblance to “Heroes” just by virtue of its subject matter, but there’s arguably even more similarity to “The Incredibles,” which might be why creator Greg Berlanti views “No Ordinary Family” as being – shocker! – a family show. At the very least, he’s not afraid to acknowledge that it might hold echoes of other existing properties.

“I’m not sure I would say it’s a total original as much as it’s kind of, in some ways, a fun throwback to some of the action adventure series that I used to love and watch as a kid, blended with, hopefully, a great family show,” said Berlanti. “I think as audiences get more and more sophisticated, you look for ways to sort of blend genres, so with this, we tried to sort of blend all the fun of a show, a big action show, with a real fun, intimate family show and see what happens. I think that distinction is not something that everybody can find everywhere else on the dial. I think, in addition to that, there’s a real broad appeal. There’s something for everyone, you know, different ages. These days more and more it seems like shows are structured towards this niche or that niche, the show’s for men or the show’s for women above 30. And it seems like with this, we wanted to make something that the whole family could watch together…and, unfortunately, those shows, I think, are fewer and fewer.”

Star Michael Chiklis, however, prefers to make a musical analogy. “Everything comes from somewhere, from some influence, and if you look at any great musician, they have influences throughout their lives growing up,” he said. “They listen to all these different musicians, and they take and they borrow from all of them, and that sort of amalgam of different influences manifests itself in them being an individual artist. That’s the way I kind of feel about this show. It borrows from a lot of different things that we’ve loved, and because it’s an amalgam of all those things, it ends up being something completely unique and different.”

Chiklis’s co-star, Romany Malco, earned some serious bonus points from me when it was his turn to chime in on the situation, successfully convincing me that his guy may be almost as big a TV geek as I am!

“I grew up watching ‘Man From Atlantis’ and ‘Greatest American Hero’ and, you know, ‘The Fall Guy’ and ‘Superman’ and ‘Batman,’ but they all seem to have gone away,” said Malco. “As Greg mentioned, the times have changed. The audiences have become a lot more sophisticated. One of the things that I think is really interesting about this particular show is you actually see these superpowers being used rather than necessarily to save the world, but to save a family. Also, I notice in Michael’s character, particularly, this newly found independence, this sense of purpose, and it’s interesting seeing like a regular human being going through the process of identifying what his purpose on the planet is gonna be, and then Jimmy’s character and the way he keeps his superpowers a secret to basically make a mockery of the teachers. So it’s, like, comedic, but it’s very heartfelt and inspiring. It’s just like a really nice balance for what I consider to be more sophisticated audience.”

“I really don’t think of this show as a sci-fi show,” said Chiklis. “‘The Fantastic Four’ is a superhero movie. It’s sci-fi 100 percent. Yes, there’s that element of the superhero thing, but what we’re trying to do is meld different genres together and make a new thing. And this is really at its core — I can’t emphasize this enough — a family show. It’s a family drama about a family that’s somewhat dysfunctional and is trying to work through all manner of different problems that all families face in this day and age. The superhero element or the super-power element, rather, really just creates such a broad palette for us to paint on and have fun with and be that much more entertaining, so this has great appeal to people who might not be interested at all in sci-fi. Some people’s heads turn off when you say sci-fi. They just go, ‘Oh, that’s not for me.’ I submit that people who aren’t really particularly interested in sci-fi would be interested in this show because it’s innately relatable on a familial level. Yet, people who are into sci-fi will be into the show too, because it has that element. So again, like a musician who borrows from all these different great musicians, their own style comes out of it, and this is something entirely new.”

“In the writers’ room, when we come in, it’s always, ‘What do we want to say with these characters this week?’” said Berlanti. “And that’s the same rule that it’s sort of been in any of the character shows I’ve ever worked on. If we’re fortunate enough to go many, many years, it would all lead up to…the end of the show would be the comic book. You know, the end of the show would be how the family finally all got together and did whatever they did in the sci-fi world. But to me, there’s a billion stories to tell before that moment.”

“One last little caveat,” said Chiklis. “This isn’t ‘Heroes.’ It isn’t ‘The Incredibles.’ This is ‘No Ordinary Family.’”

Hey, I’m in.

The Whole Truth

Maura Tierney could not have looked or sounded less thrilled to be part of the panel for “The Whole Truth,” and it made me very, very sad. She’s one of my favorite actresses, but, man, you would’ve thought that the proceedings were to be followed by the arrival of a firing squad. I’m sure it was predominantly because she was dreading the idea of having to answer a steady stream of questions about her cancer, which – hallelujah! – is now in remission, but even so, she was starting to drag me down with her lack of enthusiasm.

Prior to her diagnosis, Tierney was originally set to take on the role on “Parenthood” that ultimately went to Lauren Graham. In the case of “The Whole Truth,” however, the role was originally written for her by series creator Tom Donaghy, given to someone else because they didn’t think she was available, but, due to the ever-changing circumstances of Hollywood, ended up back in her lap after all.

“I wasn’t really thinking about doing another show,” Tierney admitted. “But I really responded to the character that Tom wrote, I guess, because (he) wrote it for me. My ego’s not involved there at all. But I thought it was a really, really appealing character, it’s funny, and I thought it was interesting to find a character that had such sort of a great sense of humor, yet was so driven.”

When asked if her health scare had affected her perspective on the importance her work in any way, Tierney hesitated for a moment at the immensity of the question, then said, “I probably have a new perspective on everything, in general. It’s a really wonderful feeling to know that people are caring about something that you do, that I’ve been doing for 20 years. I think it’s a blanket statement that my perspective has, and probably should change more than it has, quite honestly, but as far as work goes, well, yeah, partially. You know, Tom and I are friends, like actual real friends, not Hollywood friends. We went to college together. We’ve known each other for over 20 years, and it’s a priority for me now to be able to work with people who I really like and trust. So that will be a factor because I feel like, yeah, it’s too much time involved of your life to not enjoy it. So I guess that’s somewhat adjusted.”

Better With You

Although I must admit that “Better With You,” with its heavy-handed laugh track and often groan-worthy punchlines, is probably my least favorite of ABC’s sitcom offerings this season, there are still a couple of pretty decent reasons to give it a shot, the first being JoAnna Garcia, who’s as super-cute as ever and, at one point, delivers a line so perfectly that I had to hit the “rewind” button so that I could hear her deliver it again. What I didn’t expect, however, was that the premise of the show – a young couple gets engaged after dating for only two months, which causes her sister and her parents to reevaluate their own relationships – would result in a moment in the panel that was arguably funnier than anything in the pilot.

The question was addressed to Garcia and her co-star, Jennifer Finnigan, and it started out like this:

“How would you react in real life if someone had that quick of a marriage proposal in two months? Jennifer, you were engaged for a couple years, I think, before you were married. And, JoAnna, you’ve been engaged a couple times…”

As the laughter started, Garcia held up her hand. “I just want you to know,” she began, “that is going to go down in record books. I might tell the story on the talk show at some point, so we’re going to need to talk later, and I’m going to need a little bit more about you so we can make this whole thing work.”

Then, as she attempted to answer the question seriously, she started to stumble. “I got engaged after…well, my current engagement that I’m actually going to follow through with…” She stopped. “This is an absolute nightmare. I just want you guys to know that I have started to sweat.”

Eventually, Garcia confirmed that she and her fiancee got engaged after dating for 10 months…but later in the panel, she admitted, “I’m still sweating.”

Secret Millionaire

Hey, look: it’s another heart-warming reality series that I’ll probably never watch! This one, however, didn’t originate on ABC. You may remember “Secret Millionaire” from when it made its debut back in 2008 as part of Fox’s lineup. Now it’s moved over to ABC for its second season, and…what a surprise…it’s supposed to be even better now than it was then!

“The FOX show was successful when it aired and won four of its time slots,” said Natalka Znak, executive producer. “As producers, we’re delighted, though, that it’s now on ABC because it feels like a totally natural home for it. It’s also been produced in the U.K. for a number of series, and I have to say I love the U.K. show, I thought the FOX show was good, but I think this show is amazing, and it’s impossible not to watch it without getting to the end and, you know, feeling like you need to go and do something, feeling that, you know, something extraordinary has happened while you’ve watched the show. It’s an incredible show. It really is.”

James Malinchak, one of the show’s millionaire participants, admitted to skepticism when first pitched the idea of doing the show. “I’ve dedicated my life to helping to serve people and uplift people,” he said, “and I was nervous about folks on the show being hurt in some way. And when (the producers) and I were talking at my house, I could just see it in their eyes that they really wanted to do something good and try to bring a positive awareness to America and put more hope back into not just folks on the show and into us, but into America as a whole. Leslie really wanted us to have a life-transformational moment. I think when we’re successful in a certain aspect, I think we start to drink our own Kool-Aid, and we seem to forget some tough times that maybe we had. And for me personally, it was one of the greatest experiences I ever went through. And I went on the show, thinking I was going to be some guy writing some checks to some deserving people, and by, like, the second day, I mean, I didn’t really worry about my business. I didn’t care about any of it. And I met some of the most amazing human beings I’ve ever met in my life. And it just…it brought me back down to earth, let’s put it that way, and put my feet back on the ground. So I’m very grateful that I had this opportunity, because it changed me more than I think I changed them with the money.”

Tony Branch, one of the recipients of the money, was completely dumbfounded when he learned the true identity of his new friend James. “When you watch television and you hear things like this or read it in the newspaper, it’s always happening to someone else in someone else’s state or country or city,” said Branch. “When Mr. Malinchak told me, I literally looked him in the eye and said, ‘No, you’re not. Me and you was just sweeping floors and passing out basketballs. What are you talking about?’ Then I realized, looking at Leslie and a couple of the camera crew, and there was tears coming out of their face; and at that point in time, I was out on my feet. I’ve been knocked out before, but now I know what it feels like. The only thing I heard was ‘Waa-waa waa-waa-waa.’”

Another one of the millionaires, Gary Heavin, made a very interesting comment about how much can be accomplished by tackling poverty and financial woes on the grassroots level and by having good people just help out other good people

“Going out into the community and hands-on and being immersed in that poverty, we saw good being done in extraordinary ways by amazing people, I’m an entrepreneur. Diane and I are the founders of Curves, the women’s fitness franchise. So we know what it takes to care for people. The solutions that we have in our country, they’re going to come from good people like these guys who get up every day and give it their all…and it restored our faith in humanity, to tell you the truth.”

Happy Endings

I’ve been writing up today’s panels for so long that I’m no longer sure exactly when I started, so I’m glad that ABC ordered their day so that I’d know I’d reached the conclusion of their coverage. Sure, it’s kind on the nose for the network to have ended the day with a show called “Happy Endings,” but at least it’s funny…which was a pleasant surprise, actually. I have to say that I wasn’t entirely sure about a sitcom starring Elisha Cuthbert, given that “The Girl Next Door” did far more to show off her assets than it did her gifts as a comedienne, but given that the ensemble includes Eliza Coupe (late of “Scrubs”), Casey Wilson (“Saturday Night Live”), and Damon Wayans, Jr. (who’s very much his father’s son) and is produced by Jonathan Groff (“Andy Barker, P.I.”), it’s easy to give it a little bit of room to grow.

Plus, for what it’s worth, Cuthbert is willing to admit that she herself has room to grow.

“I wish I could say this is what I was looking for and it came about and it was all perfect,” she said. “I just knew that if I was going to come back to TV, I really wanted to be a part of something that I felt passionate about and that I was excited to go to work to do every day. And at that time, this script came, and I read it, and I just felt like it would be different. It was a little daunting, but I kind of got excited about that, and these guys have been helping me, and I’ve just been really excited about it all. When it came my way, I went, “Wow, this actually might be the right next step.’ This is so great because we all get to bounce off one another and find the relationships between one another. We’re all so different, but it’s been really comfortable. I mean, it’s been just a lot of fun. Honestly, sometimes we have too much fun. We have to zone it in and go, ‘Wait, we have a scene to shoot!'”

The premise of the show involves Alex (Cuthbert) abandoning Dave (Zachary Knighton, late of “FlashForward”) at the altar, an event which seriously throws a wrench into a group of friends who, at their own admission, haven’t met any new friends in more than a decade. When the question was raised as to whether “Happy Endings” would follow a plot arc or stick to more of a traditional sitcom format, Groff seemed indicated that they’d try to do a bit of both.

“I think we dealt ourselves a pretty hefty hand at the end of the pilot, which is this huge seismic issue which is going to affect this group of friends,” said Groff. “So we want to respect that and explore that as far as it’s really interesting. On the other hand, you do want to be able to have every episode stand alone, and the reality that sometimes they’ll want to change the air order for various reasons or people will just watch things out of order these days…you want to make sure everything is not completely reliant on what came before it. So it’s sort of an in-between answer, honestly.

“Dave and Alex have a lot to work on and a lot to deal with to really live up to the promise of the pilot, which is that we’re going to try to not break up this group because of what happened to us, so we’re going to sort of back up and dig in deeper and see how they actually manage to do that. And then we’re also just going to do lots of stories that maybe deal with the impact of some of this. Alex might need a new roommate. That’s Elisha’s character. Or are Jane (Coupe) and Brad (Wayans) going to move to the suburbs? What’s it like for Dave and Max to live together? But a lot of it is just also telling stories about friends in their late 20s and what that’s like and when a couple of them are married, a few of them have different career trajectories, and sister relationships and all that stuff.

“I think the main thing we’re going for, to some extent, is a funny reality where people talk to each other,” Groff explained. “It’s not a lot of hugging and telling each other that they love each other. It’s people who deal with issues, and when somebody bugs them, they deflect it through humor or sarcasm or whatever. So there will be a lot of that, I think, where the characters are just interacting with each other in a way where they have their shorthand that will be entertaining to watch as they kind of go through their lives.”

After that, it was back to the hotel to get ready for the TCA Awards, an evening which always proves to be one of the most enjoyable evenings of the tour. It’s the opportunity for the members of the organization to pay tribute to our favorite programs and performances of the previous year, and it’s also a chance for us to interact with the individuals responsible, but we do so with our tape recorders put away for the evening. There’s no red carpet. There’s no video document of the proceedings. It’s just us, the stars, and the night…or does that sound too pretentious? Yeah, it probably does, especially when you’re talking about a night that’s hosted by Dax Shepherd.

Given that the first two TCA Awards ceremonies that I attended were hosted by John Oliver (“The Daily Show”) and the Smothers Brothers, respectively, you’d think that Dax Shepherd would feel like a step down…but then you factor in how awful Chelsea Handler was as last year’s host, and darned if Dax doesn’t seem like a decent choice. Indeed, he proved to be extremely funny, much funnier than I think a lot of us were expecting him to be. He kicked things off by pretending he was addressing a group of HerbalLife salespeople, claimed that he was only hosting because Dog the Bounty Hunter dropped out, then acknowledged he was a little hurt by the fact that just about every review of “Parenthood” that mentioned his performance invariably began with some semblance of the phrase, “You’re never going to believe this, but he’s actually pretty good.” There was also a funny story about how he’s a god at CostCo, thanks to having co-starred in “Employee of the Month” with Dane Cook, and he did a spot-on impression of Owen Wilson calling his brother Luke and mocking him for his telephone commercials. Really, the only disappointing thing about Dax’s appearance was that I didn’t realize he’d brought his fiancee, Kristen Bell, until after she’d already gone. DAMN!

From there, we entered the awards portion of the evening.

PROGRAM OF THE YEAR: “Glee” (FOX)
OUTSTANDING NEW PROGRAM: “Glee” (FOX).
INDIVIDUAL ACHIEVEMENT IN COMEDY: Jane Lynch, “Glee” (FOX).

Alas, Jane Lynch was suffering from laryngitis and was unable to attend, but Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan accepted the award in her stead, offering as solace a list of four things we’ll hear Sue Sylvester say in Season 2.

4. “A female football coach is like a male nurse, Will: it’s a sin against nature.”
3. “I secretly hope you’re in the middle of a midlife crisis, William, as that means you’re halfway to an early death, affording me a blissful demented convalescence spent peeing on your grave.”
2. “Don’t go soft on me, Will. I realize you’re mourning the loss of that bony little redhead you’re in love with, and I understand. It’s not just a loss for you. As she appears to be the link between early hominids and man, it’s also a loss for science.”
1. “Should’ve taken the poop cookies, Will.”

OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN COMEDY: “Modern Family” (ABC).

Steve Levitan accepted his award by admitting that he’d written his speech last week and hadn’t had a chance to rewrite it. That would explain the reference to Steve McPherson.

OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN DRAMA: TIE – “Lost” (ABC) and “Breaking Bad” (AMC).

Vince Gilligan, God bless him, gave a heartfelt speech wherein he thanked us for all of our praise. Damon Lindelof, however, took a slightly different tactic, offering up some of his favorite Tweets that he received in the wake of the final episode of “Lost.”

* “My very first tweet! I started this account just to let you know how disappointed I am in you!”

* “Has anyone accused you of being an emotional terrorist yet? And research these words: closure and actual explanations.”

* “Hey, douche! Instead of backpacking in Europe or whatever the fuck you’re doing, how about you just give me six years of my life back?”

* “Please don’t ruin Star Trek by ending it in Klingon purgatory.”

* “‘You’re a dirty liar. You never knew, you made it all up, you betrayed us all. You betrayed me and I hope you rot, motherfucker.’ And that was from Mr. J.J. Abrams!”

INDIVIDUAL ACHIEVEMENT IN DRAMA: Julianna Margulies, “The Good Wife” (CBS)

Margulies wasn’t able to attend, due to filming commitments, but she did send a video thank-you, though it received a lot of probably unintended laughs when it ended with her cutting her eyes to the side, which looked for all the world as if she was about to say, “Are we done with this fucking thing now?” But she probably wasn’t.

OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN NEWS & INFORMATION: “Life” (Discovery)

OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN YOUTH PROGRAMMING: “Yo Gabba Gabba” (NICK JR.)

Best. Acceptance. EVER.

OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN MOVIES, MINISERIES & SPECIALS: “The Pacific” (HBO)

Executive producer Tom Hanks took the stage, acknowledged the strange creatures who’d taken the stage immediately before him, and declared, “This is the last fucking time I’m dressing up for you people.” (This was his fifth appearance at the TCA Awards.)

HERITAGE AWARD: “M*A*S*H*” (CBS)

Producers Burt Metcalfe and Gene Reynolds were in attendance, as were Mike Farrell (B.J. Hunnicutt) and William Christopher (Father Mulcahy).

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT: James Garner

Sadly, no Jim Garner…but we were assured that, as grateful as he was for the award, he didn’t necessarily believe that he deserved it, anyway.

Before I headed back upstairs to the ballroom to get ready for the first proper panel of the day, I waited around for a few minutes in hopes of chatting with Sendhil Ramamurthy and Anne Dudek, but after loitering for 10+ minutes as they talked with someone from TV Guide, I could see no signs of their conversation abating. I finally gave up and decided that I’d just try to grab them at the NBC party that evening…which, FYI, I successfully ended up doing.

The Event

When I watched the pilot for “The Event,” a new sci-fi / action series that will immediately remind viewers of “Lost,” “Fringe,” and possibly even “24,” I was instantly captivated and loved every minute of it. Even as I watched it, though, I knew that my wife would be far less thrilled, owing to the fact that there is a tendency for the proceedings to bounce back and forth in time…and she hates that. Clearly, she’s not the only one, since the topic was addressed almost immediately during the show’s panel, but the show’s executive producers – Nick Wauters, Steve Stark, Evan Katz, and Jeffrey Reiner – reassured us as much as possible.

“It’s definitely something that we’re going to keep using, at least in the near future, as long as it serves character and story,” said Wauters. “But you may not see as much of it as we go along.”

“Also, I think if you look at the pilot, the pilot was about 50 percent flashbacks, believe it or not,” said Stark. “A little over that, actually. That’s not going to be the idea moving forward. In episode 4, there’s a whole series of just getting to know Sean and Leila from a character standpoint, but it’s just that.”

“Time will move forward from episode 2 on,” said Katz. “It will be a more linear approach, and there will be flashbacks, but the story will continue to thrust forward.”

I don’t know if that’ll make my wife feel a heck of a lot better, but it’s something, anyway. It also serves as a reminder that, although “The Event” has a tremendous cast, one which includes Zeljko Ivanek, Laura Innes, Jason Ritter, Sarah Roemer, Scott Patterson, and Blair Underwood (as the President of the United States), as a serialized drama, it’s the producers who hold the answers to all of the truly important questions. Heck, the actors don’t really know anything…and they’re not afraid to admit it!

“Before we each shot the pilot, we each got these character dossiers that explained to us who we were so that we weren’t just blindly going into it and not knowing anything, so that’s what we knew when we first started,” said Ritter. “Now, as the episodes come out, we learn more about who they are. But generally we don’t know a whole heck of a lot!

This begs another question for the producers, then: how quickly will viewers start to get answers to the questions that are posed in the pilot?

“I’ve been a big fan of ’24’ and ‘Lost’ and ‘Battlestar (Galactica),’ all those shows for years and since I was a kid, so that definitely influenced my writing and I’m very conscious of that, which is why we’re going to try and reveal as many answers as we can as we go and then set up new mysteries,” said Wauters. “So in a way, you will have more immediate answers to your questions, but you still have to kind of go on faith that we know what we’re doing. I came in with this bible, and all the characters were really developed from the beginning, even though that’s not really shown in the pilot because the pilot had so many characters and so many things going on. The pilot is kind of an invitation to the series, really. It’s an appetizer. I think as a viewer myself and a fan of ‘Lost,’ I think I’d ask for people’s trust.”

“We’re not waiting till episode 4 to find out more about these people,” confirmed Katz. “The pilot is very unique and very fragmented and really, really good at keeping things moving forward. I mean, it’s terrific, but, yes, you don’t know a terrible amount about these people. Starting in episode 2, episode 3, episode 4, you will not only find out about their backstories and more about, literally, their biography, but in how they react to the dilemmas, you will learn who they are as well. I think it’s about what you emotionally connect with. I think the pilot is emotionally affecting. I think you connect with the people. People, I think, connect to their dilemmas, and frankly, it’s whether or not you’re posing questions that you want to come back next week to see answered. And, you know, right now the show is really designed with a lot of cliffhangers at the end of episodes and a lot of, you know, what I call ‘holy-crap’ moments…although I use a different word.”

“Before NBC bought the pilot, I think the bible that we developed was longer than the script,” said Stark. “They were very clear where we’re going. So we have sort of tent-pole benchmarks we’re going to hit as the series progresses into even season 3. The dance of intrigue and satisfaction is what we’re going to be doing all the time, but ultimately we have these sort of benchmarks plotted out.”

“We would hope that the pilot elicits some trust,” said Reiner, reiterating Wauters’ point. “We would hope that it’s a good enough hook. That’s what we all set out to do. You know, in television sometimes the pilot is the hook, you know, because you’re 22 episodes. So I would hope that the pilot has served that purpose.”

“In my opinion,” said Katz, “the pilot speaks for itself.”

As far as I’m concerned, it does. I’m not yet willing to go out on a limb and declare that it’s my favorite pilot of the new season, just because we haven’t gotten final versions of all of the series yet, but I will say that it’s the one that I find most intriguing. When it premieres, I’ll be there…and I’ll definitely be sticking around to see what happens.

Undercovers

You’ve probably already read my comments about how disappointed I was by the “Undercovers” set visit on the first day of the TCA tour, since none of the cast members were in attendance. That wasn’t a problem with the panel for the show, thankfully, although I couldn’t help but notice that series co-creator J.J. Abrams was once again MIA…though given that I don’t get a whole lot of the Abrams feel from the pilot beyond the premise (a husband and wife who have been retired from the spy game for half a decade are asked to return to their former profession), maybe that’s not a coincidence.

One element of “Undercovers” that stands out – even though, obviously, it shouldn’t – is the fact that its lead actors, Boris Kodjoe and Gugu Mbatha-Raw, are both African-American. According to executive producer and co-creator Josh Reims, it’s a development that came about organically during the casting process.

“When J.J. and I wrote the script originally, we decided we wanted to write it like ‘The Philadelphia Story,'” said Reims. “You know, Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn? But they’re dead, so we didn’t hire them. So when we finished the script and went into the casting process, we started out by saying, ‘Let’s just see every possible incarnation of a person. We don’t want to see the same people we’ve seen on TV 10 million times because it will look like many other shows that are on TV, which are perfectly good, but we want it to look different.’ And so we saw a bunch of people. And when Boris and Gugu came in, which was much later in the process, we sort of knew immediately, like, ‘OK, these are them.’ We didn’t go out of our way to say, you know, we’re hiring two black people to be the leads of the show, but we certainly did not ignore the fact that it would be great if we could do that and if we found actors who were great enough. And luckily, we found one of them in Gugu, and then we hired Boris, too.”

A fair enough answer, perhaps, but it was one which was accused of being somewhat disingenuous, resulting in a follow-up question wherein Reims was asked what he thinks the decision to cast two African-American actors means.

“We don’t consider that we’re revolutionizing TV, but at the same time, we do realize it is a big deal,” said Reims. “Yes, we all wish it wasn’t such a big deal at this point in time that there are two black characters who are the leads on a major TV show on a major network, but unfortunately that’s the way it is right now. And, you know, even since the casting of this show was announced, we’ve seen other shows have cast black leads that maybe, who knows, wouldn’t have happened. So if we can do that and other people realize, you know, ‘Oh, look, this is working well,’ then that’s great. But our plan was not, like, ‘Let’s, you know, revolutionize all the history of TV and cast black actors.’ It’s, ‘OK, if we can cast black actors who are great, it will be great.’ And it worked out. We’re already writing episode 7 or something, and they’re already shooting episode 4. It’s much more important now that we’re just trying to figure out who the characters are than worrying about how we cast at this point.”

Kodjoe agreed with Reims but also wanted to offer his two cents worth. “I think it’s important to recognize the fact that it is somewhat…I don’t know if you want to call it revolutionary, but it’s not the norm,” he said. “Although it should be the norm, because that’s what the world looks like. The world is diverse, and we come in all kinds of different shapes, sizes, and shades, but as you mentioned correctly, traditionally in TV it hasn’t been the case, and therefore it needs to be commented on. So I want to make a point that it is important that we get a chance to, I don’t know, be trailblazers or door openers or whatever you want to call it. On the other hand, let’s keep in mind or let’s inspire people to regard it as normal, so that more and more people don’t consider it taking a chance but just being creative. And at the end of the day, that’s what we all try to be. Even though it’s a corporate industry and even though it’s show business, to have that freedom is something that we aspire to. So Josh and J.J. have, I think, led the way, and hopefully the world will open up to it.”

As far as what we can expect from the series itself…since, really, isn’t that more important?…Reims said that we can expect the proceedings to be far easier to follow that Abrams’ previous spy series, with episodes that are more self-contained.

“The idea is, certainly, that every week you will have a case come to a conclusion,” said Reims. “That’s happening no matter what. As far as over-reaching stuff, you know, they are married, they do have their own business, there will be certain secrets that will be coming out that will be hinted at, so there will be some stuff that is carried throughout the season. Some of it will not be revealed until much later. Some of it will be revealed earlier. The great thing about the concept of the relationship is that they didn’t tell each other anything about their pasts. So they can find out stuff about each other the same way the audience can find out stuff about them because they don’t know anything from the past five years, you know, before that. So we will be laying certain things in there that will then play out, but there is no big, over-riding arc, though there will certainly be twinges here and there of stuff.”

Executive Session

The last time we saw Jeff Gaspin, Chairman of NBC Universal Television Entertainment, and Angela Bromstad, NBC’s President of Prime-Time Entertainment, it was in the midst of the great “Tonight Show” wars, so you can imagine that the duo were breathing a little easier this time around, if only because there wasn’t such a pressing agenda on the table. They still had plenty of new information to impart, however, and here are the highlights:

* There will be plenty of special premieres this season. First, “Parenthood” will be returning on Sept. 14, placed behind the next-to-last episode of “America’s Got Talent” in order to give it the greatest possible chance for strong ratings; similarly, after the “America’s Got Talent” season finale on the 21st, “Outlaw” will get a sneak-preview airing. Then, on the 23rd, “The Apprentice” – now with 100% less celebrities! – will have a two-hour premiere from 9:00 – 10:00 PM before settling into its regular 10 PM timeslot. Lastly, “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” will also kick off on Sept. 22 with a two-hour premiere, s 9 PM slot the following week.

* “30 Rock” will be doing a live episode on Oct. 14, not from their usual set but, rather, from the famed Studio 8H, home to “Saturday Night Live.”

* “Law & Order: Los Angeles” has added Terrence Howard and Alfred Molina to the cast as district attorneys. Molina’s character is Deputy District Attorney Morales, the name of Howard’s character has yet to be revealed, but the actors will be alternating episodes.

* Rob Lowe’s status on “Parks and Recreation” – he plays state auditor Chris Traeger – has been upped from guest star to series regular. Series co-creator / executive producer Mike Schur said in a statement, “I am beyond thrilled that Rob will be joining the cast for more episodes. I have truly come to value his fashion sense, grooming habits, and workout tips. Also, he is hilarious and adds a wonderful dimension to the cast. But, really, it’s the workout tips.”

* On the guest-star front, Drew Carey will be appearing on “Community,” Kathy Bates is returning to “The Office,” and “Law & Order: SVU” is providing roles to Henry Ian Cusick, Joan Cusack, and Maria Bello,

* Speaking of “The Office,” Bromstadt said of Steve Carell’s impending departure that “Greg Daniels and Paul Lieberstein do have a plan in terms of who’s going to replace Michael, and so there will be a lot of storylines leading up to that, and there will be some mystery as to who that will be.”

* When asked about the differences between “Heroes” and NBC’s upcoming midseason superhero series, “The Cape,” Bromstad was predictably diplomatic on the subject of the lessons she may have learned from the network’s experience with the former. “I think that ‘Heroes’ was a great show, we had four tremendous years with that, and it was a very good business for us,” she said. “So if we could replicate that, we absolutely would. ‘Heroes’ was so much about the discovery of their powers. This is really more of a procedural, and this character in ‘The Cape’ doesn’t have super powers. He’s trained in a way that he just is able to manipulate things, but he doesn’t actually have super powers the way that the ‘Heroes’ characters did.”

* Other midseason series include “Love Bites,” “Harry’s Law” (the David Kelley series starring Kathy Bates), “The Paul Reiser Show,” “Perfect Couples,” and “Friends with Benefits.”

* Peter Berg and his production team will be taking on the long-promised adaptation of the BBC series, “Prime Suspect.” It’s being written by Alex Cunningham, late of “Desperate Housewives” and “NYPD Blue.” According to Bromstad, there’s a story outline which is planned as a two-hour pilot, and having heard that outline, the network is very excited about it.

Law & Order: Los Angeles

Although Dick Wolf began his appearance at the TCA Press Tour by saying, “We are here today to talk about the future, and basically the past is the past,” no one has ever accused TV critics of being able to take a hint, which is why the very first question unabashedly went against his explicit statement:

Can you confirm that “Law & Order,” the mothership, is dead?

Even though I think most of us were resigned to its demise, you could nonetheless hear a slight rumbling in the crowd as Wolf replied, “I can confirm that it has moved into the history books.” Damn. I’d really been hoping that someone might save the day.

Oh, well, at least we won’t be completely without “Law & Order” series. In fact, technically, we’ll still have the same number. Since nature abhors a vacuum, in addition to “SVU” and “Criminal Intent,” we’ll now have “Law & Order: Los Angeles,” starring Skeet Ulrich, a man who, by his own admission, has seen almost no episodes of any entry in the “Law & Order” franchise. (The only exceptions, apparently, were a few episodes of “Criminal Intent,” and only then because it stars his friend Vincent D’Onofrio.)

“Basically,” said Ulrich, “we had a meeting, we talked about what the show was going to be, and fortunately Dick
felt like I fit into that mold. I’m just grateful to be here.”

Ulrich admitted that, having only read one script thus far, he couldn’t really offer up too much about his character, but he gave us as much as he could. “He’s a second-generation LAPD,” said Ulrich. “I imagine there’s a lot to come, obviously, in terms of the character development, but he’s sort of a brass-tacks kind of guy. I mean, he’s to the point. I think one of the descriptions given is whereas it takes (Corey Stoll) many, many words to say something, I can sum it up rather quickly. So he’s pretty much an all-business kind of guy in terms of what he sees in his time at work.”

Stoll knows even less about his character, but, like Ulrich, he did the best he could to tell us about him. “I think our characters really play off each other in a great way,” he said. “I’m a second-generation American, and my father was a DP, and so I come from the entertainment industry. And there’s just sort of a skepticism and a street smartness within the entertainment industry that I think I bring.”

“I’ve never played a cop,” admitted Ulrich, “and as I’ve started to delve into this lifestyle — I have friends who are on LAPD and are on the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department and stuff – and it’s fascinating. I can tell you, living here, I’m extremely grateful for these guys, having gone on a homicide scene recently and seeing what they do. And we are very fortunate to have the police department we have here. And I hope to live up to what it is they do on a daily basis because it is honorable to the nth degree.”

Rene Balcer balked at the suggestion that Los Angeles, in addition to having been done to death on cop shows over the years, simply isn’t nearly as interesting a setting as New York. “As far as divide between rich and poor, I don’t think you get any more dramatic a divide between East L.A. and West L.A.,” said Balcer. “The essential difference between New York and L.A. is New York is a big stew of people. It really is the melting pot. And it’s also been the site of innumerable TV shows, like ‘The Naked City.’ So I could argue that New York has been mined as much as L.A. has. L.A. is a mosaic of communities, and I think that’s going to be part of the fun of these shows is each episode can focus on a separate community, a separate piece of that mosaic. And though New York has Central Park, we have the beach, which is the great equalizer. It’s where everybody goes to. We even have an episode about surfers and the beach and how that played a part in the mythos of Los Angeles. So I think there’s all kinds of territory that has not been mined by a lot of shows. We have an episode on an oil rig, for example. So, you know, a lot of things, we can do here that have not been done by other shows.”

“One other thing to put to that is that, overall, the shows that have been in L.A., most of them show you one facet,” said executive producer Blake Masters. “More often than not, if they’re a cop show, they’re in one specific area of L.A.: ‘The Shield,’ ‘Southland,’ etc. The beauty of our HD is they cover all of L.A. County so that we can go and show very specific areas, and we only have to be there for one episode. We can go to Koreatown for an episode. We can go to East L.A. for an episode. Then we can go to the beach for an episode. So the idea is you’ll actually get a much wider variety of socioeconomic places.”

Facing Kate

I’m always embarrassed to go into a panel without having seen the show that it’s dedicated to, but in my defense, it’s not like we were provided with an advance screener. Our only option to watch the pilot was on the Beverly Hilton’s TCA channels, but although the networks kindly provide us with the opportunity to watch their shows’ pilots, they only show them late at night and early in the morning, and…well, I tend to be asleep at both those points, frankly.

Here, however, is what they have to say about “Facing Kate” on the USA Network’s website:

“Facing Kate” centers on Kate Reed (Sarah Shahi), a top litigator who has grown frustrated with the endless bureaucracy and injustice she has witnessed on a daily basis and decides to become the ultimate anti-lawyer — a mediator. Using her knowledge of the law, along with intuition and a whatever-it-takes approach to resolve conflict, Kate finds the middle ground for a wide variety of adversaries — from Fortune 500 corporations to bitter divorcees. Following the unexpected death of her father, she finds herself at odds with her new boss, her stepmother (Virginia Williams) — and back in bed with her lawyer/ ex-husband (Michael Trucco). Helping her keep all of this chaos at bay is her trusted, geek-chic assistant Leonardo (Baron Vaughn).

Executive producer Michael Sardo went into a little more detail on Kate’s profession, for those of us who aren’t legal scholars.

“A mediator can be someone who’s just trained to resolve conflicts, or lawyers can resign from the bar, which is what Kate
has done, to become a full-time mediator,” he explained. “In mediation, you basically bring people into a room who are in a conflict, and you resolve it according to the way that they want to resolve it. Mediation is exploding in this country. It’s exploding all over the world. In China last year there were 7 million mediations. In Florida, you can’t get divorced in a court until you’ve gone through a mediation. And what it requires is simply sitting down face-to-face with the person you’re having a conflict with and talking it out. In courts, on a regular law show, you have all this artifice around, and you have someone speaking for you and speaking instead of you, whereas we just get right to the heart of it and do our little anti-law law show where you put two people in a room in conflict, send in Kate, and things happen.”

Shahi was cast for the role of Kate because, unlike those who auditioned before her, she impressed Sardo with the way she reacted to a moment within her scene: she’s waiting in line for coffee, a guy comes in to rob the store and pulls out a gun, and another guy pulls out a bat.

“The reason we cast Sarah, in addition to her loveliness and her acting ability, is that we had looked at 100 women, and in that scene, whenever someone pulled out a gun…and there was no gun, it was just someone saying, ‘Give me the money’…100 people backed up, and Sarah was the only one who moved toward it and went, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa!'” said Sardo. “Because you can’t solve conflicts from a distance…and in life, I think (Sarah is) a little bit of a conflict divining rod. Kate is someone who’s very comfortable with conflict and moves toward it and solves it, and if she walks into a room where there is none, she stirs some up.”

“Except in her own life,” added Shahi. “She doesn’t have as much gumption in her own life as she does in the work force to confront some of her own issues.”

As far as what we can expect from the series, Sardo says that cases will come to Kate in different ways.

“Each one, in the writers’ room, we discuss in terms of a question,” he said. “‘What is your identity?’ ‘What is a life worth?’ ‘What is a hero?’ The episode after the pilot involves Kate negotiating a settlement between the City of San Francisco and the lawyer for a man who was wrongly imprisoned for 22 years for a crime he didn’t commit, and though initially it’s about the settlement, what it becomes for Kate is about healing this man who hasn’t dealt with this 22-year lapse who wants to go right back to where he was when he was 19. The show we just shot is ‘Who is a hero?’ and ‘What is a hero?’ and involves a woman who served two tours of duty in Afghanistan, but not until high school did she find out that she wasn’t a legal citizen of the United States. So she bought a Social Security number from a woman she believed to be dead and served two tours in Afghanistan as a hero, and it wasn’t until she came back to the States and tried to get a credit card that she found out the woman was alive. That gets reported to immigration, and Kate, in trying to clear up the credit problem, winds up with a woman in jail in immigration who’s going to be there for nine months and sent back to a country where the language spoken is not one she’s ever spoken because her parents raised her to be the all-American girl. So each one deals with a fundamental precept of the human behavior.”

The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell

I’m not a news junkie, so the name “Lawrence O’Donnell” doesn’t mean anything to me personally, but if you’re a regular MSNBC viewer, you almost certainly know him, since – as Phil Griffin, President of MSNBC, noted in his opening remarks – he’s been with the network since the very beginning.

“We debuted July 15th, 1996,” said Griffin, “and Lawrence was the first guest in the first hour, at 9 AM. Now, here we are 14 years later, and he has a show at 10 PM.”

“Yeah, I’ve said it before: I’ve been working part-time there for 14 years, and we’ve finally gotten to know each other well enough for me to go full-time,” said O’Donnell, laughing.

As for the title of the show, it came to him on a flight. “I just started thinking about, ‘What should I call this thing?’ And I started thinking about, ‘Well, it’s going to be the last word of the day,’ and I realized there was a title in the concept that I started thinking about, which is the last word. For people who have been following what’s been going on from ‘Morning Joe’ maybe through the day through our primetime schedule, at 10 o’clock we’ll be able to deliver a succinct and real last word on that subject or where a particular news story stands at the close of our news cycle. And I think what we’ll also have in the show is my last word on certain things: ‘This is what I think you need to know about this. This is what it comes down to.’

“There will be nights when I’m handing the last word on a subject to a guest, and it could be someone who I agree with. That will be very likely. It could also be someone who I’m not sure of or who I might not agree with. It’s conceivable to me, for example, that somewhere in the hundred days of the BP coverage, I might have given the last word to a BP executive on whatever their tactic was on that particular day that they thought was going to be the new advance on how to solve this problem. That doesn’t mean that what that person is saying is the final truth on something, but it might be the most important point to know as of this point in the development of a story.

“I’m at the beginning…or maybe it’s the middle…of the creative process of coming up with this show,” O’Donnell said. “It’s an interesting experience for me since I’ve only done this on the entertainment side and the drama side, creating television. And I’m finding that…at first I thought there were no translatable skills from that side of the TV box to this side, but it’s been a great few weeks now sitting around with Phil and others, trying to figure out how to deliver what it is I think we want to get delivered at 10 o’clock. And so we’re in the middle of that. I think some of the questions you might have about what this show is going to be like…? The truth is I don’t know yet. Some of it I do. Some of it is in my head in a way that I can’t really articulate. But it will be broadcast quality by September 27th.”

Outsourced

Most controversial series of the new season? Possibly, though having seen the pilot for “Outsourced,” it strikes me as little more than a tempest in a teacup. Not being in any way Indian, perhaps my perception of what is or isn’t offensive to Indians shouldn’t be considered the definitive barometer of good taste, but I just saw the show as a culture-clash comedy which is more about poking fun at clueless Americans. Again, though, that’s me, ever a possible poster boy for Very White Americans everywhere.

“I think where we approach this is certainly not a mean-spirited place,” said executive producer Robert Borden. “A lot of us have a life experience that’s relevant, and a third of the writing staff is Indian, so we’re not going to be wallowing in (Indian stereotypes), but we are going to have a lot of fun with characters who behave like relatable characters in a workplace comedy. For example, Parvesh, his character is modeled after that guy that everyone works with that will not stop talking to you. If you talk to them in the break room, they’re going to follow you out and talk to you on the floor, so you can’t get rid of the person. That’s neither American nor Indian. That’s how we’re approaching the show.

“We’re going to deal with culture clashes,” Borden continued, “and both sides of view will be represented. For example, down the road we’re going to have one character, Asha, starting an arranged marriage, something that the Western characters perhaps don’t understand and disagree with. And she’s going to represent her point of view by questioning Western marriages. ‘You know, 50 percent of your marriages end in divorce,’ and our character here, at a loss for words, will say, ‘Well, we crushed you in the Olympics.’ Like, he has no response for that. So we’re going to be dealing with cultural clashes in that way.”

Diedrich Bader is particularly excited about his character, Charlie, one of the resident Americans on the show, because it gives him a chance to be the guy who says what everybody else is thinking.

“It’s not exclusively American,” said Bader. “You know, like a Frenchman will want to go and hang out in the French community when they go to, say, Germany or something like that. I remember when I was a kid in France, there’d be a Mickey D’s there, and I would think, ‘Why would an American come all the way here and go to Mickey D’s?’ Well, a guy like Charlie would be that guy. He would be that guy that would be at McDonald’s going, ‘I just want what I want. Give it to me. I want it hot.’ He just tries to replicate his world wherever he goes, and for him, it’s really just a job, but it’s not without interest, you know. But the interest is mostly that he gets paid.”

For what it’s worth, the Indians amongst the cast don’t seem to be terribly offended by the show. Yeah, I know, they’re getting paid, so there’s an incentive to not be offended…but, dammit, for some reason, I believe them.

“I think a lot of people are commenting on the East, the Indian side,” said cast member Sacha Dawan. “I think with ‘Outsourced’ it’s very much about the West as it is the East. I think people assume that the gap between the East and West is so huge. I think what ‘Outsourced’ is doing is kind of making that gap very small and making loads of comparisons and similarities. Like my character, Manmeet, or ‘Man Meat,’ is, you know, very close to Todd. You know, they’re kind of roughly the same age, and they have a lot in common even though they’re from different sides of the world.”

“I’m Indian, or that’s what my parents told me,” said Rizwan Manji, “and my friends and family, they’ve seen the trailer, some of
them have seen the show, and surprisingly, they are very supportive and find it hilarious and quite accurate.”

“Also, a call-center job back in India is a really, highly prestigious job,” said Parvesh Cheena. “My mom was back in India when I found out, just visiting, and I called right before I got on the plane, and the whole family at the wedding just freaked out and erupted, and they’re excited.”

“I think all my family and friends are just really excited to see such a large Indian contingent on television,” said Anisha Nagarajan. “They’re just really excited that that’s happening and that we’re getting out there.”

Outlaw

“Outlaw” may be the fastest moving and most preposterously plotted drama of the new season, with Jimmy Smiths playing a conservative Supreme Court Justice who decides to throw caution to the wind and quit the Court in favor of traveling the country trying cases, some of which go against everything he’s ever believed in his legal career. So why is it that I walked away from it, thinking, “Ah, maybe I’ll give it a chance, anyway”?

Behold the power of Jimmy Smits.

“One of the joys about doing this show with Jimmy in the part is that he has a body of work that I think the public feels is virtuous and liberal,” said executive producer John Eisendrath, “and he’s going to play a character filled with vices who is conservative, so I feel like we will have a great deal of leeway to lean into the vices, to let Garza do and say things and be certain ways that we might not otherwise be able to do without someone with Jimmy’s persona playing Garza. I think that there will be many instances where he will play with fire, and he will risk a great deal in order to seek the justice that he’s set out to do. And I wouldn’t suggest that it’s just in his professional life that he’s going to toe that line. I think there will be many instances in his personal life too where he will do things that the audience will be like, ‘Oh, wait, he can’t do that. Oh, but I love Jimmy Smits. He’s got to be doing it in a way that we like.’ So I think that we will have him pay a price sometimes, but I think part of the joy will be to see him toe that line and find a way around the barriers that other lawyers and other judges live by. The whole point is that he’s going to not stop at the line that everyone else stops at in his quest for justice. He’s going to find a way around the barriers.”

There’s another thing that’s kind of ridiculous about this show, and that’s that the character of Garza is about 100x more in-your-face than any Supreme Court Justice we’ve seen in many moons: he’s a gambler, he employs a sexy private investigator who wears leather and flirts up a storm whenever an opportunity to do so presents itself…in short, he couldn’t be less private if he tried.

“I would say that the point-of-view character on this show is unlike any point-of-view character on another legal show you’ll ever see,” said Eisendrath. “It is about, yes, a Supreme Court Justice. None of them ever leave that way, so is it a heightened reality? I would say that it is in some ways a little bit of a fantasy. Every week they are going to go to a different city, taking up a different cause. One week it will be Detroit, Miami, Los Angeles. And wherever the case is that Garza thinks needs the most attention, looking out for the little guy, fighting against the system, this group will parachute in. Wouldn’t you want this lawyer and this legal team to come to your city to represent you in the case that matters the most to you? ”

“There’s a certain amount of license,” admitted executive producer David Kissinger. “But, you know, the reality is there were colorful Supreme Court Justices. I’d say the current group is probably, given the process that they have to go through, a little bit tamer. But people like William O. Douglas, who we talked a lot about in the development of this, had some very Garza-like qualities. So it’s not as far-fetched as I think you’re suggesting.”

“For me, the bottom line is what’s on the page,” said Smits, “and I think it was an opportunity to deal with legal matters and hot-button issues that are substantive in terms of a legal show but, at the same time, have a character that is outside the box in a lot of different ways. And since we’re at a point where we’re logger-jammed in terms of the political right and left, the fact that, because of what happens to him in the pilot, has made such a radical switch and then surrounds himself with a team of people that have different types of political viewpoints, it does give an opportunity for us to tackle these hot-button issues in a new and kind of fresh way.”

Chase

I hate to break it you folks, but I found this to be the least interesting pilot amongst NBC’s crop of new series for the fall. Sure, it’s full of action, but by the time the closing credits rolled, I couldn’t tell you a single thing about a single character…and it’s an ensemble show! Some of my fellow critics have shrugged and said, “Well, that’s what you expect from a Jerry Bruckheimer produced series,” but, look, I like most of Bruckheimer’s productions and I still think this is a big ol’ bore…and the fact that NBC could only spare 20 minutes for the panel for “Chase” made me suspect that perhaps the network felt the same way.

Apparently not, though…or, at least, that’s what executive producer Jennifer Johnson thinks. “NBC has been so incredibly supportive,” she said. “I believe them when they tell us that it’s their favorite show. We are thrilled to be with NBC.”

Maybe NBC does feel that way. After listening to “Chase” star Kelli Giddish talk about the series, I’m beginning to think I might’ve missed something. I mean, I’m pretty sure I didn’t, but, damn, she’s just so enthusiastic…

If Giddish looks familiar to you, then you must’ve been one of the few people who saw her as the star of Fox’s short-lived midseason series “Past Life.” Obviously, she managed to land on her feet, but if you go back and check the dates between when “Past Life” was canceled and when she was picked up for “Chase,” you’ll see that she barely left the ground in the first place.

“I think Fox had made the call after a couple of episodes it aired, and thank goodness they did and let me go, and Warner Bros. as well, because they’re the studio that did the show. They let me come over here, and I got it,” said Giddish.

Giddish launched into her new endeavor with all due enthusiasm, proving from the moment she stepped foot on the set that she was ready for anything. “It’s called ‘Chase,’ baby,” she said, laughing. “I show up on set the first day of filming, and they say ‘All right. You signed on. Go.’ So I did, and I was sprinting the entire first day.”

Prior to moving to Texas to film “Chase,” Giddish was in decent enough shape, but there’s more to playing a U.S. Marshal than just being fit. “I went down to train with the U.S. Marshals because…I mean, I’m from Georgia, I’ve been around guns, but, you know, I hadn’t gone and actually trained,” she said. “I got to do five days with them, riding around for 15-hour days, hearing the stories, serving warrants, and going out and really getting with the guys. A whole day of firearm training with five different types of firearms. It was absolutely awesome.”

That’s as may be, but I’m still not convinced that “Chase” itself is absolutely awesome. Still, Johnson’s assurances about what we can expect from the series sound good, anyway.

“We hope to keep the audience on their toes with very unexpected moments with the fugitives,” said Johnson. “With my background on “Lost” and “Cold Case,” a big difference of this show is we are really going to get to know the fugitives and then really get to know our U.S. Marshals, so the two points of view really make the show stand out.”

We’ll see about that.

Hunting Hollywood

I won’t be spending long on this show…not because it doesn’t sound interesting, but because it serves to remind me of how, when Sci-Fi changed their name to SyFy, they did so with the comment that they could therefore open up their programming and not limit it solely to science-fiction-related series. That really pissed me off. I mean, what, like there’s not enough room on the cable dial for a network that’s 100% science fiction…? Instead, they’ve taken to putting shows like this on their schedule…which, annoyingly, I would probably watch if it was on another network. I just don’t want to personally encourage SyFy.

Still, you deserve the right to watch it if you so desire, so here’s the deal with “Hunting Hollywood.” Treasure hunter Joe Maddalena tracks down some of the most sought-after showbiz and pop-culture memorabilia, ranging anywhere from Margaret Hamilton’s original Wicked Witch of the West hat from “The Wizard of Oz” to Mary Poppins’ carpet bag to original art from issue #12 of “The Fantastic Four” (first crossover with the Incredible Hulk), featuring Stan Lee’s original notes in the margins.

See what I mean? It’s an awesome concept…dammit.

Executive producer Jerry Shevick swears that SyFy was always his first choice for the show. “We had several offers for the show,” he said, “but we thought Syfy was perfect for us for two simple reasons. One, obviously, all the sci-fi, fantasy, horror stuff — that’s a big portion of Joe’s business in the memorabilia and collectible market, so, you know, we had a good overlap on Syfy’s core audience. The second big reason is…what we liked a great deal is with Syfy’s expanded branding now with ‘Imagine Greater’ and everything, all of these kinds of objects that Joe and his team are going to be tracking down really are so much more relatable to a broader audience, and so again, we thought that with where they’re going, it fit our show just perfectly. We really have the best of both worlds.”

Make no mistake: Maddalena’s got some terrific tales to tell, including one about a client who found an original poster for “Frankenstein” – valued at a million dollars, the most expensive movie poster in the world – in a trunk at a yard sale…and they’d gotten the trunk for free! Great story. I just wish “Hunting Hollywood” was airing somewhere else, so that I’d have more of a desire to watch it.

Destination Truth

I have to admit that I don’t regularly watch the show, but I do at least know that it’s at least an appropriate show for the network, so it gets a pass. (I know, I’m sounding ridiculously hard-ass about this. But I feel very strongly about it.)

According to host / executive producer Josh Gates, “New episodes come back on September 9th, and we’re going to be in the Pacific and Micronesia, the world’s very first overnight at Angkor Wat in Cambodia. They’ve never allowed cameras in there before. So we’re really excited about that. Our season premiere is going to be in Pompeii in Italy which is a really terrific episode, and then a bunch of stuff in various countries in Africa. So it’s a big season.”

School Pride

Cue Will’s inevitable comment about not being a huge fan of reality shows, but even if I probably won’t watch this one, it certainly has its heart in the right place. From executive producers Cheryl Hines and Denise Cramsey, “School Pride” is described by NBC as “a pro-active, alternative series that tells the stories of communities coming together to renovate their aging and broken public schools.”

Hines got involved in the series as a result of her daughter…sort of. “Don’t ask me why, but I was inspired to reach out to schools,” she said, “and my first thought was to reach out to schools in other countries that were in need. And my friend said, ‘Well, what about our country? What about our schools?’ And I foolishly said, ‘Oh, I think we’re OK.’ And he said, ‘No, we’re not OK.’ And at the time, I was volunteering with Read Across America, a reading program. And I was volunteering at this school in Compton. And I literally just picked up the phone and cold-called the principal there, a woman named Dr. Jackie Sanderlin. I said, ‘I don’t even know why I’m calling. Do you guys need help there?’ And she said, ‘Yes, we do. When can you be here?’ And I got in my car; I drove over. And Jackie and I started working together. We started renovating her school. And my friend said, ‘This should be a TV show. You should show the country what you’re doing and how to do it.’ And I said, ‘That sounds really hard.’ And then Denise Cramsey and I met, and she made it seem easy. It’s not easy, but she makes it seem easy.”

“The whole idea of ‘School Pride’ is to bring the community together, to empower the community to make changes in the school,” she said. “We’re not going in and changing the infrastructure of schools. We’re going in and saying to that school, ‘Reach out to your community, to local businesses. Everybody join together with the district. Work together and show the kids that you care about their school.’”

“And we’ve had great cooperation from the cities and the towns that we’ve been in,” said Cramsey, “so that, you know, everyone gets behind the idea of the school project, and they just help us get it done.”

“When people in their own community get together and say, ‘Regardless of what what’s going on in the world, we’re going take care of our community and we’re going to take care of the people around us,’ I think you can make changes because it doesn’t seem like we have to change the world,” said Hines. “It seems like we just have to take care of our community and each other. And I think when you break it down…you know, I was calling one other person. I wasn’t going to Capitol Hill and banging down their door, not to say that I wouldn’t do that because it’s probably in my future, but…what you can say is, ‘What can I, as an individual, do to make one tiny bit of difference?’ And you find out, actually, you can do a lot. And even if it’s just on one Saturday out of the year, it could really mean a lot to those 600 kids that walk through the door of that school. It doesn’t feel so overwhelming, and it feels doable. That’s what we’re trying to do with ‘School Pride.’ We’re trying to show people what they can do.”

Late Night with Jimmy Fallon / The 62nd Primetime Emmy Awards

The last time we saw Jimmy Fallon at a TCA event, he was just preparing to start his talk show and seemed more than a little bit nervous at the prospect of stepping into Conan O’Brien’s shoes as the host of NBC’s “Late Night.” These days, he’s had enough to success to earn himself a pretty high profile side gig, too: serving as emcee for the 62nd Primetime Emmy Awards. But don’t expect to see too much crossover between the two shows.

“The Emmys, I think, is not ‘Late Night with Jimmy Fallon’ hosting,” said Fallon. “It’s me hosting. So I don’t want to push too hard. I want the Academy to be happy, and I want Don Mischer to be happy, and I want NBC to be happy. You know, it’s not really about me. It’s more about celebrating television and getting all of those face time.”

Fallon took a few minutes to step into the Wayback Machine and reminisce about his very first show, which featured an interview which he’s able to admit wasn’t exactly the best of all possible starts.

“First of all, I just want to say how cool Robert De Niro was to come on the show,” began Fallon. “He had nothing to promote. He just did it because he’s a New Yorker and I’ve worked in the past and he did me a favor. That being said, he does not like to talk. It’s a lot of head-bobbing and one-word answers. But I figured, ‘Baptism by fire. Jump into the fire, baby, let’s see what it’s going to be.’ And there’s so many things that I wish I could have done. I wish I could have made the temperature cooler, because I was sweating so much flop sweat during that first show. It was like I just came off a water slide. Oh, my God, I was so dewy during that interview. And I was like, ‘Whaaaaaaa…’ And, of course, it’s your first show, which…I don’t know why anyone does this, but my mom and dad want to come to the first show. And I go, ‘Can’t you come to the tenth show? Can’t you come to anything, but not the first.’ There’s so much pressure, you know. And I’m worried about if my mom. Is she going to sit in her seat? What if she has to go to the bathroom? Who’s going to take her? I got to worry about these things. I gotta worry about the show!

“I just remember going, like, ‘Well, now, this is it.’ I was behind the curtain, you know, just standing there. Higgins was announcing. If you go back and listen to it…oh, my God, Higgins is even off. He’s, like, ‘Live from Studio from 6H…NBC…Jimmy…’ It’s like the worst intro ever. And I was just standing, like, all right. And it’s almost like when the curtain opens, like you’ve seen that shot in movies before where, like, the curtain opens and you just see the silhouette of the comedian walking out like a gladiator. And I was, like, ‘It’s on. This is it.’ It’s, like. game on. And I think I had a good first joke. I forget what it was. I think someone was…was Rush Limbaugh rooting for me to fail? I think that was the first joke, I think. He just said it about Obama. It’s a dated reference now. But I remember going out there, and I go, like, ‘This is just it. You just have to do it.’ And I was so nervous about time cues and going out to commercial and, like, OK and just the story’s getting good, I cut him off and go like, ‘Thank you. We’ll be right back, bye. Thank you, bye.’ And it’s like…now, a year later, I know to just keep going, or if it’s not working, to go to commercial. I’m much more calm, and I kind of understand it better now. It’s, like, ‘Oh, we don’t have anything to worry about.’ But the best way to learn is that you have to just do it.”

Okay, back to the Emmys to bring this thing home. What can we expect from Fallon as the host of the show?

“Personally, as a fan of the Emmys and a fan of awards shows in general, you just want them to move along,” said Fallon. “You just want to keep them moving and keep it fast and tight. And so I think…I mean, we’re all with the same goal in mind. I mean, even the people in the crowd. I mean, there’s just like, ‘OK. I already lost. Let’s get this over with. I mean, I want to keep it moving and keep it fresh and fun and respectful, too. We’re going to do something with Twitter. We haven’t figured that out yet, but we have a couple of ideas for that just so maybe the people at home can somehow get involved with the award show somehow, make it a little bit interactive.”