Road diary: Comic-Con, press tour, visiting Conan

It's been a few days since I have been able to catch my breath and give you some flavor from my wanderings through the Southern California entertainment mall. Comic-Con, I have to say, is growing on me. And not just because I figured out how to get myself invited to the Entertainment Weekly/Still Spelling It Sci-Fi Saturday night party. I am not much of a party schmoozer, and in particular with the genre where I am out of my depth, as with fantasy.

So I mostly tagged along with Maureen Ryan, my counterpart at the Chicago Tribune, and eavesdropped her conversations with "Lost" creator Damon Lindelof, versatile character actor Mark Sheppard and others. (Was that discussion of the Oceanic-Dharma merger on the record or not? I can't recall.) Mo has that gift of being able to enjoy a party and work it at the same time. Here, as you can see, she was actually pulled in for an interview at one point. That's her husband David on the left. He's fixing the Wii (I kid you not).

And let's face it -- this is her genre, not mine. One reason the Con is valuable to me is that it puts things on my radar I might otherwise have missed. Like the fact that people are really into Bear McCreary's soundtracks. The keyboardist-composer of the "Battlestar Galactica" score debuted the theme from "Caprica," the prequel, at the House of Blues a few blocks from the San Diego Convention Center. Mind you, the show isn't going to be on TV for months, but they're already selling the soundtrack. Anyway, it was an impressive performance by Bear and his 14-piece orchestra.

It was kind of like old home week at the Con. This is Scott Phelps; he and I have known each other since we were seven. He now runs The Splash Page in Billings and comes to the Con every year. And then there was Barry Howland. He and I had a spirited battle in the summer of 1977 to see who could collect the entire Topps baseball card set (660 cards) first. I won by a card. He now lives in San Diego and just discovered that I am on KOGO every week.

I spent a day with friends in Orange County and went to see the Angels game, which was almost as exciting on the field as it was in the stands (two fights and a heckler whose ejection was cheered by hundreds of fans). Then on to press tour in Pasadena.

Tuesday was my first visit to "The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien" at the Universal lot. If you attended a taping of Conan's show in New York, the changes are hard to miss. For one thing, nobody gets seated from the top of the theater anymore. Now you walk in the front entrance, pass through a metal detector, take about six steps forward through a door, and bang, you are on the studio floor. Everyone enters through that opening in the center of the audience seating that you see on the audience cutaway shot. The studio has 100 seats (at least) more than the old shoebox at 30 Rock, yet oddly it feels even cozier here.

The preshow routine is completely different. Now, Jimmy Pardo comes in and goes over the rules, banters with the audience for a couple, then introduces Andy Richter. Andy almost immediately introduces the band, and they do their famous juke-joint number, the one if I've heard once I've heard 100 times ... but I'll be darned if I can remember the title. Band members parade through the audience playing their instruments and getting the crowd to do a call and response. Mark "Love Man" Pender, the band's trumpeter from Kansas City and overall great guy, does the vocals. At one point he also does that thing where he holds one note for two or three minutes, a technique he learned from listening to Rahsaan Roland Kirk records. That always kills.

The show was hilarious -- I was lucky in that a comedian, Jimmy Carr, was booked instead of a musical act -- and afterward I got a tour backstage, including the hallway where all "Tonight Show" acts have begun signing their names. Joel McHale, as usual, used the occasion to take a dig at Ryan Seacrest, while Will Farrell took up half the wall with his sig. (Someone then signed inside the "L" of his name, adding, "I've always wanted to be inside Will Farrell.")

Wednesday was one of those days at press tour where you just kind of keep taking notes and hope someday you'll turn them all into stories. I try to prepare for press tour but some of my favorite stories come just by showing up and finding out what new shows are on the agenda. This is especially true of the cable industry, which parades through our interview stages almost as quickly as those venture capital shootouts I read about where entrepreneurs have five minutes to convince a group of investors to give them money. On Wednesday alone we had presentations from: MTV, TV Land, Comedy Central, Nick at Nite, the History Channel, Nat Geo, ESPN, Starz and BBC America followed by a late-night screening in my room of HBO's new Barack Obama campaign documentary. On Thursday it was Lifetime, E! and Style, G4, BET, Discovery, TLC, Animal Planet, that channel that used to have the New York Times involved, and then for most of the afternoon, HBO. Oh, and a dinner function run by Food Network. I can't, and don't, try to cover all of these; there are reporters here who do that already. But it gives me a lot of material to write off of over the next six months.

The MTV panel I found pretty enlightening. I'm not saying it's the end of schlock like "The Hills" and "My New BFF," but it's MTV's documentary programs, like "True Life" and "16 and Pregnant," that are making the big audience gains now. So that's my Saturday story. The History Channel is setting Howard Zinn's "People's History of the United States" to video thanks to Matt Damon (remember that scene in "Good Will Hunting"?). That's a very cool story. Look for that, I think, on Tuesday. Once I finish this blog post, I'll finish my "Spartacus" story for Monday -- this is a case of seeing the same panel in two radically different environments, the Con last week and press tour this week. As for HBO, I am really excited about September's debut of "Bored to Death," terrific little detective comedy with a can't-miss cast: Jason Schwartzman plays Jonathan Ames, a character semi-inspired by the show's creator and writer, Jonathan Ames; Zach Galifianikis as his buddy Ray; Ted Danson as Jonathan's carousing editor; plus guest spots by Oliver Platt, Jim Jarmusch and many others. So I grabbed the real Jonathan Ames for an interview after that panel. Don't look for that story until September.

There are also set visits whenever I come to LA. Besides Conan, I'll be visiting a sitcom, a drama, a reality show and a rabbi. No, wait, the rabbi's part of an old joke. Anyway, I have to get back to the grind. This ain't no junket and I have to earn my expense report.

Meanwhile, here's what appeared in print since I went on the road:

• Talking with the Mighty Boosh
• The Comic-Con wrap: Ray Bradbury, screaming fans, long lines, a glimpse in the future
• "Nurse Jackie," "Rescue Me": Today's antiheroes are played for laughs
• Ben Bernanke's unprecedented town-hall forum taped in KC

And my videos from Comic-Con, including the one about the long lines, are at YouTube.