FX and PBS Portion of TCA

THE PROGRAMMING INSIDERFriday, August 6, 2010 LIVE FROM THE SUMMER TELEVISION CRITICS ASSOCIATION PRESS TOUR IN LOS ANGELES, CA FX Day Press Tour Tidbits:Notes of Interest On the Air This Weekend:Prime-Time Programming Options ______________________________________________________________________ Note: The Programming Insider will not be published this coming Monday. See you back on Tuesday, August 10.______________________________________________________________________ FX Day FX was present at TCA on Tuesday, with panels on regularly scheduled series Sons of Anarchy, Terriers, Lights Out, It’s Always Sunny in Philadephia, The League and Archer. Here are some of the notable quotes: Ron Perlman on the character dynamic on biker drama Sons of Anarchy (which opens season three on Tuesday, Sept. 7 at 10 p.m. ET): “These guys are fighting for the life that they envision for themselves, and they haven’t an incredibly well-articulated code of values that sort of permeates its way through the whole family because it is a family. Its men and women and children and earners and caretakers and spenders. You know, that’s essentially is what is at the base of the thrust of this family, family drama is what it is, and we’re just fighting for the things that are going to make us have the lives we want to live. And no one is going to tell us what that life should or should not be. We make up our own rules. I think that the things that are essentially universal in our code are compelling things — loyalty, sacrifice. So, you know, these are things that are interesting to watch on any level whether they’re fraught with big dynamics or small dynamics. In this instance because we’re outlaws and we’re always kind of walking on this tightrope, they’re big dynamics.” ----- Creator and Executive Producer Kurt Sutter on the upcoming season of Sons of Anarchy: “I don’t know if there’s one specific overriding theme. I think the theme is always about family and Jax sort of defining his role as a father and as a partner and as a son and as a member of this club, and the Abel storyline really drives us through pretty much the entire season, and I don’t want to give anything away in terms of what that means and where that takes us, but the thing is our seasons, the actual span of time within our seasons is very short. It’s potentially two or three weeks. So there isn’t a lot of time that passes where you can have a lot of things unfold organically. It is a very concentrated period of time which I think helps feed the sense of urgency for the tasks that they have at hand this season.” ----- Creator and executive produce Ted Griffin on upcoming drama Terriers (which premieres on Wednesday, Sept. 8 at 10 p.m. E): “I saw Shawn Ryan (the creator of The Shield) four or five years ago, and it really awakened in me what could be done in TV. So I called up Shawn and ended up writing an episode of The Shield. And then I think it was two years ago Shawn said, “Do you want to do a show?” And I said, “No. Not at all.” And he made me come over and sit in a room until we had an idea. I’m trying to remember — here is the really elegant, initial idea, which is what if the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and the movie Harper had a child. That’s what this show is intended to be at first, and I think it sort of evolved from there. So, philosophically, I would say I sort of make it up as I go along and hope to get lucky.” ----- Executive producer Shawn Ryan on Terriers: “We’ve made all 13 episodes, so we don’t have to be one of these shows that sits in front of you and promises that we know where we’re going. We’ve been there, and hopefully you will like it, and Tim was a very, very instrumental force for all 13 episodes, just really gravitated towards the cable model, loved writing for the show, and was really, really important for the show.” ----- Stacy Keach on why the world of boxing is dramatic on upcoming serialized drama Lights Out (which debuts in January and centers on an aging former heavyweight boxing champion who struggles to find his identity and support his wife and three daughters after his fighting days): “I had never had this kind of close-hand experience with the boxing community, and my respect for boxers and what they go through in order to perform what they have to perform in the ring is just enormous. I had no idea what kind of emotional and physical stamina is required in order to sustain the beating that you take when you go into the ring. You’ve got to be able to survive and sustain the tremendous amount of punishment and still come back and do your job.” ----- Executive producer and show-runner Warren Leight on Lights Out: “There have been a lot of movies about boxing, but I don’t know that there have been that many TV shows about it. So when we prepped, we watched dozens of mediocre and maybe a dozen great boxing movies and just tried to understand. There’s not just great boxing movies. There’s great boxing literature. It’s been one of the places writers have gone to prove themselves in a way. So we tried to draw on all of that, and what the advantage we have is almost every boxing movie, except for Rocky, which kind of went on and on and on — it’s a one-off. And to serialize a story about the life of a boxer and what it’s like to try to put food on your family’s table when times have changed, to serialize that story over time really allowed us to open it up. The great challenge was to avoid the clichés and make the world come to life. And, of course, there’s usually some truth to the cliché. I hope and think we pulled it off, but we were aware we were walking where others had walked before.” ----- Danny DeVito of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (which begins season six on Thursday, Sept. 16 at 10 p.m. ET) on the recent Comic-Con gathering: “This year it was just off the charts. You couldn’t go anywhere on the floor — you know, when you’re looking at stuff — I don’t know if you’ve ever been there, but this was the biggest Comic-Con they’ve had in attendance, I think, ever. And it was filled from wall to wall with fans of all those movies and all those characters, but I would say 99 percent of them were also Sunny fans. They were just rabid about it, and we loved it. It was so exciting for us because there were, like, 7,000 people in the room. And it’s just mayhem.” ----- -Creator and Executive Producer Rob McElhenney, who plays Mac, on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia: “It was never our intention necessarily to push the envelope. Our goal is always to do what’s not being done elsewhere. And something that we’re really proud of and something that I think the true fans of the show really understand is that we are not simply just going out and trying to push the envelope for pushing the envelope’s sake. We’re trying to introduce into comedy a part of the national conversation that we hear and see people talking about behind closed doors, but aren’t doing in public.” ----- Executive producer Jeff Schaffer on the fantasy football element of comedy The League (which opens season two on Thursday, Sept. 16 at 10:30 p.m.): “It’s like 30 million people do play Fantasy sports, so while we don’t want to drown people in it, and while it’s not the sort of focus of the show — I think the focus is the dynamics — we’re never afraid of doing it, because a lot of people in our audience has said, “Oh, my God.” Even if you’ve never been in a Fantasy Football league, “Oh, my God. I know someone like that. I know someone who acts that insane on Sundays.” The other thing that we always say is to enjoy the show, you don’t have to know anything about sports. You don’t have to know anything about Fantasy Football.” ----- Aisha Tyler on animated sitcom Archer: “Archer is an intellectual show, and it’s also really, really dirty, and it’s for grownups. And I think it’s about time that you have a show that’s sophisticated and elegant and smart and referential and also, you know, really saucy and bawdy. It’s really rare to be surprised by anything in television ever. So the fact that we get these scripts that are surprising and shocking and wonderful and terrible, and they make you cringe and make you laugh and make you call your friends and go, “You have to watch this.” ----- Archer Executive Producer Matt Thompson: “I think the show works best when it does have over-arching storyline, and the characters have to learnsomething. They have to change a little bit. I love the shows like The Simpsons and Family Guy and stuff, but that’s not this show. I hope that you won’t come back a year later and say, “I am completely bored by Archer. He’s just doing the same thing over and over again.” So there has to be change that goes along into it.”____________________________________________________________________________________ Press Tour Tidbits:Notes of Interest -Rosie O’Donnell Heads to OWN:Speculation was pointing to outspoken Rosie O’Donnell returning to first-run daytime syndication. But the multiple Daytime Emmy Award winner will head back to daytime exclusively on OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network. The program, produced by O’Donnell, was pitched to OWN by longtime Warner Bros. syndication veterans Dick Robertson and Scott Carlin, now of SantaBu LLC Inc. The show will be a one-hour daily show based in New York. It launches in 2011. -Mary Hart to Exit Entertainment Tonight:Entertainment Tonight host Mary Hart, who joined the veteran CBS Television Distribution newsmagazine in 1982, will call it quits after the upcoming 30th season, which begins on Sept. 13, 2010. There is no word at present who will replace her. -Nigel Lythgoe to Return to American Idol:We still have no official word will be sitting in the judging chairs on Fox’s American Idol next season. But Nigel Lythgoe of So You Think You Can Dance will return as executive producer, joining Simon Fuller, Cecile Frot-Coutaz and Ken Warwick. The upcoming 10th season of American Idol returns in January 2011. ----- -PBS Update:PBS President Paula Kerger on how PBS Kids has changed over the last five years. “I would say curriculum-based is really the best way to describe what we’ve done. PBS has always had, I think, not only an extraordinary legacy in children’s programming beginning with Sesame Street 40 years ago. And I think that Sesame Street as a program itself is a great example of what we’ve tried to do in public broadcasting across our children’s schedule, which is it’s a program that was based in a lot of research and was a strong program that was created, but it looks very different now than it did when it first went on the air. We’ve continued to try to evolve that program to make it relevant and exciting for today’s kids because the challenge with children’s programming as we create it is that you want it to have a strong curriculum basis so that kids are coming away from their experience either watching public television programs on air or online with, not only having enjoyed the time that they’ve spent, but also they’re bringing away skills. And we’ve focused our efforts on young children because that’s where we feel we can make the biggest impact.You have to keep creating programs because kids do control the remotes. So you have to create programs that are really compelling to watch, and so that’s been the real focus of our work, is not just to build programs that their parents are going to be happy they’re watching, but also that kids want to watch.We’ve aligned ourselves with a lot of established literary properties like Cat in the Hat and Curious George, very strong character-driven projects, and we’ve looked to slowly move our schedule around so that the emphasis is really on these projects that have that curriculum basis to them. So that — you know, we’ve always had wonderful programs that have been safe for kids to watch that teach social and emotional values and all of that, but we feel that it’s important for us now to really ramp up the educational value that’s embedded in the programs.” ----- Paula Kerger on the funding of PBS:“When you look at how our funding is put together, it has always been a mosaic of lots of different pieces. We get about 15 percent — that’s one-five percent — of our funding from the federal government, which is really the opposite of the BBC model, which is largely government-funded. The philanthropy to public broadcasting mostly comes in through our stations. And so I think that — and the base of funding for public broadcasting has been lots and lots of smaller contributions, as well as major gifts, foundations,and so it’s a fairly broad fundraising mix. I think as we look forward, we will continue — we have a foundation that we’ve established at PBS. We’re looking for ways to bring in additional resources. We are always looking to increase our reach. And we have lots of ambitious goals of projects that we would like to do. The arts initiative is being wholly funded by philanthropy, which, for me, is very exciting because I think it shows that if we put some focused effort around an initiative and a project, that there are people interested in those issues, there are foundations and others that are interested that will help us bring that work forward.” ---------- -Pioneers of Television:Smack in the middle of day one of PBS at TCA was a panel with TV legends Mike Connors (Mannix), Robert Conrad (Hawaiian Eye and The Wild, Wild West), Linda Evans (The Big Valley and Dynasty), Martin Landau (Mission: Impossible) and Nichelle Nichols (Star Trek) to talk about upcoming season Pioneers of Television, now hosted by Kelsey Grammer. Four new episodes are planned. Some sample commentary at the panel included: Robert Conrad:“I thought when I was first on television in black and white for Warner Bros. for $315 an episode that I’d end up a millionaire and pioneer, but that didn’t happen. All I can say is I was so happy to have been surfing during Hawaiian Eye and horseback riding during Wild West West and flying airplanes during Baa Baa Black Sheep, and being next to these beautiful women. That ain’t bad, huh? Works for me.” ----- Mike Connors:“There were new inventions every day. And today, what they’ve got on television is just unreal. In those days, we did all the action live. You drove the cars. You did the fights. You fell off of buildings. Today it’s all done in front of a blue screen.” ----- Linda Evans “I loved working with Barbara Stanwyck because she was such a powerful woman in the industry, and I loved that she did her own stunts. I mean, very few women did their own stunts, and she was extraordinary in her position for stunts. And I remember the first time she said to me, “Well, you know, we’re doing the burning house next week, and I’m going to do it.” And the producer said, “Well, would you mind not using a stunt double because you should be there if we’re going to shoot her?” And so I thought, “Okay, well, how dangerous could this be?” And all of a sudden, I’m tied up, and the house is on fire, and the flames are licking, and I’m thinking, “Oh, gosh, we could die from this.” And once in, in fact, Barbara got a concussion from an earthquake that we had in the show. And she just was strong. She was not afraid to break convention. She loved doing things that were unique for her time. And I felt very privileged to be there with her when she did these things.” ------ Martin Landau “Most of television in those early days was character-driven. You got to know the people, and you wanted to spend time with them. The same thing exists in motion pictures. It’s harder and harder to get a movie made today that is character-driven. If there aren’t any car chases or fireballs or characters climbing up and down buildings, it’s very hard to get the movie made. I have a movie coming out in September with Ellen Burstyn, which is an older-couple love story. And it’s a picture that took awhile to get a distributor who really cared about the movie, and it went to festivals and was received well, but none of the big distributors wanted the movie. It’s finally going to come out in September, and we’re pleased with it, and the people understand the movie. And, again, we’re talking about getting to know people on the screen. ----- Nichelle Nicholls “It was rather interesting to me to be cast in Star Trek because I came up in musical theater, and somehow I was really on my way to break through and do all of the things that I really wanted to do on Broadway. And I took Star Trek because I thought it would be a nice adjunct to my resume, and I’d get to Broadway quicker and as a star. And I kind of got stuck there. As a matter of fact, I even tried to leave after the first year, the first season, because I thought, “Oh, this is going nowhere for me.” And I told Gene Roddenberry I was going to leave the show on a Friday evening. And Saturday, that next day, he said, “Please don’t leave. Don’t you see what I’m trying to do here?” And that next evening, as fate would have it, I was being one of the guest celebrities at an NAACP fund raiser. And one of the fund raisers came up to the dais and said, “Ms. Nichols, there’s a fan. There’s a person here who says he’s a big, big fan of yours. He’s your biggest fan.” And I thought it was a Trekkie, and so I said, “Sure.” And I stood up, and I looked across the room, and there was Dr. Martin Luther King walking towards me with this big grin on his face. And he reached out to me and said, “Yes, Ms. Nichols, I am your greatest fan.” And he said that — that “Star Trek” was the only show that he and his wife, Coretta, would allow their three little children to stay up and watch, because while they were marching, every night you could see people who looked like me being hosed down with a fire hose and dogs jumping on them because they wanted to eat in a restaurant. And I think it was just an encounter that started out. But the marches began and here I was playing an astronaut in the 23rd century. So I went back and told Gene Roddenberry on Monday, because he’d asked me to think about it over theweekend, and if I still wanted to leave he — I would have his blessings. And I went back, and I told himabout Dr. Martin Luther King. And Gene Roddenberry was a 6-foot-3 guy with muscles. He was a big hack-nosed guy. And he sat there with tears in his eyes. He said, “Thank God that someone knows what I’m trying to do. Thank God for Dr. Martin Luther King.” And I told him if he still wanted me, I would stay. I’ve never looked back. I’m glad I did.”_____________________________________________________________________________ On the Air This Weekend:Prime-Time Programming Options Friday 8/06/10 ABC: 8:00 p.m. Wife Swap 9:00 p.m. Primetime: What Would You Do?10:00 p.m. 20/20 CBS: 8:00 p.m. 48 Hours Mystery (R) 9:00 p.m. Medium (R)10:00 p.m. Flashpoint NBC: 8:00 p.m. Friday Night Lights 9:00 p.m. Dateline (two hours) Fox: 8:00 p.m. Bones (R) 9:00 p.m. Bones (R) CW: 8:00 p.m. Smallville (R ) 9:00 p.m. Supernatural (R) --------------- Saturday 8/07/10 ABC: 8:00 p.m. ABC Movie: Red Eye (R)10:00 p.m. Rookie Blue (R) CBS: 8:00 p.m. Cold Case (R) 9:00 p.m. CSI (R)10:00 p.m. 48 Hours Mystery (R) NBC: 8:00 p.m. Persons Unknown 9:00 p.m. Wrestlemania XXVI10:00 p.m. Law & Order: Criminal Intent (originally aired on USA) Fox: 8:00 p.m. Cops (two repeats) 9:00 p.m. America’s Most Wanted --------------- Sunday 8/08/10 ABC: 7:00 p.m. America’s Funniest Home Videos (R) 8:00 p.m. Extreme Makeover: Home Edition (R) 9:00 p.m. Scoundrels 10:00 p.m. The Gates CBS: 7:00 p.m. 60 Minutes 8:00 p.m. Big Brother 9:00 p.m. Undercover Boss (R)10:00 p.m. The Good Wife (R) NBC: 7:00 p.m. NBC Sports: Madden NFL 10 Pigskin Pro-Am 8:00 p.m. Sunday Night Football – Exhibition – Cincinnati vs. Dallas in the Hall of Fame Game in Canton, Ohio Fox: 7:00 p.m. American Dad (R) 7:30 p.m. The Simpsons (R) 8:00 p.m. The Simpsons (R) 8:30 p.m. The Cleveland Show (R) 9:00 p.m. Family Guy (two repeats) ______________________________________________________________________________ As a reminder, The Programming Insider will not be published this coming Monday. See you back on Tuesday, August 10.

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FX and PBS Portion of TCA

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