07.18.08
Posted in Cynthia Littleton, Variety at 10:07 pm by Rick Ellis
Numbers by themselves don’t mean much without the context. That’s never been more true than it is in this short piece from Variety’s Cynthia Littleton.
Despite the drumbeat of layoffs and cost-cutting at major newspapers, TCA has seen a stronger turnout than expected.
The sked for this summer’s tour, which runs July 8-22 at the BevHilton, was pared down by four days in a nod to budget-conscious times. But attendance among journos at the annual tubthumping event is off just 5% from last summer’s powwow, or 162 scribes registered through the TCA org (many more parachute in and out at the discretion of the various presenting nets), compared to last year’s tally of 170, according to TCA prexy Dave Walker.
That’s all well and good, but the number of TV critics attending this year’s TCA’s isn’t the issue. It’s the relevance of the event, and the effectiveness of the presentations and the subsequent coverage.
Because there is so much insta-online coverage generated out of TCA (even by old-guard newspaper scribes with new-media marching orders), the org and nets are giving serious consideration to the idea of moving next year’s tour to August. That would allow the flurry of coverage to hit closer to September’s season launch, and thus have more value in terms of buzz-generation with viewers.
There are couple of problems with this idea. Because so many announcements are made during the TCA, moving the event into August would only insure that news from smaller networks would be ignored. Second, if the issue is that the networks want to produce buzz, perhaps instead of moving the dates of the TCA gathering, they should consider alternate methods of promotion.
Permalink
07.17.08
Posted in Jerry Rice, Variety at 3:30 am by Rick Ellis
Variety’s Jerry Rice writes about the lack of screening pilots available to critics as they headed to the TCA gathering.
Most of the time when critics checked the mailbag for network pilots back home, they were out of luck. One exception was a disc from CBS, loaded with an episode of nearly all its fall launches: comedies “Gary Unmarried” and “Worst Week” plus dramas “The Ex List” and “The Mentalist.” Also included were previews of Jerry Bruckheimer’s sci-fi series “Eleventh Hour” and midseason replacement “Harper’s Island.”
Other nets have generally waited until the tour to give critics a look at their new skeins — either a full episode via the Beverly Hilton’s closed-circuit system or previews before the panels in the ballroom. But some critics complain that highlights alone make it difficult to get an accurate view of a show.
The irony is that at least a half dozen other fall pilots have already leaked online. Meaning that a traditional TV critic would have less access to the fall pilots than the average viewer who actively uses peer-to-peer web sites.
Permalink
07.16.08
Posted in Jon Weisman, Variety at 3:17 am by Rick Ellis
Variety’s Jon Weisman recaps the TCA vs Comic-Con arguement from last season, before assuring everyone that the TCA event is still the tops in every network publicist’s list
The fuss started during a conventional Q&A between TCA attendees and ABC entertainment topper Steve McPherson. Queried about developments for the upcoming season of “Lost,” McPherson said he wanted to dish, but that a major announcement was being saved for a panel at Comic-Con the next day.
Several critics immediately took offense, with Kushman asking how ABC could expect newspapers to continue justifying the expense of sending reporters to L.A. if the big news was elsewhere.
As McPherson parried with the press, a quick phone call from ABC’s public relations team to “Lost” exec producer Damon Lindelof gave the Alphabet topper permission to spill the news, which turned out to be the not-so-earth-shattering revelation that Harold Perrineau would be returning to the series.
The quick reversal reinforced the importance of TCA in everyone’s mind. ABC insiders say their intent was not to undermine TCA, but rather to toss a treat to the show’s passionate fanbase at Comic-Con.
The irony of the “Lost” announcement was that ABC’s intitial instincts were correct. It wasn’t a big deal to the mainstream TV critics. But to the Comic-Con audience, breaking the news there would have built much more of a buzz.
Read the rest of this entry »
Permalink
07.10.08
Posted in Monsters And Critics, TV Land at 6:52 am by Rick Ellis
When I argue that much of the TCA gathering is really irrelevant, this is the type of coverage I’m talking about. There’s nothing wrong with this Monsters And Critics post per se, but really all it does is mention the show, pull a fairly bland quote out of the press release and include some show info.
I was under the impression that someone from Monsters And Critics is at the TCA, but you wouldn’t know it from this article.
Permalink
07.07.08
Posted in Alex Strachan, Canwest News Service at 11:27 pm by Rick Ellis
Canwest News Service’s Alex Strachan argues that the TCA still matters, because it’s the TCA critics who help build needed buzz for those “niche” shows that just wouldn’t get any attention from audiences otherwise.
This year, several first-year dramas - Life, Pushing Daisies, Dirty Sexy Money, Private Practice and Chuck - are being given a second chance thanks to strong reviews early in their runs. Friday Night Lights, recently shortlisted for a best drama Emmy nomination, will return for a third season in January, in large part because of its reviews.
The audience is being fragmented by hundreds of channels. The whole economic model of conventional broadcast TV is changing. Increasingly, viewers rely on reviews to help them decode TV’s confounding picture.
Ultimately, there’s not a whole lot to the piece, and while I would agree that many shows depend on good word-of-mouth to create critical buzz, I don’t agree with the premise that traditional TV critics are the best way to build that buzz.
BTW, look at the page I linked to at the beginning of the post. What does it say about this particulat newspaper that neither the email address nor the TV blog have clickable hotlinks?
Permalink
07.06.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:48 pm by Rick Ellis
TV Week’s Josef Adalian has a new column which argues that the TCA needs to perform radical surgery on itself to remain relevant. While I don’t agree with all of his ideas, they’re well-reasoned, and some of the best suggestions I’ve seen from the ranks of the TCA.
“The biggest problem with press tour is that its format has not evolved,” one veteran of the broadcast business told me last week. “Sitting in a ballroom talking to reporters for two straight days about your network’s programming isn’t the best showcase to get the word out about the value of your product to the end user, which in our case is the audience.”Agreed. In fact, that’s the very same point I’ve made for the past couple of years. The current TCA gathering format isn’t a good deal for the networks, and it doesn’t ultimately do much for the TV critics, either.
Here’s an idea: Why not replace one of the semiannual press tours—most likely the winter edition—with a convention-style gathering that showcases the biggest veteran shows as well as newer fare? It’s time to take a cue from events with more cultural buzz, such as the annual geekapalooza known as Comic-Con.Geekapalooza? Okay, just describing it that way shows a certain lack of understanding about Comic-Con, but we’ll let that slide for now.
But the reason that many of the lower profile or newer shows have problems getting promotion isn’t because they’re not known to the pop culture world. It’s because the current system of TV networks to TV critics only allows for a certain number of high-profile shows to get the full attention of everyone. A “TV-Con” isn’t going to change that problem. Anyone who has visited Comic Con will tell you that its not an approach that works for every project.
Read the rest of this entry »
Permalink
07.01.08
Posted in Rick Ellis at 4:34 pm by Rick Ellis
This blog came about because in the months leading up to the July 2007 TCA gathering, I wrote a number of pieces arguing that the TCA was rapidly becoming a product of the past. That its membership and its stated goals reflected a print-centric method of TV criticism that was not addressing the needs of the networks or ultimately the viewers.
Now I am by no means a reporter without an agenda. I began writing the pieces about the TCA after they had rejected my membership (for the third or fourth time) because I did not fit into their requirements. Which got me thinking about just what the TCA is looking for in a member, and whether their requirements were rational, given the current state of the television industry.
I’m not arguing that I’m any great example of TV criticism. But we don’t do gossip here at AllYourTV.com, and we’re not one of these personal blogs that are essentially nothing but a long colection of thoughts about TV. We’re a serious news organisation. We hve a readership larger than all but the largest newspapers, and we’ve broken plenty of stories during our existence.
So the fact that we didn’t fit the TCA profile didn’t make much sense to me. And it made me reconsider whether or not I wanted to be part of an organization that seemed so mired in the past.
This blog evolved out of that conversation. I’ve always been irritated by TV critics who attend the TCA, and whine about the hours, and the panels, and having to write bout shows they don’t personally care about. I don’t have much sympathy for the whining, and this blog began as a way to track some of the TCA coverage during the July 2007 TCA gathering.
I debated about whether or not I was going to continue the tradition this July. I ultimately decided to bring back the blog, in part because I think the current TCA gathering arrangement makes even less sense this year than in 2007.
So I’ll be here plugging away for the next couple of week, highlighting the lows (and highs) of the world of TV critics.
But with any luck, there won’t be a need for me to do this in 2009.
Permalink
07.31.07
Posted in James Hibberd, TV Week at 3:15 am by Rick Ellis
TV Week’s James Hibberd wraps up his TCA coverage with some thoughts on why he believes the TCA still matters:
Funny thing is: Publicists and executives increasingly wonder why they bother doing TCA anymore.
Why spend hundreds of thousands for coverage that can get off-message so easily?
The “Shots” panel—a session that converted skeptical critics to potential fans on a key show—is one reason the TCA remains valuable.
The second reason is bloggers.
It’s an interesting piece, even though I can’t quite get a read on his entire point. I guess he’s arguing that TCA members who are blogging help widen the conversation, which is true enough. But part of my arguement all along has been that critics should have wideningg the conversation long before their editors bludgeioned them into blogging.
Permalink
07.30.07
Posted in Lisa de Moraes, Washington Post at 3:15 am by Rick Ellis
This funny little story from Washington Post TV critic Lisa de Moraes:
After the Primetime Emmy Award nominees were announced, TV critics chattered for days about who got snubbed — much righteous indignation about another James Spader nom for best abberation, er, best lead actor in a drama series. Serious outrage over HBO’s “The Wire” being once overlooked in the derby for best drama series, though that talk seemed to end when Tom O’Neill, columnist for the trophy show Web site TheEnvelope.com, noted in the site the critics have never actually given “The Wire” one of their Television Critics Association Awards trophies.
And funny enough, the TCA members voted the made-for-HBO film “Bury My Heart On Wounded Knee” the worst TV movie of the year. And it received the most Emmy nominations of anything this season.
Permalink
07.27.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 2:22 am by Rick Ellis
I was checking out Remote Island, the TV blog by Minneapolis Star-Tribune almost ex-TV critic Neil Justin.
According to this post, he’s at the TCA, but the date on the last entry is the 24th. So I’m not sure what happened to him after that.
Permalink
« Previous entries