The TV Critics Association Winter Press Tour plugged in Tuesday in Pasadena, where over the next two weeks nearly 200 writers will be presented more than 100 panels about new and upcoming TV shows on dozens of networks and online as well.
Or as “The Wire” auteur David Simon tweeted to my colleague Tim Goodman, “14 days listening to people pump television shows. I’d eat a gun after two. You guys are Vikings.”
No, not really. We sit here and listen to pitches and really loud sizzle reels. We ask questions if we can conjure enough interest to form a query. There is drinking at night.
And last summer, there was a Viking among us, who drank and posed for pictures and starred in that series of the same name. He was a little scary.
There is a little news to report from the first half-day, as reporters straggled in from a rain-delayed LAX.
William Shatner will play Mark Twain on the upcoming ninth new season of “The Artful Detective,” starting Jan. 26 on Oxygen.
Reza Aslan starts a new talk show for Oxygen “Rough Draft” that grew out of his public chats with writers (though this one seems to include mostly people from TV). One of the early guests, TV veteran Norman Lear, 93, also joined him on a panel.
Rachel Hunter, host of a new beauty show on Oxygen, talked about the exotic treatments she’s found in her travels.
Outdoor Channel will do something different. Instead of nonstop hunting shows, a show “Carter’s W.A.R” about a man’s efforts to keep poachers out of Africa.
Twenty sixteen will be the year of O.J. Simpson for no apparent reason. In addition to a multi-episode, stunt-casted series for FX by Ryan Murphy, there will be a multi-part documentary series about his murder trial for the “30 for 30” documentary series on ESPN.
Network TV’s former “Supernanny” Jo Frost was back fixing families in a big RV for a show on the Up network called “Nanny on Tour.”
And 86-year-old Ed Asner appeared, as he is wont to do at TCA. Not for a Hallmark movie in which he is a grumpy Santa Claus, but as a grumpy grandfather for an upcoming Up network movie “Love Finds You in Valentine,” which is about a ranch in Valentine, Neb., but but was actually shot in Ohio.
The question for many, though, may be: what is the Up network? Wasn’t Asner once famously starring and portrayed as the grumpy lead in the animated film “Up”? As we will determine over two weeks, we will try to find out what is up. Grumpily. If we don’t eat the gun.