Panel-to-Panel: Searching for a Story at Summer Press Tour

The units of the Disney conglomerate machine kick off TCA's summer gathering

Photo: Rob LaTour/Shutterstock for the Television Critics Association

Panel-to-Panel is my ongoing journal from the bi-annual Television Critics Association Press Tour, as part of Episodic Medium’s Week-to-Week newsletter—it’s free to all subscribers, and will let you know what we’re covering for paid subscribers on a week-to-week basis. For more information on the newsletter, see our About Page.

---

The first panel at this year’s Television Critics Association Summer Press Tour was for the upcoming FX comedy series, English Teacher, created and starring Brian Jordan Alvarez. Set in an Austin high school, the show confronts the contemporary issues facing educators through the lens of a collection of teachers led by Alvarez’s Evan, whose queerness pushes him to the frontline of many of those issues whether he wants it to or not.

It was a lively way to start off the event—while critics in the room were disappointed the day wasn’t starting with an executive session with John Landgraf (who was unavailable not unwilling, per FX), the English Teacher panel had some good laughs, some good vibes, and a wide range of questions covering Alvarez’s personal connection to teaching, the cast’s ability to improvise, the ‘80s needle drops, etc. It even ended on the upbeat note of Alvarez’s birthday, with FX press czar John Solberg ushering out a birthday cake for the ritual blowing out of candles.

Photo: Rob LaTour/Shutterstock for the Television Critics Association

As always, though, there’s two types of “stories” that emerge from a Press Tour panel. The first is the holistic “experience” of a show’s panel, observable by all and once reflected in the copious livetweets from those assembled in the room. There’s still a small selection of journalists who livetweet the event—the hashtag is #TCA24, if you’re curious—but this is now a much smaller part of the TCA footprint. The second type of story is what individual journalists will write about the show, either in the form of a summary of the panel or through one-on-one interviews and cocktail party conversations they have with the cast and creatives. While the questions that journalists ask during a panel give an indication of their framework for evaluating a show, the bigger story only emerges when they can drill down deeper into something that may not necessarily be the room’s take on a particular series.

This is to say that I was seemingly one of the few people in that room who viewed English Teacher through the lens of Alvarez’s larger online footprint.¹ It’s a topic that would have come up on the panel without my help, since executive producer and FX comedy shepherd Paul Simms (What We Do In The Shadows, Atlanta) started working with Alvarez after seeing his 2016 YouTube series The Gay and Wondrous Life of Caleb Gallo. But mine was the only question to specifically reference the series and Alvarez’s more recent cultivation of various exaggerated characters on his TikTok and Instagram pages, and I had lots of questions for him about his sense of self as a performer and creator when it came to transitioning for the first time into a studio production environment. During the panel, at least, there’s most often only time for a single question (the first), which he answered as follows:

“This show feels like I'm revisiting a style of performing that I haven’t done in a long time. You know, I made “Caleb Gallo” on the web like, what, eight years ago or something? And that’s what Paul [Simms] came to me about but I had left playing a character that’s a lot more like me behind for a while and I’d been doing all these characters on TikTok and Instagram. But it’s nice to come back without the face filter and show my real features on camera.” 

There’s nothing wrong with this answer, but it inspires many followups, and that’s where press tour stories become more complicated. FX and the rest of day one’s Disney-run lineup were kind enough to offer time for onstage followups after their panels, but what are historically known as “scrums” don’t offer much space for detailed conversation depending on the person involved. I did get onstage first for the English Teacher followups, and asked Brian about whether his time on TikTok is inspiring any of the insights into teachers (who have a strong presence on the app), but then there were a swarm of reporters who wanted to talk to the star of the show, and whose questions were (with respect) of little to no interest to me personally. So after Brian acknowledged that his For You Page doesn’t overlap significantly with TeacherTok, I moved my attention to Simms, who the more “entertainment” reporters onstage were inherently less interested in talking to.

The story that emerged from this conversation was a clearer sense of how Alvarez’s start in “webseries” shaped his career. Caleb Gallo came at the tail end of the era of short form episodic video released through YouTube. During the panel, when asked to follow up on the answer to my question and detail how the show evolved from Simms’ original viewing of the webseries, Alvarez rightfully observed that the webseries had garnered critical acclaim, but also recalled his failures in developing within the studio system following that success. Simms echoed this in our conversation, noting that there was somewhat of a stigma attached to Alvarez’s creative output being “just a webseries” when he started trying to get this series off the ground with FX in 2021. Even though the series has over a million views for its first episode on YouTube, Simms still spoke of it as a niche object, which is probably accurate given I was the only journalist in the room who foregrounded it in my questions.

At least in the room, that is. I don’t know what happened during the one-on-one interviews that Alvarez had scheduled throughout the day. In truth, I tried to secure one of those, but such privileges are dependent on hierarchies that shape the experience of press tour on multiple levels. I don’t share this information to say “woe is me,” as I am in the equally privileged position of not needing that access to sell a story or convince an editor that my presence here is worthwhile: not being able to talk to Alvarez wasn’t make or break for me. But it can be frustrating to have a story you want to tell and not having the access to make it happen, making any ability for followup contingent on hoping that Alvarez would make an appearance six hours later at the cocktail reception in the lobby.

Scrums and cocktail parties are valuable spaces at Press Tour, and not every channel or network offers those opportunities. We also all approach the spaces in distinct ways. For traditional reporters, scrums and parties are a space to get quotes and find stories that might not have made it to everyone present: reporters arrive with audio recorders in hand, some using Voice Memos on their phones while at least one reporter continues to use a cassette recorder that she’s been using at least since my first tour in 2013. I understand the importance of getting exact details right, but I’ll admit that I find these spaces far more useful if I’m not holding a recorder in their face. It’s not exactly rocket science, but I think creatives (and talent) are more likely to offer meaningful insights into how television works when they’re not viewing it exclusively as “work” in a promotional sense. And since I’m more interested in broad-ranging reflections like this one, my scrum/cocktail party time is mostly just…chatting, because that’s just a better way to understand this industry and those operating within it.

Fortunately, Alvarez did eventually make an appearance at the cocktail party, and I was able to talk with both him and his friend and collaborator Stephanie Koenig, who co-starred in Caleb Gallo and is a writer and co-star in English Teacher as well. I learned that Koenig was forced to watch other women audition for her role in English Teacher because of scheduling conflicts between pilot production in Georgia and her role in Lessons in Chemistry, but that English Teacher EP Jonathan Krisel and Lessons in Chemistry EP Lee Eisenberg were able to work things out so she could do both. I also chatted with Koenig about the decision to upload content like Caleb Gallo and her own 2021 film A Spy Movie on YouTube for free, limiting their ability to monetize the content but giving them the creative freedom to use licensed music and make exactly the text they wanted without compromise.

This was a preview of my discussion with Alvarez, who notably emphasized that in his view The Gay and Wondrous Life of Caleb Gallo is not a webseries: it was a TV show released on the web. It’s a fair argument, given that the episodes were far longer than a traditional webseries—each episode was actually supposed to be closer to sitcom length, but he says he “got bored” while editing and kept trimming episodes down (most are between 15 and 20). In talking with Simms earlier, we discussed how webseries embodied a moment of creative freedom born out of cell phone cameras and broad access to production software, but the “webseries” as a format never materialized as the future of television in the way that we might have imagined a decade ago. Alvarez used that freedom to just make a TV show, for free, as proof of his capacity. That it took him eight years to make that dream a reality—shifting to acting primarily in the meantime—is a reminder that there was a stigma attached to this creativity (although Alvarez cites his own struggles to work with studio notes as a contributing factor). He wasn’t distancing himself from the work, but his framing is such that he wasn’t trying to revolutionize the industry: he was trying to join it, and now has that opportunity.

English Teacher doesn’t arrive on FX (and Hulu) until September, and technically the episodes we screened ahead of the panel are still under embargo, but I suppose my investment in following and telling this story is an indication of my interest level after watching them. Ultimately, that’s my goal in attending Press Tour: to get additional insight that helps contextualize where the industry is heading, both to help plan coverage for Episodic Medium and to serve the courses I teach. Where this will take us in the week ahead remains to be seen, but hopefully these missives from the field are a start to a deeper understanding of stories that resonate with you on at least some level.

Episodic observations

• In my ongoing quest to understand how showrunners are shifting story in line with distribution shifts, I confirmed that The Old Man creator Jonathan Steinberg didn’t know definitively that FX would launch two episodes at once when breaking season two, but knew by the time they went into production, which made it easier to commit to an episode structure where the first two hours are really meant to be seen together. Interior Chinatown showrunner Charles Yu, meanwhile, had no involvement in the decision for his show to be released as a binge on Hulu in November, but he thinks it serves the show (based on his own novel) well—I’d tend to agree.

• I chatted a fair bit with Yu and Interior Chinatown star Jimmy O. Yang at the cocktail party, and while I could report some of what we discussed, the show’s long lead time means that I’ll likely try to turn that more casual hang into an actual interview closer to the premiere of the show (provided that the publicist involved in the conversation remembers it by the time that rolls around, which, no promises).

• There was an interesting contrast in some of the drama panels: whereas Interior Chinatown wrapped nearly two years ago, and the actors arrived having just seen the finished product at the same time as the assembled critics, the cast of new ABC crime procedural High Potential are in the midst of shooting early episodes. There was a really infectious energy to Yang and his co-stars’ investment in the project compared to how Kaitlin Olson and her co-stars spoke about a job that they’re still actively doing. That’s not the say the latter gave a bad panel, but a job being “complete” definitely shapes things compared to an ongoing series.

• High Potential was somewhat inexplicably adapted from a French series by Drew Goddard of all people, who was on the panel but honestly didn’t seem all that invested in answering questions and disappeared with the head of his production company before the scrum. I’m not shocked by this, given he didn’t step in to answer my question about the replacement of Rob Thomas as showrunner a month ago, but it did mean I didn’t get to ask him about “The Other Woman,” his episode of Lost season four that I watched on the plane on my way to Pasadena. Alas.

• I only got to watch one episode of Lauren Greenfield’s docuseries Social Studies, documenting high school students’ social media habits in Los Angeles, but I already know it will be a useful teaching tool. I asked specifically about her use of screen recording as a filmmaking tool, which is both really effective and something I couldn’t imagine a teenager agreeing to.

• As panels slow down for questions, one of my favorite go-to queries is to find performers who may not have a huge resume in TV and have them reflect on their experience in the medium. That was the case for Reasonable Doubt co-star Angela Grovey, who gave a lovely answer about what it meant for her to achieve this dream of being a series regular and Onyx Collective’s commitment to keeping the show alive amidst the strikes. Lovely stuff.

• The last panel of the day, for a forthcoming Baywatch documentary series by ABC News, was announced at the last minute, but the demos of the room are such that there was lots of nostalgia to unpack. I don’t have much to say about the panel, but I do have something to say about the implications for a part of the tour I want to talk about in a subsequent newsletter, so I’ll save it.

• The evening ended with a screening and afterparty for Descendants: The Rise of Red, which debuts tomorrow. It was my first L.A. party of this nature since the pandemic, and since TikTok took over, and seeing influencers at work in the wild was easily the dominant narrative of the evening.

• For reference: Hallmark and Starz today, TCA Awards Friday, CBS and NBC over the weekend, two days of PBS on Monday and Tuesday, and then a day on the backlot with CBS/Paramount+ to conclude things next week.

1. I originally wrote this sentence more definitively, failing to recognize that I was speaking too broadly. Others have since noted that they too were aware of all of this. I’m glad to feel less alone.