Barely an hour after I set foot into the Langham Hotel in Pasadena, Piers Gibbon offered me a shrunken head to eat. The heads in question were made of marzipan and cake, and part of promoting Gibbon’s upcoming special “Search for the Amazon Headshrinkers” (coming to Nat Geo), but it still made for a strange hello.
“Let me tell you, I’ve done a lot of weird things in my career,” he said, “but never in my life did I imagine I’d be standing beside a tray full of these.” Quite a statement coming from a guy who rose to fame with a U.K. show called “Jungle Trip,” for which he traveled through far flung locales sampling various hallucinogenic potions.
“It will live forever on BitTorrent sites for various reasons,” Gibbon said. “I lose control of my bowels, for example.” I laughed profusely, selected a bizarre treat and was on my merry way.
Odd run-ins like this are par for the course at the Television Critics Association’s Summer Press Tour, ten days of panels, cocktail mixers and unexpected conversations about TV. Most interactions are quite comic, and whenever a network executive is talking you can pretty much accept that you’re being conned.
Make no mistake, though – Press Tour is no fan fair for the networks. They got that last week in San Diego. No, Press Tour is different. It’s a journey into the heart of snarkness that some gleefully refer to as the Death March with Cocktails: Almost two straight weeks of network and cable channels doing their best to sell scores of entertainment journalists with well-calibrated B.S. meters on their fall lineups. We will wade through a lot of mediocrity here before the public sees it – and on the way, see snippets of a show or two that are so extraordinary that we can’t wait to share them with the world.
There are producers on hand; the new ones smile nervously if this is their first time out, while the veterans wear poker faces and hope for the best. There are network executives saying one thing in front of a full room while their every word is diligently transcribed by stenographers, and quite another once they’ve had a few at the hotel bar and think nobody’s listening.
Oh yes, and there are stars. Actors and actresses we’re all quite familiar with who, in most cases, actually want to sit down chat with us. No kidding. Barely two summers ago, a lively Jennifer Westfeldt shared war stories about how nerve-wracking the audition process can be, illustrating her point by sharing that her longtime boyfriend had to audition for the lead in a cable drama no less than six times before the network finally gave him the role. The problem was, nobody had heard of him. A mere two seasons later Westfeldt’s man, “Mad Men’s” Jon Hamm, is up for an Emmy.
And that’s the real fun of it, looking behind the curtain to see who, and what, will be involved in the shows we watch – and based on what we see, whether we’d advise viewers to give those shows their time. So visit IMDb.com’s TV blog often over the next ten days for updates, observations and lots more strange moments for dessert. Cable’s up first. PBS arrives this weekend, and the networks have their turn next week.
The shrunken head, by the way, was delicious.
