Panel-to-Panel: A PBS Press Tour in 19 Panels
Panel-to-Panel: A PBS Press Tour in 19 Panels
Reflecting on public television's full court press for critical attention
Week-to-Week is the (mostly) weekly newsletter of Episodic Medium written by its editor-in-chief, Myles McNutt, and Panel-to-Panel is its iteration highlighting the twice-yearly Television Critics Association press tour. To receive future newsletters and first reviews of shows we’re covering for paid subscribers, sign up to receive future emails. You can learn more on our About Page.
Tonight, there’s a good chance your local PBS station will be airing Blake Edwards: A Love Story in 24 Frames (it will be available online if not). The documentary, part of PBS’ American Masters series, comes from filmmaker Danny Gold, who tells the story of Edwards’ life as a artist through interviews with his widow Julie Andrews, actors from his films, and filmmakers and other stars who have been impacted by his work.
Truth be told, I don’t know that I’ve ever actually seen a Blake Edwards film other than Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Although I have a media studies degree, I only took a single “film” class at that time (a film score course where I watched Breakfast), and was never someone who sought out older movies in my formative years. So I honestly didn’t know much about his filmography before I cued up a screener of the documentary ahead of its panel at PBS’ session at Summer TCAs, and didn’t even realize he and Andrews had been married until she popped up at the beginning of the film.
Screener viewing during TCA is an often overwhelming task, but I usually try to do my due diligence by at least sampling everything that networks/channels make available. And for PBS, this is particularly challenging, given that across two days they paneled 19 different projects. Not everything had screeners, but 15 had at least a rough cut of footage, and so I dove in to the combination of Vimeo links and PBS Press Site screeners in the hopes of getting enough of a sense of each program to ask an informed question…or two, depending on the panel.
Sometimes, though, those cursory scans of a screener don’t go as intended, and this was the case with A Love Story in 24 Frames. Once I started watching, and realized that this would be filmmakers and actors discussing scenes from Edwards’ films in detail, I came to the conclusion that I would rather watch the whole documentary—which I really enjoyed and learned a lot from—than watch an extra 20 minutes of three other projects. This wasn’t the only time this happened during my PBS screeners: I also watched an entire documentary about the Electoral College (One Person, One Vote) and a Firing Line special Counting the Vote (which also debuts today), because it was mid-July and I needed to channel my existential dread over the forthcoming American elections. And in all of these cases, I probably wouldn’t have known these projects existed if not for being forced to sequester myself in a Pasadena hotel for a week where my only job was watching screeners and asking questions.
PBS’ presence at Press Tour is not the same as the other networks/channels. There are some minor but noticeable distinctions: they have the same mic runners every year, for example, and they’re one of the few presenters who are committed to executive sessions (mainly because they know no one will try to “bully” PBS). However, the biggest difference is that unlike most of the other regular presenters, they see the attention they receive from critics during Press Tour as a crucial part of their mission statement.1
For commercial networks, critics are a risky intermediary—we’re useful in certain circumstances (if your show is good, basically), but they’d much rather bypass us entirely if they feel they can communicate with audiences without us (as social media has allowed). For PBS, though, they see the critics in that room as a valuable pipeline to readers across the country, particularly for those writing to local audiences. They know that commercial programming is buzzier, and that the impact of a compelling documentary or an educational program will grow if the people who help guide viewers through the increasingly congested landscape of television understand PBS to be a crucial part of that ecosystem.
I legitimately love PBS days—the academic in me gets to hear some smart people talking about things they’re passionate about, and the sheer diversity of programming usually comes with at least some combination of animal guests and musical performances. But every year I’ve been at Press Tour, dating back a decade now, there has been concern over attendance at PBS’ presentations. This has nothing to do with the quality of the panels or the programming, but rather the shifting realities of who is attending the event and who makes up the membership of the TCA. When it was primarily full-time critics who wrote for local papers, PBS days were relevant to nearly everyone’s beat. But with the ranks of the organization increasingly made up of freelance critics or those working for online outlets with narrower audience interests, the simple truth is that PBS’ brand of programming is—barring a hit Masterpiece drama—incompatible with the actual jobs of most of the critics in that room.
This is a larger existential crisis of Press Tour, to be clear. For freelance critics, or those whose editors are less than thrilled to shell out the expenses for a staffed journalist to attend, Press Tour needs to be monetizable. The time spent at the event needs to lead to material benefit, whether in the form of interviews that can be sold to outlets, or stories that can only be achieved through being at tour and draw clicks for one’s publication. More seasoned members often talk about “banking” stories from tour, justifying the upfront expense, but that really only applies to those who have regular columns or consistent freelancing opportunities that are increasingly hard to come by. If you don’t have either of those, your time spent at press tour is incredibly difficult to turn into paid work, making it hard to justify spending the money to be there at all or stay for the entire duration.
As noted, this applies to all of Press Tour, but I would argue it especially applies in PBS’ case. The simple truth is that it is almost impossible for a freelance critic to monetize a PBS panel because the whole reason a PBS program exists is often that a commercial network deemed it too difficult to monetize. There might be niche opportunities: perhaps someone with ties to local San Diego publications could pitch a story based on NOVA’s San Diego: America’s Wildest City, which brought us our animal guests this year (pictured: a coydog). But an average freelancer selling to national online outlets is not going to find an audience for PBS Press Tour coverage in this day and age, unless it’s about one of those Masterpiece series (and this year’s presentation for Moonflower Murders was missing its biggest stars).
For this reason, many of the Los Angeles locals who commute to Press Tour don’t brave traffic to make it to PBS days, and many critics whose budgets are limited will fly out before or in after PBS, depending on where it lands in the schedule. The simple truth is that it’s more common for journalists to have limited beats based on their respective audiences than it was even a decade ago, and the majority of critics would not by default cover PBS programming (although lots who don’t still attend and ask great questions). Even as someone whose “beat” is broadly defined, and who is not specifically tied to financial motives in what I cover in this free newsletter, I won’t deny that I mostly ignore the emails that PBS sends me based on the fact that the overlap between the average PBS viewer and the subscribers to said newsletter feels pretty limited.
For this reason, there’s a part of me that gets anxious every time we get to a PBS day at Press Tour, knowing that there is a double dose of existentialism happening around them. They’re a crucial structural part of the event: this year, they constituted a full 33% of the days spent in hotel ballrooms, and the event realistically needs that kind of presence in order to be viable. At the same time, though, there’s a part of me that worries PBS isn’t getting their money’s worth: they put on great sessions (operated with military precision by their Event Strategy and Production director Phil Piga), and they treat critics well (they usually spring for the good catering), but they don’t get the same immediate return on investment that the other presenters are getting. And so I would completely understand if they are feeling the tension of the modern state of journalism, and rethinking their approach to getting their programming out to the public it’s designed to serve.
But it’s possible that this is another example of the way we fail to acknowledge the specificity of PBS’ mission. It’s true that if you were to do the math, there are probably statistically fewer stories and social media posts about their Press Tour sessions than those from broadcast networks or cable channels. But there’s also a much greater likelihood that whatever posts do happen about their programming will be a reader’s first interaction with that program, and thus have a more transformative impact on their viewership. And every Press Tour session is a push for journalists at outlets who wouldn’t normally cover PBS programming to give it a try, which is how several of my colleagues found themselves on beats that weren’t necessarily the default at their respective outlets (although, again, this really only applies to the scripted programming).
And so if PBS feels that spending the money to bring in celebrities like Bo Derek and Lesley Ann Warren to discuss working with Blake Edwards is a viable extension of their mission, then I gladly take on the responsibility of extending that experience to my audience, from the privileged position of not having to deal with editors or page views. I don’t know if it’s exactly the kind of coverage they imagine coming out of Press Tour, but here’s a full breakdown of everything they paneled airing over the next couple of months, plus the answer to a question I asked during the panel (I’ll limit it to one, lower attendance means a higher likelihood of getting the mic again).
American Masters: Blake Edwards: A Love Story in 24 Frames (8/27)
As I note above, my favorite thing about the documentary was the device of showing clips of the films that were being screened for participants like Rian Johnson and Patton Oswalt, with us watching alongside them as they commentated. I asked director Danny Gold about it, and also got 10 star Bo Derek’s reflections on her experience watching as part of the documentary.
DANNY GOLD: It's an approach that I had tried in another movie that I did, which I found very successful. What I think it really does, it gets the interviewee in the right zone. You know, in other words, you can make a movie about somebody who's no longer here and it can be very "He was great." But when I really want to focus in on their scenes and what they did or with directors commenting -- in my opinion, they can speak for themselves -- but it gets them present and they remember exactly the moment, the scene. It brings out anecdotes and it gets it, I think, much more informative.
BO DEREK: It surprised me. I didn't realize -- I think it he calls it a device, I call it a brilliant idea. I've never had that before. And you try to prepare a bit when you're going to do something as important to me as "American Masters" and Blake, because he changed my life. But I found that so much more came out to talk about because, like, you forget, and all of a sudden you're watching this scene, right as you're going to talk about it, not the night before when you prepare, and you remember so many things and you're there. It was really good.
Counting the Vote: A Firing Line Special with Margaret Hoover (8/27)
Watching this hour-long documentary about the efforts to overhaul vote-counting across the country, and more importantly the efforts among Republicans to avoid overhauling vote counting based on unfounded conspiracies, I was struck by the sheer absurdity of some of the positions held by Republicans in office or running for office. I asked Hoover about whether she was surprised by the kind of arguments she faced in her interviews:
MARGARET HOOVER: Well, forgive me, but I like to tell everyone, you know, we do a deeply researched longform interview once a week at Firing Line. And when I say deeply researched, what I will tell you is I'm rarely surprised by something that my interviewee, the subject, says. So after undergoing that process of deep research, I will say some of the deniers, particularly some that I spoke to in Arizona, even still surprised me. There is -- you will see this when you see the full cut of the film -- but there's a lot of creativity in the conspiracy theory realm. I think you'll even see new variations, of versions of explanations for reasons why Joe Biden didn't win Arizona, for example.
Masterpiece: Moonflower Murders (9/15)
I hadn’t seen the original Magpie Murders, of which this is a sequel, but I sampled the premiere and thought it was pretty accessible. I also did some reading though and discovered that the original series had seen author/screenwriter Anthony Horowitz pretty significantly change the structure of his book for the screen, so I asked him how adapting the first book changed his perspective on the second.
ANTHONY HOROWITZ: Well, the first book, I mean, I came across this sort of realization that because the main character, played by Lesley Manville, didn't turn up until page 300, if I had adapted the book simply book to screen, we'd have lost our lead actor for the whole of the first three episodes, which I don't think would have played too well. So having then realized that Lesley had to appear at the very beginning and we had to tell the story through her and through her relationship with Pünd, then that suddenly became the template for the whole first, second, and if there is one, third season of the show. There is a third book instantly, so I live in hope.
But that was the big discovery, and it was Jill, really, who said that, you know. You can't keep Lesley off the screen, we must have her from the beginning. And then I began to realize and to play with two things that were so important to me. The first is we've talked about this transition of the actors, how they would reflect each other, because Alan Conway, being a horrible writer, uses people he meets. Actually, it's something I do too, as characters in his books, but he does it in a very malevolent way, and that gave us a lot of a sort of the key to how a thing would be written, but also that relationship, the core relationship between the detectives, that is, Lesley and Tim, and that sort of extraordinary sort of friendship across two dimensions became the heart of the whole thing. And so that was set up in the first one and then continued and developed in the second, and who knows where it will go next time if there is a next time.
American Masters: VOCES: Julia Alvarez: A Life Reimagined (9/17)
I admittedly wasn’t familiar with Alvarez’s work, but I enjoyed learning more about her life, and appreciated Dascha Polanco’s narration during the passages from the author’s books. I asked director Adriana Bosch and Alvarez about the choice of narrator:
ADRIANA BOSCH: We wanted to bring to life Julia's writing. This is a story about a writer, and we thought the best way to do it was to have someone read her literature that would reflect in some way who she is, where she comes from. And Dascha was, to me, a very good choice to do that. A young woman, a Dominican, committed. And I think she understood profoundly, you know, I believe, what Julia was writing about. And that's why, you know, that's why that was chosen. She was chosen.
JULIA ALVAREZ: I thought she was me. When I heard it, I said, how did they get me to do that reading? I didn't do that. And I did like her voice, yeah.
Big Cats 24/7 (9/18)
I never know how much there is to talk about nature documentaries, but we got a satellite tour of the base camp in Botswana, and I was thankfully given a visual aid to help articulate something I found from watching screeners: while the crew are labeled as cinematographers, they spend a lot of time talking to cameras which are filming them and their cameras, which was echoed by headshots on the big screens in the ballroom which all had them and their camera in the frame. I asked about the decision to put the cameras into the show as often as they are, and here are answers from producer Rowan Crawford and cinematographer Gokongwei Seetsele “Sets” Nthomiwa.
ROWAN CRAWFORD: We had talked and planned with Brad extensively before we went on the shoot, and part of the direction from my point of view was to try and capture that real experience of being there. Not just from the cats’ perspective but also from the human perspective, because from an audience member, I want to feel that. And so, the ensemble cast we’ve built here, of eight cinematographers actually, really brings lots of different expertise and authenticity to the storytelling. And then, visually what we wanted to do was to really bring a new blended format to the screen. So we wanted to maintain the premium quality natural history footage of the cats, which is what our fantastically skilled cinematographers are doing, but we also wanted to bring our audience on a journey and make you feel like you were really there. Which meant sort of breaking down that fourth wall, showing the camera in shot, and really following the action as it happens. So, not setting stuff up, not scripting anything, we went out there and we just let it happen. And that’s what we were trying to achieve from a directing point of view. What it was like to be the subject, I will throw that maybe to Sets who might want to pick that up. How did you find that, Sets?
GOKONGWEI SEETSELE NTHOMIWA: To be honest, when we all started this, I was a bit nervous because in the start of my career, I had never been in front of the camera. Like, I was used to being behind the camera, showing the behavior that is happening. But now, having to do that and have myself in the shot was -- like, I don’t know what to say. But as we got along with it and getting advice from everyone, it became a no-brainer. Because I’m sure everybody here can agree, as well, when you film something, you kind of want to share your experience as it’s happening. And when you’re filming an epic sequence or filming something that’s not very cinematography appealing. Like when the lion is asleep and you see it rolling around with its legs in the air, it’s like you kind of want to tell someone. So, this show I believe is like an opportunity for us to kind of reveal that veil and show the world how we live with the animals. And I think that’s really cool and I like that. I love that we are able to do that and show the world.
Deadlock (9/20)
This is a rare case where there’s a panel but no show to speak of—they had yet to film the pilot for the special, which focuses on ethical debates in a polarized environment with moderator Aaron Tang of UC Davis. It sounded pretty abstract, so I didn’t really have a question. And honestly, reading through the panel transcript, I don’t even know if I got a clear idea of what the show even is. I suppose that’s all the more reason to tune in to see what this looks like, and whether PBS feels it’s worth repeating as a monthly/recurring program (which is the plan should it be successful).
POV: Who’s Afraid of Nathan Law (9/23)
I asked a question about the timing of this documentary’s premiere during the panel itself, as it’s debuting over a year after it debuted at Hot Docs last spring. Producer Matthew Torne revealed that they didn’t make any updates for what’s been going on with Nathan since the film was locked last year, which wasn’t exactly a substantive answer, but I did have a chance to chat with Matthew briefly at the refreshment stand outside the ballroom. We dug into a bit of the logic of this followup to 2017’s Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower not following that film to Netflix, and the shifts in the documentary market: while programs like POV have remained a consistent purchaser of these programs, Netflix’s initial huge spend into documentaries hasn’t necessarily sustained, and Torne seemed to prefer the public media accessibility over paywalling it on Netflix. The payday was probably—definitely—smaller, but it was a good reminder of the shift in perspective when PBS gets involved.
VOCES: American Historia (9/27)
A documentary followup to John Leguizamo’s Latin History for Morons, which was also a PBS program, this series goes through different era of Latino history. I was particularly interested in Leguizamo’s multi-faceted role, serving as a “host” in some segments but taking on a more correspondent role in others. Here’s the answer I got from Leguizamo when I specifically asked about the one-on-one interviews he does with people like Edward James Olmos and Dolores Huerta.
JOHN LEGUIZAMO: [We did the one-on-one interviews] because you need witnesses and testimonies. Because people are Latin history deniers in this country, so you need evidence. You can’t just talk, you know, I mean, you have to have proof, you have to have evidence, you have to have testimonies to verify what we’re talking about. Because there are so many deniers of Latin history. So that was the thought behind interviews.
Independent Lens: One Person, One Vote (9/30)
This documentary details the logic behind the Electoral College, exploring its ties to slavery and the modern day efforts to combat its absurdity. Amidst a lively panel where the two electors gathered on stage—a Democrat and a Republican—argued over the value of the Electoral College, I asked director Maximina Juson what led her to choose Colorado as the state to focus on despite it not being a traditional battleground (thus meaning that most of the electors in the documentary—those representing Republicans, Greens, and Kanye West—would know they had no chance of being a formal part of the process).
MAXIMINA JUSON: It actually happened really organically, but ultimately I think it was a concrete choice of a state. There was a lot going on in Colorado around the Electoral College. There was the faithless elector case that Polly actually was a part of that ascended to the Supreme Court. And then there was the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which is a bill that the legislature can vote in. But in Colorado, it was passed in 2019, but then a ballot initiative, a repeal initiative was put on the ballot by gathering enough signatures. And so for the first time, people could actually vote as to whether they were going to participate in the compact or not. And then while I was there, I figured, let's find our four electors and I already had Polly. And I went ahead and found Derrick, Kit, and, Patricia. And so it kind of happened perfectly that way.
Colorado has been a hot spot for all things Electoral College, but also, I lucked out in the sense that Colorado, you know, you drive into the state and says, "Welcome to Colorful Colorado." And really, there’s a wide range from like very, very urban, cosmopolitan, to very rural. Just a great state of diversity, and in this film I really wanted to show all sides. I didn’t want this to be a film that was preaching to the choir. I wanted it to look like America. And all four electors, they all have very, as we said, very different motivations, but all four of them together create the fabric that is America.
The only groups who come close to meaning “we’re so excited to be here” are FX, who also do the executive sessions, and production studios who aren’t concerned about ratings/decision-making and are just focused on helping their shows be competitive within their respective networks.
You have not seen a single Peter Sellers Clouseau film? Never watched thm on TV as a kid?
Wow. Not sure what clips they showed, but I would check out the second movie and the only one without Pink Panther in the title - A Shot In The Dark. They are all funny to a greater or lesser extent. but Shot In The Dark is a classic