By Lisa de Moraes
Thursday, July 26, 2007
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif., July 25
The caterwauling of TV critics was so horrible when ABC Entertainment chief Steve McPherson blew the tops off their heads by refusing to divulge scoops about "Lost" before the next day's comics convention, his publicist finally cut short the news conference.
Afterward, out in the hallway at Summer TV Press Tour 2007, McPherson slammed new NBC Co-chairman Ben Silverman as "clueless or stupid."
Brutally honest, mercurial, great programming instincts, low hooey threshold -- McPherson is the Practically Perfect Programming Executive. But critics don't seem to like him. It's inexplicable.
Wednesday's melee started innocently enough when a TV critic -- that nice Susan Young of the Oakland Tribune -- said she'd heard "major" announcements about "Lost" would be made at the Comic-Con gathering in San Diego on Thursday. "Would you like to tell us today what that might be?" she asked nicely.
"Yeah, let me give those announcements now -- of course I don't," McPherson said, dripping sarcasm.
"Oh, come on," she said, nicely.
"They do have some announcements that they are going to be making that I think everyone will be pretty excited about," said McPherson, twisting the knife, which, in retrospect, may not have been a good call.
"Can you tell us?" she pursued.
"No," he said.
Pop! Pop! Pop! went critics' heads.
"Do you want us to go to Comic-Con tomorrow instead of the [ABC] sessions?" she pursued.
"Let's go now. Do you want to go? . . . You and me, we'll just go on a little road trip down to Comic-Con," McPherson said, now bathing in sarcasm.
Hundreds of years ago, Comic-Con was a sweet little comic book convention. But it's been totally co-opted by the studios, and now, for four days each year, it's the center of the cultural world.
This year Comic-Con expects about 120,000 blogging geeks, who will rake in whatever the studios shovel out about upcoming movies and TV series.
On the TV side, pilot episodes of "Bionic Woman" and "Chuck" (NBC), "Pushing Daisies" (ABC) and "The Sarah Connor Chronicles" (Fox) will be screened for the geeks who -- you can bank on it -- are going to fill the blogosphere with rave reviews.
Comic-Con is irksome to the TV critics at the press tour.
"I don't think my editor is going to be very happy when she reads on a blog later this afternoon that Steve McPherson promised that the biggest news regarding one of the highest-rated shows on the network would be coming at a fan convention the next day," said one critic.
"Hear, hear!" others chimed in, which is something we didn't think happened except in crunchy-gravel BBC adaptations of novels.
"Not to be a crybaby . . . what's the point of having 150 reporters with access to millions of readers sitting here?" asked another critic, joining the pile-on. "You have the announcements. You can give them out. Instead you are going to hold them to give to people who have to pay to get into a convention."
"Okay, I'll give you the announcement," McPherson said. "I didn't know -- I started talking to him before he was available, I don't know what went on there. But I cast Don Imus on 'Lost.' " That was McPherson doing his impression of Silverman at his July 16 press tour session, telling critics he had started talking to Isaiah Washington about doing something on NBC "before he became available." Silverman also said he was shocked when ABC decided not to renew Washington's contract, as in: "When he told me he was available I was like 'You are?! Wait, I don't understand. What do you mean? You're a huge star on a hit television show!' " Silverman also told critics, "I don't quite understand what had gone on there."
Those of us not sucking on the hookah for the past few months know that what was going on there was that ABC decided not to renew Washington's contract on "Grey's Anatomy." This decision came after Washington used a homophobic slur in re cast member T.R. Knight, then publicly apologized, then used the word again at the Golden Globes to deny having used it in the first place, then apologized again, went to counseling, cut an anti-homophobe public service announcement that ABC aired during a "Grey's" rerun, then started hinting the whole apology/counseling thing might have been just a publicity stunt. Silverman, who shares a celebrity tailor with Washington, hired him for a five-episode guest gig on the new "Bionic Woman."
More on Silverman later. Back to McPherson's train-wreck news conference:
"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.
* * *
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.
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