TV critics play the blues

Summer press tour comes with its annual rituals, some good, some not so good. One of these customs is the inevitable column or two about “TCA ain’t what it used to be.” This year we’ve been treated to an especially glum pair of submissions, one from Ray Richmond of the Hollywood Reporter, who waxes about the good old days when press tour was more junkety; and one from my pal Joe Adalian, longtime television editor at Variety who recently moved to TV Week, where I columned for a few years.

Glum is the operative mood these days, of course, given that no television critic has a right to feel particularly secure in his or her position. Who knows, some may be agreeing with their editors that a two-week jaunt to press tour is a needless luxury at a time of staff cutbacks.

Richmond’s lament, however, struck me as coming from another plane of existence, one informed by misty memories of a younger, more vibrant time and the trade publication-fueled resentments of the online scribes whose footprint grows everywhere, not just at TCA, with each passing week.

My vantage point is different. I’m not an old-timer, even though I’ve been coming to tour off and on since 1996. Also, I am a semi-insider, having served on the Television Critics Association board since 2004. No, I don’t speak regularly with the network and hotel reps who are the other two legs of the TCA tripod; our officers do most of that work, and god bless ‘em for that. Mostly I work on the website and pitch in however I can. That said, I do benefit from being in the information flow more than many who attend tour.

Here are the key passages from Richmond’s piece:

When I attended my first event in 1984, there was just NBC, ABC and CBS. Each had three or four days to peddle their wares to critics whose airfare, hotel and meals often were paid by the networks. The swag was lavish, the mood relaxed, the alcohol flowing, but the sessions themselves often were contentious, with those attending holding executives' feet to the fire at least in part to avoid any appearance of being bought. ... Today you find the opposite vibe happening. The networks no longer cover anyone's travel and lodging, and the sessions too often devolve into a two-pronged affair: those who are too consumed with their live-blogging to participate in an intelligent discourse and those repping lightweight blogs whose queries are of the trivial, "Have you always been so hot?" variety.

With several major newspapers refusing to send anyone to TCA because of the expense, the registered attendees now feature the likes of BuddyTV.com, Bullz-Eye.com, AfterElton.com, GirlPower.com and Visimag.com. Given the precarious state of print journalism, we're seeing a rapid shift to the online world, and its impact on the quality of TCA attendance -- and indeed, its newsworthiness -- has grown exponentially.

First, one glaring inaccuracy. The networks did not pay for critics “airfare and hotel” in 1984, when Richmond first attended tour. Meals, yes, and we’ll get to that in a minute. But had Richmond looked at any tour orientation guide, he would have read the following in the "TCA History" section:

TELEVISION CRITICS ASSOCIATION HISTORY MILESTONES
1978-79: The constitution of the Television Critics Association is unanimously adopted on June 28, 1978, creating the TCA. First officers are LEE WINFREY, Philadelphia Inquirer, President; BARBARA HOLSOPPLE, Pittsburgh Press, Vice President; STEVE HOFFMAN, Cincinnati Enquirer, Secretary; WILLIAM HENRY III, Boston Globe, Treasurer; and board members ANN HODGES, Houston Chronicle; WALTER "DUSTY" SAUNDERS, Rocky Mountain News, and STEVE CASEY, San Diego Tribune.
1979-80: The TCA is officially incorporated. Press Tour takes place three times a year in New York and Los Angeles, and includes networks and a panel on PBS programming.
1981-82: Following CBS' unexpected shift of its portion of the TCA tour to Arizona, the TCA begins to take the lead in setting future tour dates and locations in negotiations with the networks. NBC boycotts the January 1982 press tour over lack of "civility" by critics toward network executives.

In other words, the change Richmond describes happened before he ever attended his first tour.

I attended my first TCA in 1996 as an uncredentialed freelancer. I showed up the first day and presented my letter from Hamptons Magazine, a summer publication whose editor, William Monahan — yes, that William Monahan, who needed the work as badly as I did — had gotten to know me through the Echo bulletin board. Turns out my letter was worthless, but fortunately a couple of nearby critics, including Chicago Daily Southdown TV critic Joel Brown, immediately vouched for me with the NBC reps, and I was in. My work from that tour appeared primarily online, which I guess makes me an original troublemaker.

By paying their own way, the TCA members gained the necessary control to take command of Tour planning, or at least be one part of a tripod. As we see from NBC’s decision to sit out one tour, that created new tension between critics and networks. That tension has never gone away, and one result of that is that no one has been able to find a replacement for the original TCA format suitable to all parties. Thus it remains intact even as the whole world has been changed outside the four walls of the hotel ballroom.

In the 12 years that I’ve been attending, tour has been a predictable corporate affair. Sessions start at 9 (press breakfasts at 8 are not uncommon) and go until 6. There are evening soirees where people with recorders are brought to grill stars and producers over drinks and party food. Press conference, scrum, press conference, scrum, etc., then mingle time, write, sleep, repeat. For some of us, “sleep, then write” is the preferred order of things. And of course, with the web you could drop the word “write” into that series after every item.

Over the years I’ve heard stories about the old days of TCA, but those were ancient history even by the time I arrived. Frankly, it’s kind of embarrassing to read about it, though perhaps the smackdown that Defamer delivered today will discourage such public nostalgia in the future.

Also, as blogs like the Gawker family so rudely prove on a daily basis, access to those great network minds can be overrated. I've learned a lot more about the sausage-making of Hollywood from websites, emails and Bill Carter's books than I would if I had drinks with Les Moonves every single tour. The information explosion has brought much that was hidden out into the open. Adapt, or die.

Richmond argues that “live-blogging,” “lightweight blogs,” and the “rapid shift to the online world,” combined with slashing of budgets and positions at traditional media, have negatively impacted his scientific measurements of the tour's "quality." This serial denigration of the online world can’t but amuse me, seeing as how I came from it. More importantly, it misses the mark. A, seasoned newspaper critics are just as capable of putting mindless drivel on the web as AfterElton.com and B, has Richmond actually read AfterElton.com? It’s a news site devoted to covering popular culture, and especially television, for gay and bisexual men. The site’s Gay Agenda video blog, with its up-to-the-second discussions of media and politics, is as substantive as anything you’re going to find online that’s not aimed at people over 50.

The fact is that the “Here Comes Everybody” argument, named for the terrific new book by Clay Shirky, is one that every corner of the media world is grappling with right now, at least everywhere that a privileged elite realizes that they are about to be overrun by filthy hordes of untrained and often unpaid content sources.

Another fact is that those hordes are increasingly being populated by former print critics and independent minds who have completely bypassed old media. People like Ed Bark and Joel Brown, TCA veterans who have gone completely online not entirely of their own choosing. People like Andy Dehnart of Reality Blurred, who’s also an academic, another growing subsector of the TV critic ranks. Yes, there are people who don’t seem to fit the “critic” mold, but careful where you draw the line, my friend.

So, how do we change tour to accommodate the transformed media world? A good question, and I commend Adalian for taking a stab at it in his column. Adalian argues, I think correctly, that what has hurt TCA more than anything has been the tour's rigid design, which has not responded well to the changes brought on by network expansion, original series multiplication and the demands of print editors back home.

Unlike Richmond and other observers over the years (Heather Havanotherhelping comes to mind), Joe doesn't dwell on the free-food aspect, though I should probably address it. Meals are covered by the networks, that’s true, and I’ve yet to see a cash bar at TCA. The status-quo argument, which is persuasive, is that this adds one to two hours a day to the time when a critic can be a network’s captive. More signficantly, there is precious little wiggle room in the current TCA format, so introducing lunch and dinner breaks would put added pressure on the schedule.

For indeed, the most striking change in the years I’ve been attending tour is the total elimination of down time. Editors demanded shorter stays at TCA, but the number of networks, cable channels and original shows kept growing. So, to make sure every second of tour was maximized, but without altering its basic structure, the planners worked hard to squeeze every last bit of air out of the schedule. In an effort to add value, we’ve added industry panels and set visits.

Even this, however, is a compromise between the past and the future, and that brings us back to Adalian, who proposes a radical solution. His idea is to replace Tour, with its single-file parade of events, its linear design, with a massive trade show, a “TV-con” modeled on San Diego’s Comic-Con, everything all at once. That's an intrguing concept, but I think it's based on a way too generous estimate of the number of interested parties. Anyway, Comic-Con is already incorporating TV on a big scale. It was the last time I went and it is even more so now.

Another idea I've heard floated would be more like an academic conference, with its self-selected membership and simultaneous plenary sessions, bookended by some big-tent sessions that were less like keynotes and more like question time at the National Press Club. These tours could be held in shorter time, with more opportunities to visit sets. Critics could pay their own way and still convince their editors it's worth it. One thing I can’t see getting rid of is parties, because you can’t haul critics to every set in the Southland, and parties are an efficient way to aggregate stars and executives into a single turkey barrel.

The situation at TCA is not as dire as either of these columnists make it appear. Attendance from traditional media is down slightly as opposed to dramatically, the online participation is a more complex trend than it's caricatured as being, and above all there's still plenty to cover. In fact, I will release my planning list of stories later on, so you can get a sense of how I'm using my all-access pass — a list that's subject to change, when the serendipitous moments that always happen at TCA happen. Above all, for tour to change, or even go away, someone has to deal the first hammer-blow, and it will take a lot bigger crisis for that to happen in this risk-averse town.

Maybe, though, what Joe is arguing is not that the situation is dire, but we should be acting as though it is.

Developing...

Related: You should also check out this response from my friend, Eric Deggans, whose ability to get to the point often leaves me in awe.