At 'Lost' Session Critics Ask ABC, What Are We, Chopped Liver?

"A lot of newspapers spend a lot of money to get us out here. A lot of us are fighting to stay out here," one TV critic told McPherson, severely. "We write about all of your television shows. If you are not going to tell us what it is, you can at least tell us why you are not talking to us. Are we not important enough for you, or do you just not want to talk to us? A serious question: Why are you deciding to go there and not here?"

McPherson began to talk about how sometimes announcements are made here and sometimes there, when his publicist walked onstage whispered in his ear.

"Okay. All right. They just spoke to ['Lost' creator] Damon [Lindelof] and he is okay," McPherson told the critics. "It's going to be announced that Harold Perrineau is returning to the show."

Had McPherson or his publicist read the San Diego Union-Tribune that morning, he would have known this year's Comic-Con International is registered with the federal government as a public charity. But he hadn't and so he didn't know that telling the critics to buzz off because he's saving the "Lost" scoops to give to charity was an option. Too bad.

McPherson had yet to be asked a single question about Isaiah Washington, and only softball questions about his controversial new sitcom "Cavemen." The publicist, who's no dummy, took no chances; she cut off the news conference a few questions later, a lot sooner than executive Q&A sessions generally run.

But critics followed McPherson out into the hall, where the Washington question came up. That's when he came up with his "clueless or stupid" gag about Silverman. It played well in the room.

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Eight white men onstage told TV critics, columnists and reporters that the new sitcom "Cavemen" -- in which the cavemen are depicted as great dancers, naturally athletic and able to drive blondes crazy with their sexual prowess -- is not, as one critic suggested, "the series about black folk that ABC was too scared to make."

"In terms of them standing in for any one group, that's not our intention," executive producer Josh Gordon said in response to the question posed by Eric Deggans of the St. Petersburg Times. Deggans, who is African American, based his comment on the pilot episode, which will not be the first episode of the series after all, critics were told. It will air later in the show's run -- after it's canceled, if we're all very good and eat our vegetables.

"We're aware that the pilot seems to lean a little bit more in that direction," Gordon said. "But in the episodes that we're sort of coming up with now, we never saw them as, again, a stand-in for one group."

The critics didn't buy it. One noted that in that pilot there "weren't a lot of stereotypes of other ethnic groups."

"You just loaded up on one particular one. . . . How could you have thought that wasn't going to be a problem?" the reporter asked.

Here's where the executive producers began to talk about the show being "subtle" and "about acclimation."

The critics: still not buying it.

"You said you want it to be subtle -- the show we saw is anything but subtle," one said. "It's not going to be about black discrimination, but that's the only thing the show we saw is. What are some of these episodes going to be if they're not going to be an allegory for racial relations and you say they're going to be subtle -- what can we expect?"

Don't worry, they were told. It will all become much clearer when they see the new episode in which one of the cavemen is shown to be -- very lazy.