Here in the TCA ballroom....
The view from my room
... no one can hear the haters scream. That's how bitchin' the sound system is here at TCA. Seriously, if you missed the last two days of navel-gazing commentary over whether two or more television critics should ever be allowed to appear in the same room together, all you need to read is this. But once I got into this 68-degree-chilled ballroom — this tour is being held in the same one the Golden Globes are televised from, at the Beverly Hilton — I thought: Do I hear people whining? I do not.
The TCA has been using Dave Taylor's audio and video army for press tour since the late 1950s. They're amazing. But this year they've outdone themselves. I see 15-foot HD rear projection screens on either side of the ballroom. Right now Tommy Lee is being beamed in by HD cameras in Canada (where he and "Motley" are touring) to plug his reality show for Planet Green with Ludacris — the one with the L. Ron Hubbard-sounding title "Battleground Earth" — and I can't stop staring at his tats. The HD picture is just amazing. In fact, another critic felt inspired one to ask Tommy Lee, at a cost of untold satellite time, to please inventory his tattoos while we watched. He had this red fishlike creature on his left arm and a bunch of chipmunk tracks on his right -- "and I have a big peacock down my leg," he said, which got a big laugh.
That's not the only technology that's impressing me. Twitter is a great backchannel for communicating what's going on throughout the day at tour without being glued to your computer screen (except, of course, to read other people's tweets). Case in point. During a TLC panel, docu-series uberproducer R.J. Cutler was asked about a show the reporter thought he produced. I tweeted:
tvbarn RJ Cutler just got asked if Flip This House is dead. A: "I hope so, because that's on another network. My show is Flip THAT House."
Minutes later I got this tweet from Brian Stelter at the New York Times:
brianstelter @tvbarn Haha, I made that mistake several times when I interviewed him about "Flip That House" a few months back.
Six years after I got so fed up with Blogger that I vowed never to use it again, Evan Williams has crafted another brilliantly simple piece of web software that may yet be crushed by the weight of its own popularity.
Until that happens, if you'd like to listen in, just follow me on Twitter.
I said I was going to post my stories planning list. In addition to blogging, I have two regular placements a week in the paper, plus we've added Saturdays during Tour. Looking over the schedule of upcoming appearances, these are the people I'm trying to grab to interview:
- Thursday, July 17 - Carson Kressley (Look Good Naked s2)
- Sunday, July 20 - Shows about dirty jobs (History's "Sandhogs," upcoming; NGC's "World's Toughest Fixes")
- Thursday, July 24 - The "Army Wives" gals OR shows about dirty jobs
- Sunday, July 27 - MAD MEN (set visit report; could be cover story as s2 premieres that night on AMC)
- Thursday, July 31 - Funny business: Scrubs, Project Gary, Worst Week, Kath/Kim
- Sunday, August 3 - Anticipated returns: 24, THE SHIELD, Friday Night Lights, Housewives maybe
Already the best made plans are going astray. I just screened the first two eps of the Sundance series "Architecture School," about Tulane architecture students sent in to design homes for hurricane-ravaged neighborhoods in New Orleans. I realized there was a striking similarity between the rebuilding of New Orleans using new ideas and the eco-reconstruction of Greensburg, Kansas, documented on Planet Green (and just reupped). Then, in the lobby, I spotted one of the on-screen subjects, who was chatting with one of the series creators. And TCA serendipidity kicked in, as it so often does. We had what amounted to a 20-minute pre-interview, of which about 10 minutes was me giving feedback. I think I convinced them that the Greensburg-Nola symmetry wasn't b.s. (for one thing, both areas had, pre-storm, an extremely high level of rental housing). So now, I'm thinking of moving "Architecture" into the August 3 spot, since it's debuting that night. The placeholder story can be reported and written later.
But that gives you a taste of what it's like here for the majority of us who work the tour, as opposed to the L.A.-based trade types who piss and moan about us because they'd rather we went home and stayed there.
