TV Column: Future of Fox programming; Kiefer Sutherland; JJ Abrams on ‘Alcatraz’

By Lisa De Moraes,

Decisions on the future of Fox dino drama “Terra Nova,” doc drama “House,” paranormal drama “Fringe,” sitcom “I Hate My Teenage Daughter” and even “X Factor” host Steve Jones are just around the corner, Fox programming chief Kevin Reilly came to Winter TV Press Tour 2012 on Sunday to reveal.

On the bright side, Reilly screwed up his courage to announce the end of animated comedy “Allen Gregory.”

“It’s hard to imagine the network without ‘House,’ ” Reilly told TV critics, who’d come with a laundry list of on-the-fence Fox shows their readers wanted to know about. On the other hand, Reilly admitted that “House” squeaked through to get on the schedule this season, given its skyrocketing costs and declining ratings.

Steven Spielberg’s super-pricey freshman series “Terra Nova” “looked fantastic” but “creatively, it was hunting” all season, Reilly acknowledged. But, he insisted, “We made money — the studio made money” on the show. Interpretation: They’re trying to figure out a way to do the show for a lot less money. Anyway, Reilly said they won’t be able to drag their feet much longer on a decision, given the lead time needed for the show’s special effects.

Simon Cowell is still off somewhere “decompressing” after the strain of doing “X Factor’s” first U.S. season. But the minute Simon returns, he will begin to “tweak” the singing competition, in answer to one critic’s questions as to whether Reilly had noticed that “America wants to vote off the host and one of the judges.” That would be, in order, Steve Jones and Nicole Scherzinger.

Asked whether he was happy with the show’s ratings — it attracted about half as many viewers as Cowell had promised to deliver — Reilly began to boast that the show helped Fox improve its fall ratings by 14 percent compared with last year, when Fox’s next big thing was “Lone Star,” remember? Where we come from, that’s called “damning with faint praise.”

Reilly claimed he did not know what “tweaks” Cowell had in mind for “X Factor,” but it’s a safe bet that a new host is one of them, given that Reilly said the big takeaway from the show’s first season is that hosting these live competition shows is harder than it looks and that Ryan Seacrest is a genius. At one point, Reilly said: “Whether Steve’s the guy or not.” Bye-bye, Steve Jones!

“We certainly want to keep him — it’s a deal issue,” Reilly said of contract-renewal talks with “American Idol” host Seacrest. He went so far as to reveal that it’s a “tough negotiation” and that its conclusion is . . . right around the corner.

Speaking of “Idol,” Reilly took a break from all these hard questions to deliver his annual “I expect ‘Idol’ will be down this season, but mostly it’s due to the fact it’s a [fill in the age]-year-old show.”

Duly noted.

How about that billion dollars the broadcast networks will be forking over to the NFL for football game broadcasts? At what point does football just become too expensive, one TV critic asked Reilly.

“It’s very hard to imagine the network without the NFL,” Reilly said. Fox is making money, he said. Not necessarily on football — he just threw that out there, adding, “We don’t break out the cost of any individual product.”

But then, when asked about the prospects for “Fringe,” Reilly said a decision was right around the corner, and added that it’s a pricey show and that the network loses money on it, and that they’re not in the business of losing money. Then, sensing he’d said too much, Reilly begged the TV critics and reporters and bloggers in the room not to tell their readers to “start the letter-writing campaign right now — I can’t take it!”

The crowd was growing pretty restless, what with Reilly dodging so many of its questions about its favorite shows. One big-hearted blogger decided to lob a softball question in Reilly’s direction, asking him about the future of Fox’s barely watched Sunday animated show “Allen Gregory.” In case you were lucky enough to miss it, “Allen Gregory” stars the voice of Jonah Hill as a precocious little moppet you want to smack so hard it jolts his grandchildren.

“We will not be making any more ‘Allen Gregory,’ ” Reilly said decisively, looking like a captain of industry.

Wikipedia immediately updated its “Allen Gregory” listing: “The series premiered on October 30, 2011. The series was officially cancelled on January 8, 2012.”

This was more like it! Encouraged, TV critics and bloggers asked him about the future of another super-low-rated new Fox comedy, the multi-camera-and-laugh-track comedy “I Hate My Teenage Daughter.”

In the blink of an eye, Reilly ceased to be a captain of industry and turned into a teenage chick begging her boyfriend not to dump her.

“It’s such a difficult format when it’s out of context,” Reilly pleaded. “CBS also has put on plenty of stinkers” on its Monday sitcom block, he cajoled. Multi-cam comedies such as “Two and a Half Men” and “The Big Bang Theory” are “at the top of the ratings heap and the top of the syndication heap,” so Fox needs to get back into that game, he said. He reminded critics they did not love “The Big Bang Theory” when it first hit the airwaves, but now they do. “So don’t pile on” the hate against “I Hate My Teenage Daughter,” and cut all those struggling new multi-cam comedies “a little bit of slack,” he begged.

Speaking of begging, TV critics wanted word of “Glee” graduates Lea Michele, Chris Colfer and Cory Monteith at the end of this season. Yes, the plan is still to graduate them, but there will be no spinoff show, as creator Ryan Murphy had once promised, Reilly said. On the other hand, he added coyly, Murphy has a “really cool idea” for the graduates that “gives us something cool to dig into next season.”

“That’s all I can say about it,” he said, causing one desperate TV critic to shout from the back of the room, asking whether Michele would be back on the show next season.

“Yeah, she will be . . . still part of the show — in some way,” Reilly responded.

Getting away from ‘24’

Martin Bohm, the character played by Kiefer Sutherland in his new Fox drama series “Touch,” is nothing like Jack Bauer, the character he played on the Fox series “24,” Sutherland told the many TV critics attending Winter Press Tour who were rabid fans of “24.”

Then he told them again.

And again.

And again.

They didn’t seem to want to hear it, so they kept asking.

Finally, Sutherland gave up and announced that shooting of the “24” movie would begin in late April.

It was like throwing raw meat to a piranha.

In “Touch,” Sutherland plays a widower and single father who is haunted by his inability to communicate with his 11-year-old son, Jake, who has been misdiagnosed as autistic. Martin discovers that Jake has the ability to see hidden patterns that connect people around the world.

“The character was so vastly different and the tone of the piece was so vastly different that that was part of its appeal,” Sutherland answered the first time he was asked. “And I had to reread it a second time to make sure that all of the emotional components I was reacting to so strongly were actually integral to me as opposed to this perspective that I was trying to create or navigate from ‘24.’ ”

You can see where he went wrong — too many three-syllable words.

“Kiefer, continuing on that point for a minute,” a critic said. “Jack Bauer had to keep his emotions in rein so often. . . . In this one . . . you got to do more . . . outward acting than you got to do in all the years of that. How different an experience is this for you?”

Sutherland answered politely that it was a very different experience, being careful to use more words of fewer syllables. “This will hopefully become more open and more open and more open,” he said.

“Kiefer, in front here, on your left: Being identified with a role is a double-edged sword, and obviously you are happy people bought into it, but you don’t want to be known only for that. So, in taking this role . . . did you feel, ‘I’ve got to get away from Jack Bauer as far as I can?’ ”

Sutherland re-recited his gag about making sure the pilot affected him personally rather than just trying to manage his career, this time winding down with: “Does it happen to also be a nice diversion from ‘24’? Yes. But I believe, honestly, that the choice and the reason that I made the choice was because it spoke to me.”

“I guess, in some way, you are still kind of saving the world, though on a lesser scale, indirectly through your son,” responded one critic, undaunted. “You prevent sort of an unwilling suicide bomber and a major bus wreck in the first episode.”

“Unwittingly,” Sutherland shot back, like he meant it to sting. “I mean, again, the real driving force for my character is to really just simply communicate with his son.”

“I’m curious if, after saving the world and running around in a TV show with a gun and a cellphone, I’m curious if one of the things that appealed to you about this role is that, presumably, you are going to have quite a few fairly quiet, intimate scenes with [child actor] David Mazouz as your son,” said another critic. Now they just sounded like they were baiting him.

About the sixth — maybe it was the seventh — time a critic asked Sutherland about “24,” Sutherland began to talk about how sorry he was that “I really wasn’t very articulate when I answered this question” the FIRST time.

Critics did not take the hint, though at least they started prefacing their questions with “I hate to keep going on about this ‘24’ thing.”

Sutherland tried a new approach: “Touch,” he said, is a show that teaches viewers “that things happen for a reason, very much like the wildebeest that is stung by a bee in the Serengeti, and starts a stampede, and creates a dust cloud that rises and carries over two continents, and starts a storm in the Gulf — and there is a cause and effect to everything.”

Well, that shut them up.

After that, they wanted to know whether American TV viewers are “ready for something that is so positive.”

You betcha, said the panel, which included show creator Tim Kring. Kring, in marked contrast to Sutherland, took only one question, in which he was asked whether the son character on “Touch” wasn’t really a prototype for a character on Kring’s NBC superheroes drama, “Heroes.”

“This is not a superpower idea,” Kring said firmly. “It’s a mystical or spiritual idea.”

More from JJ Abrams

“Alcatraz,” JJ Abrams’s new drama series for Fox, is a “thrilling new series that follows a unique trio investigating the mystifying reappearance of 302 of Alcatraz’s most notorious prisoners and guards, 50 years after they vanished.”

Appearing at the Winter Press Tour on Sunday, JJ, who brought us the maddeningly convoluted series “Alias” and “Lost” and “Fringe,” promised that this time he could be believed when he promised that viewers would get lots of answers to the mystery by the end of the first season and that it would have closed-ended episodes, and no parallel universes.

“This show is designed very much as an episodic show . . . a case of the week.”

Hahahahaha!

Oh, sorry. Where was I? Oh yeah, when some TV critic noted that here we go again with another JJ Abrams show in which a team investigates a mysterious island, JJ shot back that “any land mass is an island. You could argue every show — ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show’ — is much like ‘Lost.’ ”

Watch at your own peril.