Dispatch from NBC: 'Friday Night Lights' goes to DirecTV

So Dan Fienberg opened the "Friday Night Lights" press tour session by asking Jason Katims whether he would understand why fans of the show who don't have DirecTV -- and therefore will be out of the loop when new episodes begin airing in October (the NBC run won't be until February) -- might feel compelled to illegally download those episodes to avoid getting spoiled on when Landry kills again.

“I would like to think that I would be patient and wait and watch the real version when it was available to you,” Katims told him.

Zach Gilford had a more realistic idea: “If I were such a good fan, I would go ahead and download it, but then in good conscience, turn your TV onto NBC when it comes on."

The press conference itself focused a lot on the DirecTV deal, but afterwards I was in the scrum with Katims to get a lot of details about the 13-episode season three, which will pick up at the start of the next school/football year. Some excerpts after the jump...

On some of the upcoming storylines:

Tami Taylor is going to become principal of the school. We think that's going to be a really great story. From the beginning, we've tried to find stories for Connie, because we think she's wonderful, find ways for her to be as much in the show as a driving story as possible and not just being the coach's wife. But we also think that can be a really good way to turn it around and bring it back to the marriage, where she turns around and finds herself on the opposite sides of some issues.

Tim and Lyla are in a serious relationship... We think it'll be a tremendously fun storyline that could also become very moving. It's one thing to have this passionate, secret relationship, but once they're in a real relationship, they see how different they are. They're like an odd couple, from different sides of the tracks. They have different ideas of the future. They have different ideas of personal hygiene. I think it's going to be really fun to watch that. And we talked a lot about it being senior year. Lyla and Tim are both seniors, and it's a question of where they're headed. Lyla tries to get Tim to be the best merchant of himself -- get into college, get a scholarship -- but the question is whether these two are destined to stay together.

(Note: When I asked Katims during the session how Riggins, Lyla and Tyra have yet to graduate, given that they were all written as the same age as Street at the beginning, he laughed nervously and said that it's the third season, and it's finally time for them to get serious about small details like what grade people are in. In the scrum, he said that those three and Saracen are seniors; somebody asked whether Landry was as well, but he was distracted by another question and didn't answer.)

On writing out Street and Smash after the first few episodes:

The further and further (Street) got away from the team, the more it just seemed natural that the show has to evolve and continue to move on. With these characters leaving, there's going to be an opportunity to bring more people in. I love Scott Porter and Gaius Charles, as actors and as people, but there's also an opportunity that we need to start thinking about. The show needs to evolve and stay fresh.

Both of their storylines are two of the most powerful stories we're doing this year. We're not doing this in an unceremonious way, and we very much want to leave the door open for both of these actors to come back to the show.

Will Mama Smash stick around?

We're going to do everything we can to keep her on the show.

On lessons learned from season two:

What I liked about last season was watching these characters spread out and grow and evolve. What I want to do this season is bring everybody back to the nucleus and have stories more with each other. We have a few really great new characters, but we're really taking care to, first and foremost, make our characters interact with our other regular characters.

There also won't be any murders.

We're going to try to do those stories we do best, those intimate stories about adolescence, relationships, marriage, parenthood. I really think we're going to hit our stride this year. I'm very excited about these stories.

On a quarterback controversy for the Panthers:

We're introducing a new character named JD McCoy, who's a freshman quarterback, and is a phenomenal quarterback. In the first episode of the season, there becomes a controversy over who's going to become the freshman quarterback for the Panthers.

Both of his parents are also in the story. They've actually moved from Dallas. His father's a very successful beer distributor, and they've moved from Dallas for him to play on the Panthers. Not only is it about the son, JD, but about the pressure this very successful father is trying to put on the coach to play his son. That's the kind of story we've always wanted to tell on the show.

On when we'll find out how the previous football season finished up for the Panthers:

We're going to find out in the teaser of the first episode.

On the state of the other teenage romances:

Matt and Julie, we want to very slowly, in baby steps, have them start to be friends again and we'll see how it goes from there.

Tyra, in the intervening eight months, has felt that while she loves Landry, she kind of feels like he's not really the guy. And so it becomes a story about are htey going to be able to be friends and is Landry going to be able to accept that.

So they're over?

Depends on if you ask Tyra or if you ask Landry. They had a conversation, but after the conversation, Tyra's interpretation was 'We broke up,' and Landry's was 'We're taking a break.' So it's going to get pretty tense, especially when she meets this other new character we're introducing a few episodes in: Cash, who's an old friend of Billy Riggins, who's a local rodeo star.

Is Santiago still on the show?

No, but we have a lot of great story for Buddy. One of the things is dealing with this relationship that his daughter has gotten herself into. The other thing is dealing with his new best friend, Principal Taylor, which he has to do on a regular basis as head of the booster club. Tami loves it! Loves every second!

On the Landry/Saracen friendship:

One of my regrets about last season was with that intense secret thing between Landry and Tyra, we lost a little bit of Landry as Matt's buddy, sidekick, friend, and we're going to get that back.

Is Landry still on the team?

Yes.

On whether the new characters are there to prepare for the possibility of a fourth season of the show where Riggins and the other seniors have graduated:

We're going to introduce new characters slowly, but one or two other people on the team and other students as well. The intention is to hopefully, in a graceful way, set it up so that, as some people leave, new people come in, and we believe that we can do that. And we have the best casting directors on this show, so we're excited.

When will the decision be made on renewal?

It will be after we shoot, and frankly after all those episodes have already aired on DirecTV

So how do you write the 13th episode?

I'm certainly not going to write it as a series finale. I'm going to write it as something that hopefully will have equal shares of things that you feel are satisfied and resolved but also cliffhangers and things that make you wonder what's going to happen now.

We're going to be done with these episodes before Christmas, and they don't air on NBC until February. Our strategy is going to be to try to do great episodes, and hopefully, that will be good enough to bring people back.

Why not continue with the school year from season two?

I think that the football season provides, for me, the spine of the season of TV. It's the engine for the whole year. So if you were to start in the playoffs, and you get to however you get, and they weren't supposed to get very far last year, you get to wherever they get to, you're a few episodes into it, it just doesn't make sense to me to continue the story that way.

But doesn't skipping the non-football part of the school year mean we miss a lot, particularly in terms of the teen romances?

We are talking about, in this year, of having the final football game maybe being the penultimate episode of the season, and then having the next episode be a time cut so we're able to do what you're talking about. We're playing around with that a little.

But to have the majority of the season have be the off-season for football would be too much. Especially since -- I read you guys, and one of the comments about the second season was 'Not enough football,' and we want to correct that this year. Click here to read the full post

Dispatches from the TCA Awards: Tom Hanks' shame, Tina Fey's pockets, Paul Giamatti's habit and a whole lotta 'Mad Men'

Tonight was one of my favorite nights of every summer tour: the ceremony for the annual Television Critics Association Awards. Sure, there have been years where I vehemently disagreed with some of the winners ("Heroes" over "The Wire" -- or anything else -- for Program of the Year last year, to name one), but it's nice to be able to celebrate the work we admire the most, and the low-frills, untelevised nature of the event tends to lead to memorable moments.

After the jump, a list of the winners, and a rundown of some of this year's award ceremony highlights:

"Mad Men" was the big champ, winning Outstanding New Program, Outstanding Achievement in Drama and Program of the Year. As the winners know in advance what's going to happen (the losers don't come), Matt Weiner made sure to share the wealth with the acceptance speeches. He took Program of the Year, but let fellow producer Scott Hornbacher handle New Program, and sent John Slattery and Jon Hamm up on stage for the drama series award. Hamm thanked the creators of shows like "Keeping Up With the Kardashians" for creating a niche on the opposite end of the quality spectrum for them to thrive, while Slattery noted, "I would like to say how glad I am that the show's message of drinking and smoking and whoring has resonated with the TCA."

"30 Rock" swept our two comedy categories, for both series and individual achievement. Tina Fey, wearing a snazzy gown that somehow had room for pockets, cracked a "Bosom Buddies" joke during one of her speeches in the direction of Tom Hanks (more on him in a minute), and referred to "30 Rock" as "the highest-rated cable show on broadcast TV. It's a great time to be in broadcast television! It's like being in vaudeville in the '60s!"

HBO's "John Adams" miniseries was our other multiple winner, for best miniseries and for Individual Achievement in Drama for Paul Giamatti. Giamatti was particularly frenetic as he gave his speech, admitting that he just quit smoking after picking the habit back up after having kicked it for 10 years (got all that?) while filming "John Adams," which he described as a real, um, buster of a certain piece of his anatomy. Hanks, one of the executive producers, accepted the miniseries award and, after thanking Tina Fey for once again reminding us all that he starred in "Bosom Buddies," mocked us for doing such a low-frills, untelevised ceremony.

As Hanks was, with Garry Shandling, involved in the second-funniest moment in the history of the TCA Awards(*), and as he was really funny again tonight I'll let him slide. Also, after the ceremony was over, I went over to tell him that many of us in the room genuinely, unironically enjoyed "Bosom Buddies" -- particularly the second, cross-dressing-lite season -- as he laughed, then buried his face in his hands. I assured him that it was okay, that he had two Oscars and all these other awards, and he reflected on how he and Peter Scolari knew the show was doomed by the third or fourth week, and yet kept working on it for two years.

(*) The funniest moment of all-time was Sid Caesar's acceptance speech for Career Achievement, which I described in a post that has since been lost to time and the NJ.com servers, and which I'll rehash some other time. The second funniest moment was the year the Hanks-produced "From the Earth to the Moon" won the miniseries award. The award was being presented by one of our more veteran members, who very quickly lost her place in the prepared introductory remarks she had written, and so Hanks and Shandling came to her rescue and took turns reading what she had written while ad-libbing about how weird this all was. I doubt I'm doing it justice; when I retell the Sid Caesar story, you'll appreciate that one.

Other winners: Ken Burns' "The War" for Outstanding Achievement in News and Information, "WordGirl" for children's programming, the Career Achievement Award to Lorne Michaels, and the Heritage Award (sort of a Career Achievement for shows) to "The Wire." That's the one and only TCA Award the show has ever won, and while I'm not happy about that -- see last year -- at least it's one more than it'll get from the Emmys. David Simon got up and noted that a big part of the final season's newspaper storyline was about the uselessness of awards and prizes. Then he looked at his new translucent TCA Award, put on a big fake grin and said that clearly, he was wrong.

In other entertaining developments from the night:

• The Smothers Brothers were our opening act, and after 50 years of working together, Tom and Dick still had the old patter down. As an added treat, Dick narrated an extensive slideshow and highlight reel of the best and most controversial moments from their '60s variety series, maybe, as TCA co-founder David Bianculli put it, the only series in TV history to get fired rather than canceled. By the time they were done, every person in the room -- be they critic or celebrity -- seemed to want to run out and pre-order the DVD set featuring the best of their third and final season on CBS.
• Some years, the winners bolt as soon as the show is over. (Or, in the case of last year with both Alec Baldwin and David Chase, as soon as they've accepted their final award.) While Hanks and Fey and Michaels all left fairly quickly, everybody else stuck around for the rest of the night, so I got to both pay homage to some of my favorite actors (Bryan "Salvatore" Batt from "Mad Men," Andre "Bubbs" Royo from "The Wire") and to pay witness to bizarre scenes like Vincent Kartheiser (Pete from "Mad Men") and Jamie Hector (Marlo from "The Wire") swapping cell phone numbers. I had to really fight the urge to interrupt their tete-a-tete with my best, loudest impression of Lester Freamon screaming, "That's the cell number of the mother-****er who dropped 22 bodies on us!"
• When I mentioned to Jon Hamm that I thought he'd be a natural for Greg Berlanti's in-the-works "Green Lantern" movie, he said I was far from the first person to mention that, and claimed that he was a comic book geek once upon a time himself. I must have looked suspicious, so he invoked the name of Hal Jordan. Still not sure I buy it, but it'd be cool if true -- and cooler if Hamm somehow wound up in the movie.

A fun night was had by all, one of the best such nights in TCA history, a lot of people seemed to agree. If you want to see a picture of Hanks accepting his award (if only to get a sense of what the awards themselves look like), go to the NJ.com version of this post. Click here to read the full post

Dispatch from the CW: Brenda Walsh, Michael Lee, Lucille Bluth and more on the new '90210'

Why is this man smiling? Doesn't he remember Dukie?

So Tristan Wilds and the rest of the gang from the new "90210" were just here at press tour. After the jump, some highlights, including confirmation about the return of Shannen Doherty.

• Doherty will be back for several episodes as Brenda Walsh, who comes back to West Beverly as a special guest director for the school musical. (When last we saw Brenda, she was heading to London to study theater; the press release says she was successful as both an actress and director.)
• I asked new showrunners Jeff Judah and Gabe Sachs why they thought Tristan, last seen on the polar opposite of "90210" as Michael on "The Wire," would be right to play the lead on this new show. They admitted they were both huge "Wire" geeks, and that they spent most of their first few days working with him acting like they were on "The Chris Farley Show." ("Remember that time you were sitting on the stoop? That was awesome!") I could not get a satisfactory answer as to why they chose to leave Dukie behind.
• The Peach Pit will be reimagined as more of a hip coffee house that the kids like to hang out at. Joe E. Tata was a very special guest at the CW's breakfast, but I didn't get a chance to talk to hm.
• Jessica Walter, who plays Tabitha, the boozing ex-movie star mom of Rob Estes' character, was asked how Tabitha compares to Lucille Bluth. "Lucille enjoys vodka, while Tabitha prefers scotch."

Click here to read the full post

Dispatch from CBS: Talking with HIMYM co-creator Craig Thomas

At CBS' party last night, I talked to "How I Met Your Mother" co-creator Craig Thomas about what CBS president Nina Tassler said about Stella's potential status as The Mother and what else is coming up at the start of season four, and Craig even slipped me a very important exclusive about the new season.

Nina said during her press conference that she doesn't think Stella is the mother. Your reaction?

I am not prepared to say either way whether she is the mom. But I will also say we're not antsy to tell people who the mom is in the premiere of season four. We have a little mystery going. "What's up with the island on 'Lost'? I don't know; let's keep watching!" So I think Nina is right to say we're not going to give it away in our first episode back.

What can you tell me about what happens next season?

We're not going to jerk the audience around. Our premiere gets right to it on both cliffhangers: on the proposal cliffhanger and the Barney longing look at Robin cliffhanger. Maybe we're not milking it enough, as a lot of shows do very well. We're just diving into that in episode one. A-story, B-story, just picking up on Ted and Stella and Barney dealing with those feelings. Let's get right to it and give the audience what they want.

You've been building to Barney and Robin since the Laser Tag episode in season one.

We have. It's been two years coming, we don't need to stretch it out any longer than that. Neil's so amazing with her, Cobie's so amazing with Neil. Lily's going to play into it a bunch, as the only one who can tell something's a little odd about Barney, something a little different than before the bus hit him. It's fun to see her recognize him.

So how do you do this without defanging Barney?

We don't defang Barney, because Barney will always be Barney. We've shown Barney have af eeling side and quickly retreat back into his comfort zone before. What's interesting about this is that we'll see Barney sustain something emotional over several episodes. I think the audience will see very quickly that we're not defanging Barney. We'll see a guy who has these feelings and has no clue what to do with them.

And the flipside of that is what Neil said at the New York Emmy event: how do you do this without making Robin look like an idiot for getting with a man she knows treats women so badly?

The funny thing is, they were so sweet together in that Sandcastles episode where he put his arm around her and told her how awesome she is. You just buy it. There will never be a more perfect woman for Barney than Robin. I kind of just buy it, I don't feel like we have to prove it to the audience. Ultimately, it's about exploring what the hell would Barney do with this. Obviously, when he was Hippie Barney, 10-12 years ago, he had feelings for a girl, and probably hasn't had one second of considering that since. I think it's going to be a Neil powerhouse episode.

Do you think at this point the fans are more invested in Robin and Barney than in Ted and whoever the mom turns out to be?

I think fans have been watching Robin and Barney for two years, so until we say someone's the mom, the fans aren't going to freak as much about that as they are about Barney with Robin. And that's fine with me. The fans are invested in the mom no matter what we do, but Barney andRobin, that glance he took at Robin, I'll be honest, that was thrilling to us. That was a great little gracenote in our finale and it's given us a lot of rocket fuel for our first six.

Okay, so we know what's happening with Ted and Stella and Robin and Barney and Lily. What's happening with Marshall? Or is Jason Segel just big-timing you now and he'll show up once or twice an episode to show his penis?

Here is a Newark Star-Ledger exclusive: we will see Jason Segel's penis in all 24 episodes this season. And always in different surprising ways. Different framings: some will be close-ups, some will be really wide, some will be really tight close-ups. We pitched it to CBS, and they loved it.

No, Segel will be in episode one being a really good friend to Ted and being the guy saying to Ted, 'Really? Three months? Three months in and you're proposing? In the same day where you broke up with her, got in a car accident and proposed?' He's going to be the voice of reason a little bit. They're like family, and he has to ask the hard questions.

What is the status of the Dowisetrepla apartment that Marshall and Lily bought? Will they ever move into it?

We don't find them in there in episode one, but the idea of them moving and the idea of things shifting around and us reconfiguring the living situation for everyone on the show, we're getting into that.

Well, at the end of "The Goat," you gave up that Robin would be living in Ted's apartment within the next year.

We try to keep our promises on "How I Met Your Mother," we're pretty proud of our continuity. The fans seem to love that, we want to honor the fans, so we are not jerking anyone around on that front. You will see Robin moving in with Ted and you will see another arrangement happening.

And do you actually have an idea for the goat itself?

I'm going to be honest with you: we have thirty-five ideas for the goat! That jerkaround -- that unabashed audience jerkaround we did on the goat -- was us not being able to choose one of those 35 ideas that we had two years to come up with. We will get there. I promise all "HIMYM" fans.

I liked that bit in "The Chain of Screaming" where we got to see all the other characters as Marshall. That seemed like a new trick in your bag in terms of playing with narrative and perspective. Might we see more of that?

I love that, because that's how it is when you hang out with a group of friends, they go, "Oh, you know what I would have done in that situation?" and they pitch you some impossibly cool idea and you feel like an idiot for not trying that, and it's like, "No, in the moment, you never think of that thing. Screw you, man!" I like that form and hope to do it again.

And, of course, that gave us Alyson grabbing her crotch.

I guarantee you this: you will see Jason's penis and Alyson grabbing her crotch in all 24 episodes. It's going to be our best season yet! Click here to read the full post

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, Act 3: Of course, of course

Some thoughts on the finale of "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog" (which will be up on the official site until Sunday night, so watch and/or download it while you can), plus an interview with Dr. Horrible himself, Neil Patrick Harris, coming up just as soon as I finish my song...

Barring some kind of goofy, character-defying twist like making Penny turn out to be Bad Horse, "Dr. Horrible" was going to end one of two ways: Dr. Horrible gets the girl, or Dr. Horrible becomes the supervillain of his dreams. Joss Whedon chose the latter, and chose to have it play out in the worst way possible for poor Billy. He gets the thing he thought he wanted, but at the cost of what he really wanted. Lovely work by NPH and Felicia Day, particularly that gut punch of a moment where the dying Penny tells him not to worry, that Captain Hammer will save them.

The rest of it was the usual cleverness we've come to expect over the previous two acts. Bad Horse turns out to be an actual horse, and is in the Evil League of Evil with the likes of Fake Thomas Jefferson, Dead Bowie and Professor Normal. Captain Hammer sings a song belittling the homeless, but it's so catchy and he's so handsome that everybody but Penny wants to sing along. And Captain Hammer turns out to be a bully who can dish it out but can't take it, judging by his crying jags after actually being hurt by the backfire of Dr. Horrible's death ray.

All in all, this was a lot of fun, bringing lots of what I enjoy about Joss Whedon's work even on a micro-budget scale.

Will there be further adventures of poor Dr. Horrible? That's one of the questions that came up when I tag-teamed Neil with Mo Ryan (which is why many of the quotes here are the same as the ones you can see in her own "Dr. Horrible" post) at CBS' press tour party last night. Some excerpts:

On the huge day one reaction to "Dr. Horrible," which overwhelmed the servers:

"We got an e-mail from Joss that said, 'Gang, we broke the internet.' That's all he said. That's awesome."

On how much he enjoyed being a part of the project:

I will say that once I actually downloaded Jed singing the scratch tracks, I had trouble not listening to it. I was listening to it all the time. Partly because Iw as having to sing it, but partly because I think the songs are really really catchy. And then once I sang it, I listened to myself singing it, and I still will go on an airplane, if there's turbulence, listen to Dr. Horrible. I think I've watched the three parts 7 or 8 times each -- and I was in it! I gain nothing while doing that except that they're really clever.

While we were filming it, I thought we were sitting on something really unique and good, and I know Joss cared about it enough that I suspected he wouldn't fuck it up in editing or change its trajectory.

On how he got involved:

I've been friendly with Joss on a personal level for a while and have always wanted to work with him. I've known him since early Buffy days. ... I usually see him at social gatherings, we have similar groups of friends. He's the kind of person where you talk to him, and he's so clever that you try to keep up with him. So when he wrote a part that I got to play, it was kinda him, him being himself. Then I had a bigger challenge to try to emulate Joss' mind a little bit. The songs are great. Act III is killer.

What would happen if Barney Stinson and Dr. Horrible met, and, more importantly, ho'od win in a fight?

I would suspect that Barney would be very dismissive of Dr. Horrible. He's a bit nerdy in prototype. But I think Dr. horrible would win the fight, just because Barney probably represents all the guys who laughed at him when he was younger. Plus, he has a freeze ray.

On where each iconic character would rank on an awesomeness scale:

Dr. Horrible, on a scale of 1 to 10 is a 10, and Barney's, like, 27.

Will there be more Dr. Horrible?

Joss has some strange giant master plan that includes much more than a sequel. Joss thinks on a great many levels. When he was pitching this to us, he said, 'This will take over the world, and there will be musicals on stage and feature films and we'll get our own television network and they'll name awards after us.'

I think we're all giggling like little schoolgirls for a week or so and then he'll figure out what he wants to do next.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Dispatch from CBS: When Diane Ruggiero attacks

I should start this post with a disclaimer: Diane Ruggiero (pictured above right) and I are friends. Friend-ly? Friends-ish? Not exacty sure what noun to use, but I interviewed her when she had first made the transition from Jersey waitress to TV show creator (of CBS' "That's Life"), and we hit it off well enough that we've kept in touch, even when I wasn't interviewing her for one of the several profiles I've done over the years. (The two best ones are the one from when our first meeting, when she was brand-new to Hollywood, and one from five and a half years later, when she was working on "Veronica Mars" after her initial dreams kind of crashed and burned.)

Or, to put it another way, we know each other well enough that, when I (sitting way back in the cheap seats) asked her a question during the press conference for her new CBS show, "The Ex-List," she asked, "Is that Alan?" and when I confirmed that it was, she waved at me. (That's now two showrunners in two days name-checking me from the stage, and it needs to stop, immediately. I'm getting far too much grief from the peanut gallery.)

I say all this because I like Diane, and therefore recognize that I'm not unbiased when it comes to her. So don't take my word for it when I say her performance during that press conference was one of the funniest of the tour. Take it from more objective critics like Peter Ames Carlin or Robert Philpot. The general consensus seemed to be that even people who weren't fond of the pilot would give the show a second look based on how funny Diane was on stage. After the jump, some of the many highlights.

"The Ex-List" is about a woman (Elizabeth Reaser, aka Ava/Rebecca from "Grey's Anatomy") who is told by a psychic that she must find her soulmate and marry him within the year or else die alone, and that her soulmate is a man with whom she was romantically involved in the past. A critic opened the session with the obvious question of asking what happens if the show gets renewed for a second season.

Diane put a hand to her mouth, made like this had never occurred to her before, and let out a perfectly-timed, "Oh, no."

Later, a critic referred to the subplot in the pilot that featured a lot of "vaginal humor," and without missing a beat, she replied, "I actually let my vagina write half of the script, so it's not my fault."

She discussed how her father is so proud of her he intends to have his whole church group watch the pilot, and when she warned him about the racier material, he then made sure that she was being well-paid and had health insurance, and left her with only one other instruction: "Don't make fun of Italians."

Like many proud Italian-Americans, Diane tends to talk with her hands, and at one point, the gestures became so frenetic that they started to create feedback in the microphone she was using. She tried to keep her hands clamped to the armrest in her chair, and there was a very long pause.

"That's awesome," she noted. "Now I stopped doing that and I have nothing to say. What the hell was I talking about?"

At another point, while trying to discuss the dynamic between Reaser's character and her friends on the show, she shared a Keanu/Sandra Bullock-related game she and her own friends like to play.

"We have a 'Lake House' drinking game in which we watch 'The Lake House' and if you want to make a joke, you have to drink. And we're drunk in, like, the first five minutes, because none of us cannot, like, not make a joke. It's just ridiculous."

Finally, Philadelphia Inquirer critic Jonathan Storm asked her about her transformation from neophyte Meadowlands waitress to the sleek Hollywood veteran who sat before us, and the resulting monologue (interrupted on occasion by Stormy) was so funny and charming that it won over even the real cynics in the room. I don't know how much of it translates out of context, but I'm going to reproduce it in its entirety for you to get a sense of the pure, unfiltered Diane Ruggiero:

DIANE RUGGIERO: I mean, in the beginning when I first got out here and I was like "Whoo-hoo. Look at this. Keys to the kingdom." I was like "Oh, wait. I have to actually do something. Crap." It was scary and I had no idea, you know, what I was -- terrifying. I literally was waitressing one day and then three months later was at my typewriter like -- but then the show was cancelled and I didn't work for like a year and I'm like "So does someone come and tell me to go home? What happens now? They don't just give you another pilot?" I was just waiting for that to happen. Apparently no one else was waiting for that to happen, and so it was scary.

And that's like one of the things -- you know, being a writer, it's not just like they're constantly like giving you jobs and shows. There was some lean years, man, and -- well, a lean year and a half. "Woe is me." Right?

Then I went on "Veronica Mars" and that was the best experience of my life, hands down, and that is why I'm here, I believe. And doing "Veronica Mars," Rob Thomas is a genius. He's one of my best friends. I had this feeling like I couldn't write anything other than my stuff in Jersey and what we were talking about, like that little world, like if I can throw my Aunt Janice into it, I'm cool, but otherwise I'm screwed. And working on "Veronica Mars" meant that I can actually write and, you know, other things. It was a great experience.

As far as California goes, it was like Alan, who I know from New Jersey. I used to be heavier by like 50 pounds, 50 pounds, and they actually weren't going to let me stay here because apparently -- I would like go into a store and "Do you have a size 14?" And they're like "Bitch, you're in California. We don't carry a size 14. What are you talking about? Put down the fries. Go to the beach."

Talk about ex lists, like in Jersey I was like cute, you know, kind-of-ish. I'm not -- I never had a problem getting a boyfriend. I dated. I had people. I literally was out here. I'm like "Oh, my God. If they're not coming at me with like a head shot going 'You're a producer, right,' there's like nothing." That's how I met Adam. But yes, it's different. I don't know. I'm just talking. Did I answer anything that you wanted to know?

How am I still here? Is this cool? This rocks. It's really -- like getting to do -- I have this weird, funny thing with CBS where I love them and they're very, very sweet to me and very supportive of me and, you know, there were times we were trying to work together again and it was always me and Barbara Hall. It was always me and some rock-star producer. And I'm like "Why are you even pretending that I'm going to get this job?" Like I'm going to go in with my little like note cards and pitch you and then like some bad-ass producer is going to come in and I'm going to be -- you know, and it was like pulling away the football a couple of times and then they called me about this and I was thinking "Okay. Who is the bad-ass producer attached?" And there wasn't, so I just sunk my teeth in and was like "We have to do this quick because of the strike? Cool. You're stuck with me. Try to shake me now. Just try it."

QUESTION: What do the friends and family back in East Rutherford or wherever it is think about what you have become?

DIANE RUGGIERO: I have such like a "boom" response that I just go "Don't cry." I'm literally thinking about my sister and my parents. They're -- I mean, it's cool. It's cool to -- it's great. My family is so incredibly supportive and they love it and my father is still surprised, I think -- well, actually, no. He's not surprised anymore, but I think there was a long period of time where I was such a loser like that my family -- if you looked -- big Italian family, tons of cousins, and if you looked at all of them and you said "Okay. Who's the jackass? Who is moving back home and living with her parents," like universally they would all be pointing at me. So me doing this is like kind of a big -- it was a big deal, but now they're all very supportive and proud and it's cool. It's cool. I have to say as far as exes go and all that business, it's cool to get to -- this is awful. It's kind of bad-ass and cool to get to know that the people that knew you when and perhaps maybe didn't think that -- it's like "How do you like me now?" It's like "You broke up with me. Gee. I hope you're not a storyline."

I have to say -- there is -- am I supposed to -- is there like another question or -- I'm going to tell you something really quick.

QUESTION: Just keep going.

DIANE RUGGIERO: So we're talking about like -- you know, I have -- when I meet Elizabeth, I'm looking at Elizabeth and I'm going "Who is" -- I love the idea that people broke up with -- as different from the Israeli version where they only did 11 episodes and she broke up with all the guys. I wanted to have -- to be -- to throw some egg on Elizabeth's face and have some unrequited -- unrequited stuff. And the whole premeeting with Elizabeth is me going "Who is the guy that dumps Elizabeth?" I'm trying to like think about -- what I could think about -- my own personal stories, what I could bring to the table and see Elizabeth doing those things just brought me so much joy. Thinking about the jackass moves that I made, I literally -- and I thought this guy I was dating was cheating on me, right? So of course I snuck around and so he -- because you have to make sure because perhaps you're wrong. And so I'm in his apartment. I see him do this thing in his closet. He has this paper and he puts it under this box and I knew about this box. This box was like a box where he kept shit and it was this cardboard box and it was on the shelf in his closet. He puts the paper and I'm like "What's the paper?" Whatever. And so he leaves and I'm there and I'm like it's my right as the person who is sleeping with him to know what is in that -- it's my right.

So I go to take the box down and I'm not kidding. I go like this (indicating) and then it was just like (inaudible) and this whole like white -- actually yellowish cloud of stuff came out and then just went (inaudible) and settled on everything. It was a box of ashes from Mount St. Helens and it was. You can't like -- that's when you go "I guess we broke up" because there's no --

(Laughter.)

Seriously with the DustBuster and then like sitting there with Elizabeth just going "How badly do I want to see her" -- and then just ash everywhere. And so I guess we can't do that now. But just seeing her as like my little person that I get to make do all the embarrassing things I did, but look cool and be funnier.

Maybe you had to be there, I don't know. Go read the old Star-Ledger profiles if these didn't work for ya. Click here to read the full post

Doctor Who, "Turn Left": Ladies and gentlemen... the beetle!

Brief spoilers for the latest episode of "Doctor Who" coming up just as soon as I buy a raffle ticket...

Damn. Looks like Russell T. Davies is trying to make sure that his final season on the show doesn't get upstaged by the annual Steven Moffat script(s).

Davies follows the taut, Serling-esque "Midnight" with its exact opposite in the equally brilliant "Turn Left." Where "Midnight" was a claustrophobic, low-budget story with an implied theme about why The Doctor needs a companion (were Donna with him on that train to explain The Doctor's eccentricities to the terrified passengers, things would have gone very differently), "Turn Left" is an epic about just how badly the human race in general and Donna in particular need The Doctor.

What-If? stories where the world goes to hell because of a hero's absence are a superhero/sci-fi staple, but "Turn Left" felt fresh and moving because of the very human face it put on this alternate timeline. Working almost entirely without David Tennant (this year, Davies chose to do separate Doctor-light and companion-light episodes as opposed to one without either in it very much), Catherine Tate more than carries the load on her own as Donna has to suffer through a world that's broken for reasons she can't understand. She's particularly good in the "Children of Men" portion of the episode, once the Titanic destroys most of southern England and things really turn bad for the Noble family and for Great Britain.

(It was a clever touch, though, for the ruination of Britain to have a silver lining during the Sontaran invasion. Also, what happened with the Adipose fat cells, sans Doctor, would seem to put the lie to my theory that nothing bad would have happened if The Doctor and Donna hadn't disrupted the plan.)

Because Davies has built such a memorable and elaborate world over the past four seasons, he was able to easily conjure up a nightmare version of seasons three and four where the same menaces came and the likes of Martha, Sarah Jane and Gwen Cooper died to prevent (some of) them. And because one of the hallmarks of the Davies-era "Doctor Who" is the writers' ability to conjure great sympathy for doomed characters in only a few minutes of screen time, the moment where Donna says goodbye to her falsely-chipper Italian neighbor earned whatever tears it may have generated.

I did find the ending a bit of a cheat, in that Donna seems to be right about the old timeline reasserting itself and bringing her back to life. But Rose (who fit right in again, rather than evoking Billie Piper's new job) seems to know quite a lot about various versions of our timeline, so I fear there may be more bad things to come for my favorite companion of the modern series.

As always, usual warning applies: we are respecting the American schedule and will not discuss anything having to do with the season's final two episodes until after they air here. Any comments with spoilers about those episodes will be deleted by me.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Attack of the horn-rimmed glasses

So a couple of days ago we got Zach Braff sporting thick glasses and a beard -- or, as Bill Lawrence said, his "smart Zach" look. Now today we got Simon Baker from "The Mentalist" sporting even thicker specs. Is this a trend I just missed out on?

(Also, it took five questions before someone brought up "Psych," and the producer of course insisted they're two completely different shows.)

UPDATE: A couple of other critics reminded me that we also got Smart Tim Daly yesterday. That's three, and that's a trend. Will try to upload a photo of that when Blogger stops acting buggy. Click here to read the full post

Sepinwall on TV: 'CSI' transition plans, Katie Couric's job status and more

Insta-column up over at NJ.com, in which I detail CBS' plans for the character who will follow Gil Grissom on "CSI," Katie Couric affirming her career plans, the status of "Swingtown," something of a big spoiler for "HIMYM" vis-a-vis Sarah Chalke, plus Nina's latest comment on the cancellation of "Moonlight."

(Also, if you need some light reading, I strongly recommend you read the comments for the NJ.com version of today's Day in the Life of Press Tour entry, and keep in mind how complicated it is to register on NJ.com, and that these fine people did it just to register their opinions.) Click here to read the full post

A day in the life of press tour: CBS/Showtime

Didn't get a chance to do a rundown of yesterday's schedule because I was slammed with Emmy coverage, but after the jump, I'll walk you through today's combined CBS and Showtime jamboree...

9:05-9:35 a.m.: Executive session with Nina Tassler, in which the "Moonlight," "Jericho" and possibly even "Joan of Arcadia" fans will whine about their show's cancellation. (That, or the critics will whine on their behalf.)

10-10:30 a.m.: A CBS News session with Katie Couric, Jeff Greenfield, Bob Schieffer and CBS News boss Sean McManus. Like the reps of every other network and cable news dvision who've shown up so far, they're here to talk about the election, but I suspect we're going to devote a good chunk of this one to "Katie, are you quitting?" or "Katie, why hasn't it worked out for you here?" questions. And no, I will not be repeating my wardrobe question from Katie's last press tour appearance.

10:30-11:15 a.m.: Writing time, all the East Coast media types who are obsessed with TV news can file stories reporting what Katie said about her job status.

11:15-11:45 a.m.: "Worst Week," which will be something of a relief to discuss as it's one of the few network pilots we actually got to see before tour.

12-12:30 p.m.: "Eleventh Hour," in which we'll ask why we didn't get to see what sounds like it was a completed pilot.

12:30-2 p.m.: Lunch, and more writing time. At some point in there, I may slip over to the parking garage to charge my phone. (A bit of travel advice: if you're going to a two-week conference where you may not be leaving the hotel much, don't only bring a car charger for your cell phone.)

2-2:30 p.m.: "The Mentalist," where I would put the over/under on the "For the creator, are you familiar with the USA show 'Psych'?" at the second or third question. (I'm assuming the first one will be a softball for Simon Baker.)

2:45-3:15 p.m.: "The Ex-List," one of the few pilots I've both seen and enjoyed, and we'll see if creator (and Jersey girl) Diane Ruggiero can be as quiptastic on a panel as she is with her dialogue.

3:15-3:45 p.m.: Snack break, as CBS leaves the field (the Jay Mohr sitcom isn't being paneled because Jay is on a second honeymoon or something) and Showtime takes over for the rest of the afternoon.

3:45-4:15 p.m.: Showtime executive session, as Matt Blank and Robert Greenblatt try to resist the urge to say, "Suck it, HBO!" about "Dexter" getting a best drama nomination.

4:30-5:30 p.m.: A "Sho Stoppers Showcase Q&A," with the star and one producer each from "Brotherhood" (Jason Clarke in this case, not Jason Isaacs), "Californication," "Dexter" and "Weeds." These multi-show panels are always interesting to see who gets a lot of attention (I'm guessing Michael C. Hall and "Dexter" creator Clyde Phillips) and who gets ignored (I'm guessing the "Brotherhood" guys).

6:30 p.m.: Get on the bus for a combined CBS/Showtime/CW non-party party. The guest list is long and full of people I'd like to talk to -- notably Neil Patrick Harris, whom I'm sure will be mobbed with "Dr. Horrible" questions -- but the way these things go, I doubt I'll actually find and be able to talk to half the people on my list. Click here to read the full post

Burn Notice & My Boys: All about the Benjamins

Haven't reviewed more than one show in the same post in a while, but it's press tour and my time is limited. Spoilers for, in order, "Burn Notice" and then "My Boys," coming up just as soon as I buy both five drinks and a new coffee maker...

I continue to be pleased with "Burn Notice" season two. Though I'll admit to losing the plot a few times with the Sophia/Raul story (why exactly did a DEA agent need a mercenary to help pull off an undercover op?), I was glad to see that the writers intend to have Michael keep doing work independently of whatever scavenger hunts Carla sends him on. (Plus, it offered us Bruce Campbell's marvelous line reading of "I didn't know he had a Mac-10. I thought it was, like, a regular gun.")

Carla herself turns out to be quite the compelling villain, as Tricia Helfer finds a way to play a smug and sexy character in a way that's not remotely evocative of the smug and sexy Head Six from "Battlestar Galactica." And while I usually have little use for Michael's mom, I thought the writers did a good job with her here. The lookalike therapist gag was really funny, and on occasion Mom can be used to give us a little psychological insight into a guy who usually refuses to let himself appear vulnerable.

I really liked last night's "My Boys" as well. Usually it's just a light and goofy show, but they did some interesting, slightly darker things here with Andy blowing off PJ's attempt to protect his marriage, and with PJ confessing the truth about the Italy trip to Bobby, in a way that didn't feel tonally inappropriate. Setting PJ up with another guy -- and Bobby's brother, to boot -- at the exact moment where he's found out how she feels about him is sort of a classic Unresolved Sexual Tension sitcom trope, but they've been playing the whole thing so low-key that I think it can work.

I also liked the running gags like Kenny being uber-prepared for the party and Brendan complaining about the cost of everything. Every bachelor party I've been to seems to have one of each guy, and the last one I was at featured a noticeable divide between those who could afford to go eat at the meat-on-swords place and those who either went home or hit up one of the other guys for a loan. Mike was a little over-the-top, but not as bad as he's been in a lot of other episodes this season.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

The Wire, Season 1, Episode 7: "One Arrest" (Veterans edition)

Okay, it's a Friday morning and I actually have a review of "The Wire" for you. Can't promise the same for next week (I usually take a few days off at the end of press tour), but right now we're back to business as usual, in which we talk about season one of "The Wire" in two different versions: one safe for people who are brand-new to the show (or who haven't watched all the way through to the end), one where we can talk about anything from first episode of the series to last. This is the latter; scroll down for the newbies edition if you want to be protected from discussion of things that are still to come, both this season and in later seasons.

Spoilers for episode seven, "One Arrest," coming up just as soon as I explain to Fienberg that I'm Batman and he's Robin...

"A man must have a code." -Bunk

There are several types of codes at work in "One Arrest." One is Omar's code, spelled out more explicitly in his conversation with Bunk than it was in previous episodes, in which he declares that he would never put his gun on an ordinary citizen who wasn't a player in The Game. There's the code that the Barksdale crew uses to communicate, and which Lester and Prez are proving so adept at cracking. And then there's the unwritten code of conduct that players on both sides of the drug war are expected to follow -- and the consequences that befall those who don't.

Rawls is out to get Jimmy for starting the Barksdale ball rolling in the first place (thereby depriving Homicide of a detective for the rotation system) and for giving Daniels ammunition to defeat Rawls in an argument before Burrell (thereby violating chain of command and the notion that Rawls can strike fear into the hearts of all his subordinates).

The detail tries to go around the usual code of conduct by not arresting Stinkum with the package; it's such a stark departure from how things are usually done that Lester has to repeatedly explain it to Herc. But Lester proves too clever for his own good, because Avon and Stringer are smart enough to know there has to be a reason why the cops didn't track Stinkum down later to arrest him. And that in turn starts revolving the wheels in Stringer's head, which leads to him ordering the destruction of the courtyard payphones at the low-rises. As things are going, it's probably the lesser of two evils -- giving Avon's lawyer a look at the charging document would have blown the entire case -- but in retrospect, there was probably a better way to handle their tracking of the re-up.

Again and again and again, "The Wire" shows us people in long-standing institutions who try to think outside the box, and who get mocked or outright attacked for doing so. The Game is The Game, and you're only supposed to play it one way, right?

Look at what happens when Lt. Daniels tries to reach out to Kevin Johnson, the kid Prez half-blinded back in episode two. Kevin listens to Daniels' pitch for a minute, but the pressure to behave in a culturally-correct way is too much for him, and so he turns to Carver and mocks Daniels' entire offer and belief that there's another way out for a kid like him. Maybe if Prez isn't hiding in an adjacent windowed office at the moment, he considers it a little more, but I doubt it.

(While Kevin just happening to be the runner in Stinkum's car could have seemed contrived, it fit into the show's philosophy that everything is connected, and it also served as a reminder that past actions will not be forgotten. Other shows would happily stick with the more likable, puzzle-solving geek that Prez has been the last few episodes and try to forget his original sin. Not "The Wire.")

On the other hand, when you expect everyone to play The Game by your rules, you occasionally become vulnerable. Just look at how dangerous Omar has become to the Barksdale crew. They get over by instilling fear into the citizenry and punishing anyone who might speak out against them, but they would never count on someone like Omar -- someone brave and tough enough not to fear them, and well-connected enough to have intel to offer up when someone like Bunk asks -- cooperating with the cops. Omar's beef with Bird isn't specifically about Bird killing a citizen -- it's about Bird as representative of the crew who tortured and killed Brandon -- but you can tell that sort of standard 'yo behavior disgusts him just the same.

With Polk now drying out or on vacation or whatever, our focus shifts to the lowest man on the detail totem pole: Michael "Santy" Santangelo, who fits the classic hump mold of many of the original detail members. In Baltimore Homicide parlance, a "dunker" is a case that any idiot should be able to close with minimal effort, and yet Rawls notes that Santy, at best, nails 6 to 7 out of every 10 dunkers, and is all but useless on the more difficult cases.

But if Santy isn't that bright (see also him missing a chance to photograph Avon in the previous episode), he's not that bad a guy. (It's interesting to see the bit where Jimmy calls him an a-hole when he has to cover for Santy, when we know that Santy is specifically ducking out to try to save Jimmy. It's a small moment, but one of those vintage "Wire" bits where our knowledge of everyone's perspective deepens our understanding of what's really going on.) He busts his hump, by Santangelo standards, to close one of his open whodunnits, and when luck -- and Bunk and Omar -- bail him out, he recognizes that the time has come to warn Jimmy, no matter the blowback from Rawls.

Getting back to the notion of how The Game is expected to be played, behold what happens when Bubbs accompanies Johnny to his court-mandated 12-step meeting. While Johnny thinks the whole thing is a joke, something to be endured until the judge forgets about him, Bubbs' eyes are open by the sight of all the ex-junkies he hasn't seen in so long, he assumed they were dead. Even though he gets high later that night, you can see that the group speaker Walon (Steve Earle, who will sing the theme song in season five) makes a connection with Bubbs. Johnny cares about nothing but getting high, but Bubbs sees, even for a moment, a possible way out.

But whatever progress Bubbs may briefly make is canceled out by the incredibly sad sight of Wallace getting high, doing anything he can to block out his memory of Brandon's corpse and the role he played in his death. As I've said many times over the course of these reviews, Wallace is just a boy. He shouldn't have to carry this kind of emotional weight (even though he made a conscious choice to place that call), shouldn't be in an environment where the only comfort he can find is in a bag of dope. God, that kid breaks my heart.

Some other thoughts on "One Arrest":

• I like how the beating of the unrepentant, loathsome Bird is led by supervisors Daniels and Landsman, where you'd usually expect to see the rank and file doing it and the boss coming in to break things up.
• Daniels' trip to the expensive fundraiser shows that, while he's a good enough politician to be tight with Burrell -- so tight that Burrell thinks nothing of uttering a line like "In this state, there's a thin line between campaign photos and photo arrays" in front of him -- he's not really of this world, and is much more comfortable watching a ballgame with the blue-collar limo drivers.
  
• Speaking of which, note that thieving limo driver Day-Day Price is played by Donnell Rawlings, who would go on to greater comic fame a few years later as one of the supporting players (he was Ashy Larry, among other characters) on "Chappelle's Show."
• Jimmy and Bunk's scene at the bar reminds me of how much I love how the show depicts drunkenness, as the two of them always reach a level of sloshed that you almost never see in movies and on television. Also, Jimmy's line about how Bunk, um, made love to him gently is a verbatim quote from "Homicide" the book, with Jimmy saying Terry McLarney's lines and Bunk saying Bob McAllister's.
  
• Man, Omar gets all the best lines. Love the bit where he's telling them where Bird might be scoring dope: "That's if I happen to be constabulating like y'all."

And now let's look at how this episode reflects things going forward:

• Obviously, the biggest long-term development is the first meeting between Bunk and Omar, where Bunk is impressed enough by Omar's code to remember and believe in it after Marlo frames Omar for killing the delivery woman in season four.
• Rawls claims to be offering Santangeo two choices, but really he's only offering one. Santy closes a case, as demanded, and still winds up being exiled from Homicide by season's end.
• Ronnie lists a funeral parlor among Avon's assets; it'll become Stringer's headquarters in seasons two and three.
• Phelan predicts that Ronnie will become a judge within 10 years. Clearly, he underestimated her.
• We're introduced not only to Day-Day, but to Clay Davis himself, though it's such a brief appearance that I didn't even want to discuss him in the newbie portion of the review. Don't expect to hear the catchphrase this year; it first appeared in season three.
• Memory continues to play funny tricks with me about this season. I thought it took the detail much longer than a single episode to crack the pager code, whereas I remembered Bubbs deciding to get clean in the same episode where he hears Walon's speech.
• In retrospect -- and trying not to factor in what would come later this season -- more heartbreaking: Wallace getting high, or Dukie getting high?

Up next: "Lessons," in which Jimmy takes advantage of his kids, D'Angelo considers Orlando's offer, and Day-Day takes a drive. My guess is that one will be two weeks away, as I'll be wrapping up press tour, then flying home, then taking some time off to reconnect with my family.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

The Wire, Season 1, Episode 7: "One Arrest" (Newbies edition)

Okay, it's a Friday morning and I actually have a review of "The Wire" for you. Can't promise the same for next week (I usually take a few days off at the end of press tour), but right now we're back to business as usual, in which we talk about season one of "The Wire" in two different versions: one safe for people who are brand-new to the show (or who haven't watched all the way through to the end), one where we can talk about anything from first episode of the series to last. This is the former; scroll up for the veterans edition if you want to talk about things that are still to come, both this season and in later seasons.

Spoilers for episode seven, "One Arrest," coming up just as soon as I explain to Fienberg that I'm Batman and he's Robin...

"A man must have a code." -Bunk

There are several types of codes at work in "One Arrest." One is Omar's code, spelled out more explicitly in his conversation with Bunk than it was in previous episodes, in which he declares that he would never put his gun on an ordinary citizen who wasn't a player in The Game. There's the code that the Barksdale crew uses to communicate, and which Lester and Prez are proving so adept at cracking. And then there's the unwritten code of conduct that players on both sides of the drug war are expected to follow -- and the consequences that befall those who don't.

Rawls is out to get Jimmy for starting the Barksdale ball rolling in the first place (thereby depriving Homicide of a detective for the rotation system) and for giving Daniels ammunition to defeat Rawls in an argument before Burrell (thereby violating chain of command and the notion that Rawls can strike fear into the hearts of all his subordinates).

The detail tries to go around the usual code of conduct by not arresting Stinkum with the package; it's such a stark departure from how things are usually done that Lester has to repeatedly explain it to Herc. But Lester proves too clever for his own good, because Avon and Stringer are smart enough to know there has to be a reason why the cops didn't track Stinkum down later to arrest him. And that in turn starts revolving the wheels in Stringer's head, which leads to him ordering the destruction of the courtyard payphones at the low-rises. As things are going, it's probably the lesser of two evils -- giving Avon's lawyer a look at the charging document would have blown the entire case -- but in retrospect, there was probably a better way to handle their tracking of the re-up.

Again and again and again, "The Wire" shows us people in long-standing institutions who try to think outside the box, and who get mocked or outright attacked for doing so. The Game is The Game, and you're only supposed to play it one way, right?

Look at what happens when Lt. Daniels tries to reach out to Kevin Johnson, the kid Prez half-blinded back in episode two. Kevin listens to Daniels' pitch for a minute, but the pressure to behave in a culturally-correct way is too much for him, and so he turns to Carver and mocks Daniels' entire offer and belief that there's another way out for a kid like him. Maybe if Prez isn't hiding in an adjacent windowed office at the moment, he considers it a little more, but I doubt it.

(While Kevin just happening to be the runner in Stinkum's car could have seemed contrived, it fit into the show's philosophy that everything is connected, and it also served as a reminder that past actions will not be forgotten. Other shows would happily stick with the more likable, puzzle-solving geek that Prez has been the last few episodes and try to forget his original sin. Not "The Wire.")

On the other hand, when you expect everyone to play The Game by your rules, you occasionally become vulnerable. Just look at how dangerous Omar has become to the Barksdale crew. They get over by instilling fear into the citizenry and punishing anyone who might speak out against them, but they would never count on someone like Omar -- someone brave and tough enough not to fear them, and well-connected enough to have intel to offer up when someone like Bunk asks -- cooperating with the cops. Omar's beef with Bird isn't specifically about Bird killing a citizen -- it's about Bird as representative of the crew who tortured and killed Brandon -- but you can tell that sort of standard 'yo behavior disgusts him just the same.

With Polk now drying out or on vacation or whatever, our focus shifts to the lowest man on the detail totem pole: Michael "Santy" Santangelo, who fits the classic hump mold of many of the original detail members. In Baltimore Homicide parlance, a "dunker" is a case that any idiot should be able to close with minimal effort, and yet Rawls notes that Santy, at best, nails 6 to 7 out of every 10 dunkers, and is all but useless on the more difficult cases.

But if Santy isn't that bright (see also him missing a chance to photograph Avon in the previous episode), he's not that bad a guy. (It's interesting to see the bit where Jimmy calls him an a-hole when he has to cover for Santy, when we know that Santy is specifically ducking out to try to save Jimmy. It's a small moment, but one of those vintage "Wire" bits where our knowledge of everyone's perspective deepens our understanding of what's really going on.) He busts his hump, by Santangelo standards, to close one of his open whodunnits, and when luck -- and Bunk and Omar -- bail him out, he recognizes that the time has come to warn Jimmy, no matter the blowback from Rawls.

Getting back to the notion of how The Game is expected to be played, behold what happens when Bubbs accompanies Johnny to his court-mandated 12-step meeting. While Johnny thinks the whole thing is a joke, something to be endured until the judge forgets about him, Bubbs' eyes are open by the sight of all the ex-junkies he hasn't seen in so long, he assumed they were dead. Even though he gets high later that night, you can see that the group speaker Walon (Steve Earle, who will sing the theme song in season five) makes a connection with Bubbs. Johnny cares about nothing but getting high, but Bubbs sees, even for a moment, a possible way out.

But whatever progress Bubbs may briefly make is canceled out by the incredibly sad sight of Wallace getting high, doing anything he can to block out his memory of Brandon's corpse and the role he played in his death. As I've said many times over the course of these reviews, Wallace is just a boy. He shouldn't have to carry this kind of emotional weight (even though he made a conscious choice to place that call), shouldn't be in an environment where the only comfort he can find is in a bag of dope. God, that kid breaks my heart.

Some other thoughts on "One Arrest":

• I like how the beating of the unrepentant, loathsome Bird is led by supervisors Daniels and Landsman, where you'd usually expect to see the rank and file doing it and the boss coming in to break things up.
• Daniels' trip to the expensive fundraiser shows that, while he's a good enough politician to be tight with Burrell -- so tight that Burrell thinks nothing of uttering a line like "In this state, there's a thin line between campaign photos and photo arrays" in front of him -- he's not really of this world, and is much more comfortable watching a ballgame with the blue-collar limo drivers.
  
• Speaking of which, note that thieving limo driver Day-Day Price is played by Donnell Rawlings, who would go on to greater comic fame a few years later as one of the supporting players (he was Ashy Larry, among other characters) on "Chappelle's Show."
• Jimmy and Bunk's scene at the bar reminds me of how much I love how the show depicts drunkenness, as the two of them always reach a level of sloshed that you almost never see in movies and on television. Also, Jimmy's line about how Bunk, um, made love to him gently is a verbatim quote from "Homicide" the book, with Jimmy saying Terry McLarney's lines and Bunk saying Bob McAllister's.
  
• Man, Omar gets all the best lines. Love the bit where he's telling them where Bird might be scoring dope: "That's if I happen to be constabulating like y'all."

Up next: "Lessons," in which Jimmy takes advantage of his kids, D'Angelo considers Orlando's offer, and Day-Day takes a drive. My guess is that one will be two weeks away, as I'll be wrapping up press tour, then flying home, then taking some time off to reconnect with my family.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Dispatch from ABC: Shonda 'didn't feel insulted'

As mentioned below, "Grey's Anatomy" creator Shonda Rhimes was just here for a panel with her fellow ABC drama showrunners and, shockingly, we had a question or three about the Katherine Heigl/Emmy situation...

So, to recap: Emmy historian Tom O'Neil notices that Heigl, the reigning Emmy winner for drama supporting actress, hasn't submitted herself for Emmy consideration this year, and when he contacted her (or her representative) to ask, she said she didn't feel her writing this year merited Emmy consideration. This was interpreted as Heigl taking a shot at her writers, either because she has a tendency to insult people in public or because she's angling to get off the show so she can do movies full-time.

A reporter asked Shonda about ABC president Steve McPherson's comment yesterday that Heigl would be staying with the show, and that Shonda had an "unbelievable" storyline in mind for her apparently unhappy star. Shonda, who hates to give up info about future plots even in good times, said, "Story-wise, we have a really great story worked out that we're all really excited about, and things (on set) are going fine."

"Oh, put her in a coma, why don't you?" Silvio Horta, creator of "Ugly Betty," cracked. (Horta's pictured above with Rhimes.)

When asked how she first responded to hearing about Heigl's comment, Shonda said, "When I was told about it, I have to say I found it surprising. I actually have a really wonderful working relationship with Katherine. I love and respect her as an actress and I love Izzie as a character..."

Whatever she was going to say next will be lost to history, as the answer was interrupted by another reporter asking about the lesbian relationship between Callie and Dr. Hahn, and though she seemed willing to be candid in that moment, the moment quickly passed.

Later, someone asked "Desperate Housewives" creator Marc Cherry if he had any thoughts on dealing with star-related turmoil, given that he had that infamous Vanity Fair cover shoot with his actresses in season one.

"Usually, the best way to deal with actors is to pretend they're real people and you talk to them," Cherry said, while explaining that the Vanity Fair reporter only saw one side of that story, and that Cherry himself defused that particular situation by "hugging a sobbing actress in her trailer for 30 minutes and telling her, 'This too shall pass. It's not real life, it's showbiz.'"

Shonda then suggested that the press had only told one side of the Heigl story, and when someone asked her what we had missed, Cherry called out, "She was drunk!"

Finally, a reporter asked her to continue her original story about how she reacted to being publicly insulted by her biggest star.

"I don't know that she was necessarily insulting the writers per se," Shonda insisted. "There's two things: One, in the first half of the season she had a very strong storyline with george that played out a lot more comedically than Katie's stories in the past. (And then) in the back half of the season, Katherine asked me to write her light so she could do her movie... I didn't feel insulted." Click here to read the full post

Dispatch from ABC: The Lindelof set me up!

You may recall in the days leading up to the "Lost" season premiere, I linked to an interview where Damon Lindelof, referring to the grilling I gave him at last summer's press tour, called me "a pain in my (butt)." Well, we had something of a sequel a few minutes ago.

Sometime after Mo Ryan's interview ran, Lindelof reached out to me and we metaphorically kissed and made up, and fortunately season four was kick-ass. But when press tour approached and ABC scheduled a showrunners panel to feature Lindelof, along with Carlton Cuse, Marc Cherry, Shonda Rhimes, Greg Berlanti and Silvio Horta, Lindelof told me he expected nothing less than another sweat-inducing interrogation.

The problem, of course, is that I had very little to complain about with season four. "Why is Kate still so boring?" isn't really a useful question to ask, you know? So I thought about it for a while, looked back over the reactions to each episode, and eventually decided to ask a question about why, in retrospect, Jack came up with the Oceanic Six plan, which was far more convoluted than necessary considering it was voluntary. (I had been assuming for much of the season that they were forced into leaving the island and following the lie by some outside force.)

So I gave it a shot, but Lindelof, sneaky bastard, was ready for me.

He not only nodded and smiled at the sound of my voice, but in response to my question, explained, "It's actually a funny story. We were sitting halfway through the season, and we had come up with this simple, streamlined, non-convoluted excuse, and I turned to Carlton and said, 'Alan Sepinwall might actually like this, so what we ought to do is come up with something incredibly convoluted so he can bust our balls at press tour.' And he said, 'Let's do that! He'll never fall for it.' Lo and behold, here we are."

At that point, the only thing I could say was "Touche."

In terms of actual "Lost" news, the session was pretty light, though Carlton did say Daniel Dae Kim would appear on the show in the future "in some form" -- which prompted Damon to add, "In human form!" And when someone asked Carlton how they planned to use next season to set up the final year, he called it "a tricky year for us; like 'Two Towers.' It's the year that links us from the past to the final season... We've known a lot of what we wanted to do there for a long time. The challenge we have now is how to make this season exciting and engaging."

The funniest part of the session, actually, was Carlton and Marc Cherry, who had gotten friendly with each other during the strike as part of the WGA's negotiating committee, translating each other's metaphors from sports (Carlton) to musical theater (Marc) and back again.

I'll have Shonda's take on the Katherine Heigl situation -- or what she said about it -- in a few minutes. Click here to read the full post

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, Act 2: Hammer time

Act II of "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog" is now up, and it's as much fun as Act I. (With half the technical difficulties.) Even more than the first act, this one pushes the idea of the bad guy being the hero of his own story, plus it has the marvelously-timed moment where Captain Hammer returns to explain... well, you'll know it when you see it.

Don't have much else to say this time, plus I need to get ready for tour-related stuff, but fire away in the comments. Click here to read the full post

Sepinwall on TV: Emmy nominations

The Emmy nominations are out, and I'm torn between outrage ("Entourage"? "Boston Legal"? Almost nothing for "The Wire" or "Battlestar" or "HIMYM"?) and contentment (lots of love for "Mad Men," plus a surprise Bryan Cranston nomination). The lead of my column:

It's nice to know that the Emmy voters all upgraded their cable package.

The nominations of years past would have you believe that every member of the television Academy subscribed only to the broadcast networks and HBO. If a performer or show from a non-HBO cable channel slipped into the major nominations, it was almost a shock.

But the 2007-8 Emmy nominations feature three cable shows - FX's "Damages," Showtime's "Dexter" and AMC's "Mad Men" - duking it out for Outstanding Drama Series, the first time any non-broadcast, non-HBO show has cracked this category, let alone three of them.

To read the full thing, click here. For a complete list of nominees, click here. (For a slightly shorter list, in order of importance, click here.) And after the jump, some other Emmy thoughts I didn't have room for in the column:

-Despite the gag-inducing self-congratulatory repeat nods for “Entourage” and some other Emmy faves, I have to applaud the voters for controlling their kneejerk reflexes with some other series that had terrible seasons. Only two minor nominations (including a very deserving one for Charles Durning) for “Rescue Me,” and only a handful of nods (notably for Chandra Wilson, Sandra Oh, and not for best drama) for “Grey’s Anatomy.”

-On the flipside, despite what was considered by many to be a bounce-back year, none of the “Desperate Housewives” stars got a nomination.

-Though HBO didn’t crack the best drama category for the first time since ’98, it was nice to see “In Treatment” get four nominations – in particular, to see Glynn Turman get recognized for his extraordinary guest star turn as Blair Underwood’s dad. The guest star categories are usually dominated by movie stars, so it’s nice to see a character actor get a nod for something so great.

-“Family Guy” made the top 10 for Outstanding Comedy Series but couldn’t crack the final list, meaning (according to Tom O’Neil) no animated series has been nominated here since “The Flintstones” in 1961.

-Only one nomination, for casting, for “Friday Night Lights” season two.

-I figured my beloved “Flight of the Conchords” would be too weird for the Emmy voters, but at least it got writing and directing nominations, plus two song nominations, for “Most Beautiful Girl (In The Room)” and “Inner-City Pressure.” They’ll have a tough road ahead of them, as Sarah Silverman’s “I’m (Being Intimate With) Matt Damon” is also in the category.

-Only two nods – one of them the deserving but predictable one for Neil Patrick Harris – for “How I Met Your Mother.” Sigh...

-Given that Michael Angeli is widely-reviled by “Battlestar Galactica” fandom, I wonder how the fans are going to react to an Angeli script (“Six of One”) being the one to crack the drama writing list. As “Mad Men” (either the pilot or the season finale) will almost certainly win this category, I guess it’s a moot point.

-The “Extras” finale, which I loved, got submitted as a movie and wound up getting nominations in all the right categories: best movie, writing, directing, plus acting nods for Ricky Gervais and (especially) Ashley Jensen.

What do you think? Click here to read the full post

Dispatch from ABC: 'Scrubs' on the move

After the jump, some developments from the "Scrubs" press tour session and the scrum with Bill Lawrence afterward...

I don't have time to transcribe anything right now, so bullet points...

• Whether or not this will be the final "Scrubs" season, this will definitely be Zach Braff's final season. The season finale is being written as JD's farewell from the hospital, but Lawrence is shooting two slightly different versions of the very end of it: one for if the show is being renewed and will come back without Zach, one for if this is the series finale. (The latter version would feature Janitor's real name, as Lawrence has been saying forever that when you find out Janitor's name, the show is over.)
  
• Every actor's contract is up by mid-September, and they're free to pursue whatever jobs they want. If the show comes back, they're welcome but not obligated to come back with it. John C. McGinley said he'd like to come back but what if, hypothetically, he's landed a part in a Martin Scorsese movie around the time production for a season nine would begin? Lawrence said he has no problems with any of the cast moving on if they want to.
• Though the season won't debut until some time in early '09, they should wrap production by the end of August, which gives them flexibility both within the show and without. Aziz Ansari from "Human Giant" will be playing a new doctor this year, even though he's under contract for "The Office" spin-off; since "Scrubs" was in production and the new show wasn't, Greg Daniels said it was cool. And if "How I Met Your Mother" wants Sarah Chalke back a lot -- "They don't want me to say it, but she's the mom," Lawrence cracked -- she'll be available.
• In part to freshen up the series, in part to set things up for a potential post-Braff incarnation of the show, there will be a number of new doctors this year. In addition to Ansari, Eliza Coupe (who was one of the better things in the never-seen HBO show "12 Miles of Bad Road") will be one of the rookies. Chalke said that when Lawrence announced he was adding young doctors, she and the other regulars said, "But we're the young doctors!" and Lawrence told them something like, "Go look at the opening credits and get back to me."
  
• Ken Jenkins is not leaving the show, even though Kelso no longer works at the hospital. "Kelso won free muffins for life on the show, which gives him an excuse to hang around the hospital and be a different character," Lawrence said. Courteney Cox will do a three-episode arc as the hospital's new chief of medicine. (It was a part written for Lawrence's buddy John Cusack, who wasn't available due to a movie shoot.)
• Lawrence admitted that many of the shots people (including me) took at the last season on NBC were deserved, and that they got lazy telling the same jokes over and over again, and then telling jokes about their own jokes. (All that meta stuff about how JD's long fantasies are never worth it, etc.) The tone of the new season will be much more in keeping with the serio-comedy of seasons 1-4 -- "Though I don't know if Steve McPherson wants me to talk up how there's going to be more tragedy in the show."
• Getting back to Janitor's name -- which Neil Flynn kept trying to claim was Zanzibar Duck Duck McFake -- there's some debate in the writer's room about what it should be, with several writers insisting that it has to be "Neil Flynn," since they established that Janitor played Neil Flynn's role in "The Fugitive." (UPDATE: I was mistaken. Flynn said "Zanzibar Buck Buck McFate," which is the name of a Dr. Seuss character, a Sneetch, I think.)
  
• And, the most important question as far as I'm concerned: Lawrence promised much more of Donald Faison dancing.
• The episode in the Bahamas -- where Lawrence will make his acting debut on the show -- will be about Janitor's wedding (presumably to his girlfriend, Lady), and is part of Lawrence's attempt to prove old mentor Gary David Goldberg wrong that you can't do a funny sitcom episode where you take your cast and crew to another country.

Click here to read the full post

Dispatches from ABC: Kimmel undercover, Heigl's status and more

ABC's executive press tour session with Steve McPherson opened with a Very Special Guest Star for the first question: Jimmy Kimmel, undercover (sort of), trying to get to the bottom of the Jay Leno situation.

Wearing a baseball cap and claiming to be a reporter for the (non-existent) Sarasota Star-Herald-Tribune (I think he said his name was Tom Weinerman), Kimmel asked McPherson about the rumors that ABC wanted to hire Leno once Leno's contract with NBC expired, and what that might mean for ABC's late-night line-up.

"If that were, God forbid, to happen, would that mean Ted Koppel would get fired, or what?"

He also suggested that ABC talking to Leno now would constitute contract tampering and should maybe land McPherson in jail, asked McPherson how he keeps his hair so nice, and then wondered, "Are you at all afraid that if you replace Jimmy Kimmel he might do something crazy to you or your car?"

"We wanted to have a little fun with it," McPherson said after Kimmel left, and tried to defer all further Leno questions by saying, "I can't believe (NBC would) let this guy go at the top of his game." In the scrum after the session, McPherson acknowledged that he thought Leno and Kimmel could make a very compatible one-two punch if Leno were to come to ABC, and that he would keep Kimmel closely involved in any discussions about bringing Leno over to the network.

In other news from the ABC exec session:

• Asked about the kerfuffle over Katherine Heigl's comments about not wanting to submit herself for an Emmy this year -- and whether it was a contract ploy to get Heigl off the show and into a full-time movie career -- McPherson called the situation "unfortunate," but insisted, "She's absolutely staying with the show. There's an unbelievable storyline for her coming up... Shonda (Rhimes) is really excited about that and is the one who crafted that."
• Speaking of Rhimes, "Private Practice" will be tweaked to focus more on medical drama and less on the doctors hanging around the coffee room swapping neuroses, and Kate Walsh's character will resume doing surgery on a regular basis.
• Katie Holmes' upcoming guest spot on "Eli Stone" -- a reunion between her and "Eli Stone" creator Greg Berlanti, who was a showrunner for a while on "Dawson's Creek" -- will feature Mrs. Tom Cruise singing and dancing, "and it's exquisite."
• McPherson tried to wipe away the Show In Trouble label from "Life on Mars," even though the remake of the BBC time travel/cop drama is being completely rewritten and reshot, and many of the supporting roles are being recast. "It's in great shape," he insisted, and when I asked him in the scrum what separates the massively-overhauling "Mars" from all the other shows in development that ABC won't even consider for a debut sooner than midseason, he said the difference is that they have the BBC show as a template.
• "Dirty Sexy Money" will be retooled to eliminate what McPherson called certain "indie film" elements and become more of a "popcorn guilty pleasure" show.
  

Back later, perhaps with Berlanti himself talking about the Katie reunion. Click here to read the full post