The 2007 summer TV critics’ press tour–nearly three weeks when the TV networks bring out their stars for group interviews with the Television Critics Association–begins this week in LA. I’ll be watching it from the vantage point of sunny NYC. There are professional reasons (largely involving getting TIME to pony up for a three-week trip) and personal ones (largely involving the Tuned In Jr. Duo’s July birthdays and a desire to avoid Bad Parent Hell). But you can check in virtually, as I will, via the likes of Aaron Barnhart, Peter Ames Carlin, Melanie McFarland and, especially, the superhuman efforts of the San Francisco Chronicle’s Tim Goodman, who popularized the TCA tour’s insider nickname, the “Death March with Cocktails.”
TV writers who don’t go to press tour have made a cottage industry of bashing TV writers who do. I’m not interested in rehashing the is-Press-Tour-good-journalism debate that other writers have weighed in on repeatedly. (Except to say that anyone who honestly thinks that getting free meals from networks would buy anyone’s fealty severely underestimates the ingratitude of critics.) The press tour is useful or not, necessary or not, depending on where you work and what kind of work you do. For newspaper writers from regional papers, for instance (for whom the tour was mainly organized), it offers a chance to meet, all in one three-week stretch, many of the stars and executives they have limited access to the rest of the year.
For a weekly national newsmagazine, this is not as much of an issue. (And unlike, say, Cannes, it’s not like you have to travel to TCA to see the shows being screened.) So I’ve gone occasionally over the past years, usually when it’s coincided with travel for other stories. The longest I’ve stayed is a week or so, and while it’s easy to make fun of critics being paid to stay in a luxury hotel for three weeks, eating and drinking free and meeting celebs, I have grown to respect the journos who do the whole slog every year as if they were P.O.W.s. It’s lovely for a while, but after several days of shuffling down carpeted floors from panel to panel under artificial light, a certain mole-man feeling starts to set in.
And to the extent that being a TV critic requires, you know, watching television, TCA makes it tough to actually do your job: between the jam-packed sessions in the daytime and meet-and-greet parties at night, I usually find that most of my TV watching there is limited to CNN on the hotel-gym treadmill first thing in the morning. (Cardiovascular disease is to the TV critic as Black Lung is to the coal miner.)
So please patronize the good folks on my blogroll the rest of this month, and think kind thoughts for them. They’re eating those hors d’oeuvres so that we don’t have to.