Cable TCA Tour Lacks Some Big Guns This Year

TV writers—yours truly included—return to the Left Coast this week for the first Television Critics Association tour in a year where cable will kick off an event that normally takes place twice annually, in the winter and summer.

The Writers Guild of America strike earlier this year not only hit Hollywood in the wallet, it put the kibosh on the January press tour, which had to be canceled. Now, the Screen Actors Guild is in the middle of a bitter battle for a new contract. But even with that threat hanging over Hollywood the summer press tour is forging forward.

The “tour” is when TV networks tell the media—gathered scribes from papers across the nation—about their new shows, for the summer, fall and beyond. Network executives, producers, writers and actors take part in panels and field questions—sometimes fawning, sometimes downright nasty—from the media, who use the panels as fodder for stories in the coming months.

It’s likely that reporters this go-around will grill the actors on the panels about what stance they are taking on SAG’s negotiations. Tuesday, ballots are due for AFTRA’s contract, a deal that SAG has skewered, and that vote is considered a bellwether for how SAG may proceed.

The press tour is being held in Beverly Hills. I know it sounds like a cushy gig. Some may suspect we’re all out here living high on the hog in sunny California, lounging by the pool and having a good ol’ time. In point of fact, it’s a lot of hours spent cooped up in freezing hotel ballrooms, trying to keep up and file stories for all the sessions, wolfing down lunch in five minutes so you can go back to your room and write before the next panel.

Tim Goodman of the San Francisco Chronicle calls the tour “the death march with cocktails,” and I think that’s about right.

Sure, the networks give fancy parties at night, but when you’re jet-lagged and have just filed 2,000 words of copy, just the idea of schmoozing an executive after hours—even when you’re sipping an apple martini—can be a bit exhausting. Hell, it’s a tough job, but somebody has to do it.

The summer press tour at the Beverly Hilton will be different than past years, in that many of the major cable programmers with high-profile shows—USA Network, Sci Fi Channel, Disney Channel, FX, Showtime, and others—will not be doing their presentations during cable’s four days of sessions, taking some luster and pizzazz away from cable’s portion of the tour.

Those networks, part of media conglomerates that own major broadcast networks, will be presenting during broadcast’s part of the tour—which follows cable—alongside their corporate siblings ABC, NBC, Fox and CBS. So I won’t be seeing FX’s panel on the final season of The Shield, for example.  

With networks like USA and FX not presenting during the cable press tour, smaller and medium-sized cable networks wound up getting coveted slots this week on cable’s roster. TV One, for example, is slated to kick off the cable TCA sessions Tuesday morning. HDNet also has a slot.

And cable’s TCA tour still does have some original-programming heavy hitters on its roster this week, including HBO, TNT, TBS and Lifetime.

The very future of the TCA tour seems a bit iffy. Some TV networks privately challenge the usefulness of the event, which is a costly undertaking for them. With local newspapers cutting back on staff, and eliminating their own TV critics, some could argue there is less and less need for the press tour. But with the Internet and bloggers covering TV with a vengeance, the TCA tour may still be an efficient way for networks to get out the word—and try to generate buzz—for their new shows.