'The West Wing': Lame Duck

The cast of "The West Wing" -- which ends its run in May -- from left, Martin Sheen, Rob Lowe, the late John Spencer, Stockard Channing, Richard Schiff, Bradley Whitford, Allison Janney and Dule Hill. (By Mark J. Terrill -- Associated Press)

He leapt over another critic's suggestion that he should be worried about the the state of his boss Jeff Zucker's "immortal soul" for having sworn NBC would air a series finale on canceled "American Dreams" many months ago.

"Another pact with the devil for Zucker," Reilly noted, adding that corporately, they never made any such promise.

Again and again, critics tried to trip up Bucked-Up Reilly. But he was so full of vim, there was no stopping him.

One critic thought he had Reilly for sure, over the whole move of "Law & Order" to 9 p.m. Wednesday. (NBC will debut the new drama "Heist" in "L&O's" old 10 p.m. hour; it's about a group of professional thieves plotting to simultaneously rob three Beverly Hills jewelry stories during Oscar week, and will debut about two weeks after the Oscars.) "So how happy was Dick Wolf when you told him ["Law & Order"] was going up against 'Lost' " on Wednesdays at 9?

"Was he his usual cheerful self?" the critic asked smugly of TV's Greatest Living Grump.

"You know Dick; he's a pushover -- always smiling," Reilly responded with a smile.

"Would he prefer that it not move? Probably. But . . . 'Law' has been here for a long time," and it will stay around for a long time, he noted. "And we're asking it to do a job right now, and Dick's with us on it."

Yet another critic went after him with a question about the strange coincidence in which NBC announced that "The Office" would be available through iTunes the same week the show's episode featured an iPod in a major plot point, adding that there had been similar hanky-panky recently on other NBC series, like "Medium."

Reilly swore the iPod thing was a coincidence. "This has been confirmed by NBC," the network said later in the day. That said, Reilly acknowledged that "this is a fact of life now, and producers of television . . . know where their paychecks come from, they come from us, and our income comes from advertising."

"Everybody's trying to embrace the new world and you've got to find the line. . . . If it's organic we'll do it," he said.

So full of beans is New Kevin Reilly that he even told them about one instance of product placement they'd missed, where Chili's, the restaurant, appeared in "The Office," the show:

"I don't know if you saw the episode . . . but it was very funny. It was tricky to pull off, but it was just funny."

One critic thought sure a "Book of Daniel" question would give Reilly the willies. "The Book of Daniel" is the new series starring Aidan Quinn, about a Vicodin-popping priest who talks to Jesus regularly about his son who is gay, his daughter who is selling pot to finance a manga habit, whose adopted son is a skirt-chaser, and whose wife has liquid lunches to help ease the pain of losing yet another of her children.

"I was watching 'Book of Daniel' the other night; it was virtually a sustaining program," the critic said, meaning "run without advertising."

"Your commercial breaks were a festival of NBC promos; I think you had maybe one national ad in the whole show. Can you afford to keep putting that show on, or have these pressure groups . . . driven off literally all the advertisers?"

"The Mattress King has stepped up and he's going to sponsor the entire hour. And God bless him," Reilly responded.

It was breathtaking, but best quip of the day went to Greg Garcia. With a pox on Lee, Garcia appeared at an "Earl" session without his star and told critics, "Well, we think it's chickenpox. I saw him shake hands with Charlie Sheen at the Golden Globes, and [Lee] woke up the next morning with bumps all over him. So it could be anything."