Broadcast news

Now, if only I could remember what the heck it is I was doing the last time you joined me here.

"Here," you see, is sunny, muggy, smoggy southern California, site of the U.S. networks' semi-annual TV press tour. And it's been fully two years since your humble Prairie correspondent ventured to these parts in search of newsy tidbits, preview peeks and interview snippets related to the upcoming television season.

Between the Hollywood writers' strike of 2007-08, which cancelled one press tour, and an unexpected year-long personal medical adventure, which prevented me from attending another two, it's been quite a while since I joined my friends and colleagues in the Television Critics Association at this frenzied but (if you do it right) fun-filled two-week TV-a-thon, in which the days are crammed full of previews and interviews and the nights are a fairly non-stop rotation of network-sponsored gatherings (known, in my personal blog-speak, as BPHPs -- Big Phony Hollywood Parties) at which lavishly presented food and drink and easily accessible chats with the stars of prime-time TV are the featured menu items.

It is -- even if this trip means giving up two prime weeks of Winnipeg's too-short summer in favour of breathing L.A.'s extra-special summertime-brown brand of air -- nice to be back. But the first thing I've noticed in my preparations for this jaunt is how incredibly much things have changed since the last time I took part.

The TV biz has undergone a massive overhaul, starting with the financial hit created by the writers' strike and continuing through the greater economic collapse, which has devastated advertising-driven businesses everywhere, and also including a long and sometimes acrimonious contract showdown with Hollywood's TV and movie actors, which could have been truly catastrophic if a strike-averting resolution had not been reached.

The networks have retreated and retrenched; the summer version of the TV press tour, which used to run almost three weeks, has been cut back to a tightly scheduled two weeks as the U.S.'s major broadcasters have sought any means possible to cut costs and consolidate efforts with the cable specialty nets their parent companies also own.

(As evidence of how things are changing, as I wrote this I received an email update from Variety.com that controversial NBC Entertainment chairman Ben Silverman had been cut loose just days before the network's TCA presentations, meaning the Peacock will have a brand-new programming boss in place when it presents its fall-launch lineup to the assembled critical mass a few days from now).

On the other side of the notepad and microphone, the print-media community has been equally hard-hit by the current economic times. Recent conversations with TCA executives have revealed that many -- perhaps as many as a couple of dozen -- of the newspaper business's most experienced and esteemed TV critics will not be making the trip to Pasadena this summer; some are victims of tightened budgets at their various publications, but even more have left the TV beat completely as a result of newspaper-chain reorganization or out-and-out closure of the papers that employ(ed) them.

And what that means is that this version of the summer TV press tour is bound to be a less spirited encounter than in years past, as many of the most interesting and insightful folks on both sides of this informational give-and-take will not be here to add their voices to what has always been a fascinatingly fractious debate.

Still, there's lots of information, and no small amount of Hollywood-style chatter, to be gathered during the next couple of weeks -- including appearances by the likes of Matt Damon, Edward Norton and Whoopi Goldberg (who are executive producers of some new made-for-cable TV offerings), Joan Rivers and Dennis Hopper (who are onscreen stars of new shows on U.S. cable networks), the ever-cranky Larry David (here to promote the upcoming seventh season of Curb Your Enthusiasm), PBS stalwart and resident documentarian Ken Burns (who has a new epic series examining America's national parks), public TV's fuzzy blue Cookie Monster (part of a Sesame Street 40th-birthday celebration), new prime-time talker Jay Leno and current late-night chatterbox Craig Ferguson (in separate conversations), and the casts and producers of more than two dozen brand-new U.S.-network dramas and comedies that will be vying for your flipper-finger affections this fall.

We'll be here, the whole way, trying to make sense of it all from a Canadian Prairie perspective. And I'll try to add a few less-relevant observations as I go, in my ongoing TV-flavoured blog, CouchBoy Chronicles, on this newspaper's website.

It's going to be a strange trip, indeed. I hope you'll join me for the ride.

brad.oswald@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition July 28, 2009 D1