Watch the Pilots - better late than never

This year's edition of "Watch the Pilots with Aaron" at the Screenland Armour (home of Roscoe, the curtain-opening robot) featured its biggest audience, its nicest locale, its tardiest host and its slimmest pickin's.

My computer and I engaged in an epic staring contest that took most of Thursday afternoon and into the evening as I waited for all the clips to finish processing. As I stewed, three people at the Armour helped keep 300 readers occupied, giving away all of the valuable swag at the start and generally tap-dancing until I and my laptop finally appeared on the scene. A big thank-you to Ian Phillips of Screenland and Vana Sweetland and Mark Whitaker at the Star, and also to our patient audience, who kindly refrained from throwing their popcorn at me or the screen.

There were actual pilots mixed in with the returning-series highlights, and once again it appears I picked a winner, as CBS's "Worst Week" got huge laughs from the audience. I also featured clips from Fox's "Fringe" and another CBS show, "The Mentalist," which all have as much potential as any three shows that have come on network TV in the past few years. NBC and ABC pilots were hard to come by this year so I substituted clips from highly-anticipated returning shows like "Life." I told my audience that writers' strike or no writers' strike, the event was going to live up to at least the Watch part of the title, if not the Pilots part. These were, in fact, shows I planned to watch this season.

My apologies to those who had wanted to see the pilots and John McCain in the same night. We'll try to do better next year. On a positive note, I think this (as well as my laptop woes) was a one-year anomaly. People expect to see lots of new TV shows in the fall, and it's in the networks' long-term interest to deliver them.