The Television Critics Association press tour is the kind of event that can move seamlessly from Monica Lewinsky to Rudolph Giuliani.
The appearances by the moll and the mayor, each promoting upcoming HBO documentaries treating their particular claims to fame, happened within hours of each other during the cable channel’s presentation last week at the Pasadena, Calif., gathering. Their relatively easy coexistence there may be all you need to know about the press tour.
That, and the proof it offers that it is entirely possible to spend nine January days in Southern California without getting a lick of sun — and to spend $3,000 in company money while staying at a Ritz-Carlton only to become increasingly cranky rather than relaxed.
“TCA,” in the critic and network shorthand for the twice-annual informational meeting, is the most TV-centric event on the planet, which means it is every bit as expansive, enlightening and upsetting as the little box that defines it.
It can accommodate the salacious (Monica) and the sublime (Rudy). It can accommodate the husband-and-wife team of Julia Louis-Dreyfus (star) and Brad Hall (producer) pushing their new NBC sitcom and producer Peter Tolan (“The Job”) trashing it, sight unseen, to riotous laughter from the assembled critics who had, in fact, seen this latest post-“Seinfeld” comedy and were mostly unimpressed.
TCA has room for newswoman Paula Zahn to criticize the instantly infamous “just a little bit sexy” CNN promo for her, while wearing come-hither pumps that suggested her self-image might indeed include such a phrase. It also has room for Fox News firestarter Bill O’Reilly (whose footwear choice, I confess, did not make my notebook) to say, “If Paula Zahn doesn’t think she’s there partially because she’s a good-looking babe, then she’s in Never-Never Land.”
It has plenty of room for juicy rumors and nasty innuendo to spread like, well, gossip among network publicists and the assembled TV critics, who then, of course, return home to pass it on at dinner parties rather than to their readers. Cursed libel laws! In its best moments, TCA has that summer-camp-for-adults feel to it, a way to recharge the batteries, despite the drain of events stretching from 9 a.m. to almost midnight daily, and to remind yourself that it is OK to have a brain and be unnaturally interested in the boob tube.
Freebies are gone — almost
TCA no longer has — thanks to reforms instituted a few years back by the critics, the mostly big-newspaper employees who shepherd the event in cooperation with networks — room for the embarrassment of freebies that gave it a kind of pigs-at-the-trough reputation. It once was the kind of event where an attendee several years ago brought his drapes from home to have them cleaned by the hotel, a charge picked up by the networks, of course.
Since such unsupportable excesses, TCA has been rapidly growing more professional, but even at my first press tour, shortly after taking the Tribune’s TV critic job in 1995, a new, costly tchotchke would appear in my hotel room almost daily, gradually becoming a suitcase full of stuff that, thankfully, included a new suitcase in which to carry it all home (for donation to the paper’s designated charities).
This time out, the cocktail shaker pictured on the front of the section was the only freebie that slipped through the critics’ no-giveaways rule. Watch out for glowing reviews of programs on whatever outfit gave it away.
More compelling to the critics is the chance to get a real feel for the upcoming shows, from the tawdry, desultory cast-and-producers session for WB’s ostensible comedy “The Young Person’s Guide to Becoming a Rock Star” to the uproarious one for Fox’s shimmering “Andy Richter Controls the Universe” (coming in March). Good panel does not always equal good show, but it often does, and certainly seeing the people behind a program offers invaluable information.
Keeping networks in touch
An even more useful part of the conference is the chance to hear from and question top executives as they deliver what amount to state-of-their-network addresses, so that you can, for instance, put NBC West Coast president Scott Sassa’s feet to the fire for proclaiming a few sessions back that he wanted more family shows and this time that NBC was sticking with its trademark urban yuppie fare.
For all its insular, even claustrophobic feel, press tour is valuable to viewers, I think, on a subconscious level because it keeps the networks in close touch with newspapers’ de facto viewer representatives.
But its most overt effect is that it is hazardous to top programmers’ vocational health. So that they wouldn’t have to go before critics this time and answer questions about the guillotine blades poised over their necks, for instance, ABC’s Stu Bloomberg and UPN’s Dean Valentine were fired before and during TCA.
Bloomberg’s ABC replacement, former network movie and specials programmer Susan Lyne, impressed the group at her first appearance, less than five days on the job, by actually standing up and taking the blame for a blunder, ABC’s failure to develop a 25th anniversary special commemorating its airing of “Roots,” a matter of some embarrassment to the network because NBC was showing one.
But then Lyne, in the anteroom outside the Ritz ballroom where most events take place, made the kind of faux pas that, in such close confines, quickly makes the rounds and can permanently damage reputations.
A bad move
Approaching a chatting group of critics from large- to midsize papers, Lyne immediately pulled aside the one with the most national reach, USA Today’s Robert Bianco, and turned her back on the rest.
Other notable faux pas and oddities: The Ritz temporarily gave the car rented by influential Washington Post TV columnist Lisa de Moraes to someone who was not Lisa de Moraes. Retiring San Francisco critic John Carman was greeted with silence when he waved his notebook in a roomful of WB stars and asked if anybody wanted to talk to a reporter or, indeed, reads a newspaper at all.
And at ABC’s edition of press tour’s nightly stars-and-critics parties, “Once and Again” executive producer Edward Zwick learned from critics that ABC had said that day it was cutting back the number of show episodes it would make this year, an ominous sign that sent the “Once and Again” brain trust running over to the ABC brain trust. In damage-control mode all night, the network worked hard to put out the story that it was all just a misunderstanding.
That party, perhaps not coincidentally, happened at a rented old Pasadena mansion decorated with giant, animatronic dinosaurs. They were promoting a May mini-series based on the “Dinotopia” book, but it didn’t take much imagination to connect old-line TV networks and lumbering, inefficient beasts headed for extinction.
Indeed, if there is a theme to be extracted from all the notebook scribblings, press releases and celebrity/executive panel transcripts accumulated during the just-concluded two weeks of January’s midseason TCA (a nearly three-week version happens each July, ahead of the new fall season), it is that the networks appear to be fiddling in an inferno.
Little optimism
Speaking of television’s longstanding business model, WB head programmer Jordan Levin announced, there is no longer debate: “It is broken.” Other executives offered similarly uncheery assessments. “What you’ve sort of sensed this week is a remarkable sense of fear and anxiety about what the model ultimately becomes,” Levin said.
Programming costs are rising, advertising revenues are declining, and the broadcast networks, which still dominate television despite the continued loss of audience share to cable, have no way to make real money beyond selling ads.
But instead of a drastic response to such realities, what was presented in Pasadena was, with only a few exceptions, more of the same: tepid sitcoms, undramatic dramas, an absurd battle to be first on the air and prevail in court between two dimwitted copycat reality-game shows, ABC’s “The Chair” and Fox’s “The Chamber.”
“It is incumbent on all of us to figure out a way to make scripted television that costs less,” pronounced Fox Television Entertainment Group president Sandy Grushow.
But CBS chief Les Moonves pooh-poohed a notion put forth by NBC, the search for a way to mount a TV drama for $500,000 an episode instead of the usual $1.5 million. Moonves suggested that you would get what you pay for, a “Xena: Warrior Princess”-level show that network audiences would not accept.
A regular season
Sept. 11 was on everyone’s mind, still. And the clips HBO offered from it’s “Sept. 11, 2001” documentary, set to air Memorial Day weekend, proved that it ought to be. If you thought you had tucked safely away the horror and sense of violation that day engendered, think again. The images of airplanes turned into missiles and panic on the streets of New York City had a roomful of cynics in tears.
But except for the representatives from news departments and the cost in lost revenue, most TV executives thought the attacks would ultimately have little effect on programming. Reality TV is not dead, most insisted, it’s just waiting for the Next Great Concept. They did allow that viewers are starting to crave series that are self-contained, one story per episode, like “CSI,” rather than the “Hill St. Blues” serial narrative model that dominates contemporary TV drama.
For the most part, though, shows in development now are similar to shows from last year, executives said. Added NBC Entertainment chief Jeff Zucker, “At the end of the day, this is going to turn out to be a pretty regular television season.”
Such thoughts should be small comfort to stockholders, especially when you consider that the year’s big programming idea is to repackage old hits into new specials, like CBS did to much success with “The Carol Burnett Show.”
Most critics, of course, are more focused on day-to-day programming concerns, but even when the discussion turned micro, the TV business’ current uncertainty snuck through.
There, for instance, was WWF star Ivory, at the UPN party, telling me it’s better to be a wrestler these days than an ingenue, “I have a series. I have two of ’em. And what actor in the room here can say that? And I’m gonna be on for five years. And what actor in the room can say that?”
And there was Peter Tolan, “The Job” producer, holding forth at a session for his upcoming, still-unnamed ABC comedy set at a fictional network. “When I sat down with the writers for the first time,” Tolan told critics, “I said to them, `This is a show about fear.’ Because that’s what motivates the television business: fear and not knowing.”
Let the record reflect that at the January 2002 TCA event, a maverick producer and a network executive reached similar conclusions about fear ruling their business. Maybe there is some hope for it.
