It seemed like a great idea: Instead of sitting all day at a ballroom table and listening about a network’s TV shows, getting on a bus and going to their shows instead.
In the case of ABC ‘s set visit day during the two week (!) TV Critics Association winter press tour in Pasadena, the excursion involved sitting at Jimmy Kimmel’s talk show desk, watching a “Switched at Birth” scene be shot, examining the faux White House on the “Scandal” set and finally making my way up the stone driveway to “The Bachelor” mansion. Where I got a rose.
It almost sounds like a fall through the flatscreen looking glass but it’s a lot duller than that. A lot of time on the 405 at the wrong time of the day and while in the traffic, having to watch the latest episode of the next show on the tour on the bus DVR.
On the first stop, this meant watching the episode of Kimmel when he and his sidekick Guillermo were having ultrasounds conducted by Dr. Oz. It was amusing but I had seen most of it when it had run the night before. The funny thing was noticing that the guy in the next row up who was watching more intently than anyone else was Guillermo himself.
Sure enough he said hello when the coach pulled up to the El Capitan Entertainment Center in Hollywood, he was worried about all the weight Dr. Oz had told him to lose. Kimmel, when he met us in the theater, asked if we had a lot of fun with Guillermo on the way to the theatre. Obviously he was supposed to do some schtick (or say hello) but did not.
No problem. Kimmel had some breakfast for us in the green room area and we were supposed to be able to casually interact with him, but of course he was swamped by recorder wielding interrogators for the balance of the stop. Kimmel himself looked relaxed and trim, well burnished as a new 11:35 host should be. But right around his eyes were very dark indeed. It’s what happens when you get up early and host a late night show (even if you shoot it in the late afternoon).
The bus to Santa Clarita to visit “Switched at Birth” gave time to watch an episode or so of that ABC Family show. Still probably wasn’t enough to get all of what’s been going on in the increasingly complex show, half told in American Sign Language and subtitles. An upcoming episode will be the first on TV entirely in ASL.
Once there, we sat with the stars which included some familiar adults among the teen cast, including, at our table, Lea Thompson, talking about her own progress in learning ASL and her thoughts about living in an era she once went to in “Back to the Future” (the future date though is 2015 not 2012, she pointed out).
Marlee Matlin was doing a scene inside the school set and I got to learn about wireless focus pullers from a cameraman. I fully examined the house set and took mental notes on kitchen decoration.
Back on the bus, things were going badly with the bus DVD. Next week’s episode of “Scandal” was skipping and stuttering and skipping again as if it were rendered by Max Headroom. For fans of the show it may have been maddening, but for the rest of us, it was sort of amusing. I shut off the whole thing myself after a while.
Much of this was remidied by the time we got to the Sunset Gower studios, where we sat in a room with the ambience of a truck bed and watched next week’s episode of “Scandal” without the digital skips. The one thing about moving us to all these places, ABC certainly had us captive to watch shows we may not ordinarily have watched. It was like Guantanamo.
One difference, though, was that we were eventually released to the show’s set, where some of the stars were also available for interviews. Much of the “Scandal” set replicated the White House, so I wandered around and looked at all the fake paintings, most of them photo reproductions on textured paper, but one strikingly terrible Gilbert Stuart imitation. But the Remington sculpture in the White House looked pretty real.
We were there for a long time, it seemed, but the bus ride to Agoura Hills, Calif., about 30 miles north of the city, took about 90 minutes on a Friday rush hour night. Enough to see highlights of 25 (!) seasons of “The Bachelor” and much of next week’s episode before we got there. And once we pulled in, closer to the highway than you would have imagined it was too dark and too cold to hang out near the outdoor pool or two hot tubs
But inside was all manner of “Bachelor” faces, starting with current one, Sean, and the first “Bachelorette,” Trista. This show must keep local florists afloat for all the roses they work in. It’s a weird, 8,000 feet mansion that one can’t imagine a family ever living in. No, it’s only made for rose ceremonies, gossiping and being there for the wrong reasons.
The decor for the house changes with each season, the set decorator said. Right now it’s more manly to reflect the male bachelor. Chris Harrison wasn’t there because he was in Las Vegas, preparing to co-host Miss America. But he was represented by a cardboard cutouts.
The bachelors were not cardboard, but might have been. Though the current Sean is tall, some of the guys from recent seasons who were there looked relatively tiny. I talked to Ali and Courteney who were both pretty interesting and stuck around for a fake rose ceremony in which reporters were asked dramatically whether they’d accept their rose. Well how many were they going to get?
Back in to the bus and grateful for the ride home, I was doubly grateful they didn’t try to show another video.