Panel-to-Panel: Three Questions, Two Answers
On expectations vs. reality when speaking to panelists at TCA Press Tour
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.
What do we expect from a question asked at Press Tour?
I’m someone who asks a lot of questions at Press Tour, admittedly, and I might conclude this series of newsletters by collecting the answers to every single one of them, for science. But while I’ve asked a question in nearly every session, they cover a wide range of genres depending on who you’re speaking to.
Friday’s afternoon session with FX began with an executive session, an increasingly rare sight in our current moment: while Disney’s three days included three (with Nat Geo and Disney Television Group also offering them), and PBS and CW will offer them in the coming days, big players like Apple, AMC, and NBC/Peacock declined to make their executives available for questions in the ballroom.
It’s always valuable to talk to executives, regardless of where they come from. But FX’s executive session is distinct because it is with John Landgraf, who Alan Sepinwall is credited with dubbing “the Mayor of TV.” It’s a title Landgraf earned by being the executive most willing to comment on the big picture questions of the industry, and by making himself readily available to journalists. It’s also a title he picked up around the same time he famously intervened with FX’s directing pipeline following Mo Ryan’s report about a lack of diversity at the channel.
As someone who is regularly trying to use panel questions as a way to get the pulse of the industry at a given moment, Landgraf is one of the few people who I expect will address my question in the way I intended. In this case, with Landgraf having cited a period of intense turnover at FX and the premature end of Reservation Dogs (which he had intended to take to five seasons) and the sunsetting of What We Do In The Shadows after season six, my thoughts turned to the trend across the industry of fewer shows running for longer than a handful of seasons. Here’s a slightly edited version of my question to remove conversational redundancies that happen when you get a microphone in your hand:
“You mentioned "What We Do in the Shadows" ending after Season 6, but we're obviously seeing a trend towards fewer long-running series, we're seeing more turnover happening across the board. Do you think another FX series will run past five seasons in the future? Or has the industry changed to the point where we have to get used to these shorter runs?”
When I asked this question, I knew that I wasn’t just going to get a “yes” or “no” answer. Landgraf’s brand—and yes, executives have brands—is the idea that he is a philosopher of the medium, a position that he’s really embraced after Disney’s acquisition of FX. While other cable channels like AMC struggle to figure out how to adapt to a non-linear marketplace, FX has the safety and security of being the biggest provider of adult-focused programming to Hulu at a time when Disney is the studio best positioned to survive the contraction of the streaming marketplace. Even in a year where FX is experiencing intense turnover, losing long-running shows, there’s no panic in Landgraf’s position, which makes it easier for him to turn his attention to subjects like “Peak TV” and trends like the one I identified without needing to spin his own situation in the process.
As such, his answer inspired a lengthy response that became the lede for Variety’s report on the executive session. Here’s his answer in full, if you’re curious:
“You know, it's such a good question, and it's something that I struggle with, my team and I struggle, and I ponder really deeply. And I think it's profoundly related to what many of you have experienced in journalism if you've been in journalism for a long enough period of time to watch the form go from the weekly magazine or the newspaper to the endless scroll, right? The thing about the newspaper or the magazine is it's a thing in and of itself that's carefully edited and curated in which you can create adjacencies and you can create a kind of stumble upon quality, you can mix, you know, metro and sport and entertainment and international, and all kinds of things together. And there's a limited space so there's also a very high priority on quality in that circumstance.
You know, when you go to an endless scroll, the key is engagement, right? And everyone's accustomed then to just -- you know, and the algorithm often makes a different newspaper for you or magazine for you than it does for me. And everybody's attitude is oh, no, not for me, not for me, not for me, right? Nobody basically gives anything the benefit of the doubt, whereas I would suggest that people probably read, you know, deep stories about international relations because they were in the newspaper that they otherwise wouldn't have read.
And so, I think our attention spans have declined radically. And I think our impatience with things that are a little demanding have gone down. It's something I'm really worried about in the media ecosystem created by the internet. And it's just different when somebody buys a ticket and goes to a theatrical experience and sits in the dark with a big screen and frankly curating something for an actual channel is different. But, you know, we have 8,000 episodes of television available on our streaming platforms and so holding people's attention is really difficult. And I worry very much about what that will mean for deep library, because what I see right now if I look across the ecosystem at actual consumption of television is that's a lot of what people want from TV.
If you look at where the actual hours of consumption are, they're in "Friends" and "The Office" and, you know, we can go on and on, deep library, long, you know, like there's a reason why when "Suits" go on a streaming platform it gets, you know, billions of hours of consumption. It's because that's a kind of television people really love.
And then you have this problem which is that okay, so now you're not marketing this show on one of even 500 channels, you have it in the middle of 600 television shows, but not really 600, say 6,000 because everything ever made is available, you have a restless audience that's very impatient and if it's not to their taste in three minutes, they often leave.
And not for nothing, but we've radically increased the cost of making television in Season 1. We brought a lot of wonderful talent into television, but there's been a spiraling and escalating cost, that's part of what happens when you make 600 television shows. And so television shows start at such an expensive rate. We have so many shows from "The Shield" to "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" and many that started with such modest budgets that even if they weren't on fire out the gate, we could afford to renew them and believe in them creatively. That gets harder to do when something is super expensive.
So I'm telling you in a lot of different ways that I really don't know except that I can tell you that one of my greatest priorities at FX is to try to figure out how to make television. That's not a pejorative to me, I love great television, and that includes episodic comedies and episodic dramas. I want to figure out how to make the next deep library. And I think that is to the advantage of Hulu and The Walt Disney Company if we can figure out how to do it.
And, you know, we got a lot of smart people in our company, you know, Dana and I talk about this and Eric Schrier and Karey Burke and you know, all the people that run the studios and the FX team's really focused on it. But it's a different order of magnitude challenge now than it was before and it's always been hard to get a show to 50 or 75 or 100 episodes.”
This is the platonic ideal of a press tour question and answer, inspiring a lengthy insight into how the industry works that is both honest and dimensional in its approach. But it’s also the kind of answer I only realistically expect from Landgraf.
The next morning, Disney Television Group president Craig Erwich did an executive session, and while I had never seen him speak before, I knew going in that there wasn’t going to be the same type of reflection as with Landgraf. During his initial remarks, he made a comment about “linear vs. non-linear” that coincided with a question I had been forming:
“Since I started, I've gotten a lot of questions about how we decide what goes on linear versus streaming. I had one resolution this year, and it's to get people thinking differently on this topic. It's not one versus the other. Versus implies an opposition or a comparison. These are two complementary platforms which reach two very different types of viewers, and they're nonduplicative.”
It was decent segue for me, because I wasn’t so much interested in linear vs. non-linear as I was in thinking about the decisions within the non-linear pipeline, brand wise. Later that day, Disney Television Group did a panel for the upcoming Renegade Nell from Sally Wainwright, which is a period action-adventure drama about a woman who just so happens to have a fairy that gives her super powers.
It struck me as a show that would have naturally straddled the Hulu and Disney+ brands, and while I knew I would eventually be able to ask the show’s director about it during their panel, Wainwright herself wasn’t present, meaning that I needed to go to Erwich for a better understanding of these decisions. Rather than narrow my question to Nell (which I enjoyed even with my residual Nate feelings regarding Ted Lasso star Nick Mohammed, who plays the fairy), I decided to ask a broader question about the brands he oversees:
“Here on the right, Craig.1 So you mentioned the difference between linear versus nonlinear in terms of programming strategies, but obviously with Hulu now existing on Disney+, what is the difference between a Hulu series and a Disney+ series, and is that kind of a moving target given the collapse of the brands?”
I’ll give you his answer in full, but spoiler alert: he does not come close to answering this question.
“Well, ABC -- I would say all of our brands have a very clear creative filter designed to serve a very specific role in our streaming strategy and to serve the platforms that they're on. So for Disney Branded Television, which is Disney Junior, Disney Channel, and some shows for Disney+, the charter and the mission of that group, which they do remarkably well, is to really introduce the Disney characters in the Disney world to that next generation of fans. That's where you see shows like "Mickey Mouse Club" and "Spidey," and "SuperKitties," which Ayo is going to be talking about, and that's a really critical initiative for our company. ABC has a very clear creative charter as well, which is these long-running procedurals. Simran and Brianna Bennett, who head up our drama, they call them "subcedurals," which is a term that I really like.2 These are ideas and series that can generate 18 to 20 episodes a year, will go on for many years and, most importantly, kind of satisfy that audience's desire to watch some shows that have a resolution. Clearly, comedy has always been at the center of ABC's strategy. I think over the last 30, 40 years, ABC has always been at the forefront of reinventing family comedy. You know, whether it's the years of TGIF, or when they took a look at families through the lens of class with "Home Improvement." "Modern Family," obviously, was kind of a new format in a way to look at it, and then obviously through new voices, which was the era of "black-ish" and "Fresh Off the Boat." And now we have, I would say, a generational talent taking a look at it with "Abbott Elementary," and we're still taking advantage of the audiences that want to watch live programming and celebrate and participate in a communal event. "New Year's Rockin' Eve" was a massive success for us. We're really excited about the Oscars coming up. So that's kind of that strategy, which I think is, for us, very clear and has been very successful.”
He stopped at this point, which was weird given he still hadn’t talked about Hulu, which was the actual context of my question. So at this point, with the microphone still in hand, I prompted him to address Hulu as well.
“Hulu are really about shows that both, I would say, reflect and kind of pierce popular culture. When you think about shows like "The Dropout" and "Pam & Tommy," shows that really kind of put a mirror up to our popular culture, and they're really designed as much for people to watch them but really to create conversation. We talk a lot at Hulu about, kind of, two words, one being "addictive," which are shows that you can't stop watching, can't stop talking about. They're guilty pleasures that are executed at the highest creative level and shows that are modern, shows that -- really, stories that can only be told today. So it's through a modern lens that we can kind of take a look at "The Dropout" or "Pam & Tommy," or even take a look at a book that was 30 years old like "Handmaid's Tale.""“
Is this an answer to my question? Objectively no. There’s some insights to be gleaned here, but it’s all marketing nonsense, without specific examples of the kind of “either-or” shows I was considering. Could I have gotten a more specific answer if I had cited Renegade Nell? Maybe. But it’s also pretty likely that he was likely going to break into this particular boilerplate PR speak regardless of what I asked, because this is pretty much par for the course when it comes to commercial TV executives that aren’t John Landgraf. And that’s fine—the very fact that an executive is more likely to speak in generalities as opposed to answering your question is itself a piece of information about the industry and those within it. A non-answer is sometimes an answer.
“No answer,” though, is a whole other deal. Later that afternoon, ABC held a session for its primetime reality franchises, bringing showrunners from across their franchises. And while ABC was hoping for a victory lap after announcing The Golden Bachelorette, it quickly became clear that the producers from The Bachelor franchise in particular were not going to be addressing our questions. First, a reporter—I’m 90% certain it was Reality Blurred’s Andy Dehnart—asked about whether the producers would support the unionizing of reality contestants. The transcript doesn’t reflect it, but there was absolute silence until Jeopardy producer Michael Davies chimed in, forcing the reporter to be more direct:
I guess I’ll point it to “The Bachelor” producers then since you have the biggest group of people and the ones who probably talk the most about how they’ve been treated over the course of filming. So, would you support those kinds of efforts to establish a union or those kinds of standards?
At this point, Claire Freeland—new to the U.S. franchise after working on the Canadian spinoffs of the series, which she compared to getting drafted to the NBA from the G League—chimed in to miss the point of the question entirely:
I mean, I think for our show, we tell the love stories of real people, not actors, and we are feeling like our relationship with the cast are really strong. I mean, Jason and I joined in January of this year, and Bennett’s been making this show for 16 years, and I think our cast are quite pleased with the experience that they’ve had on the show and, for us, a successful ending engagement, long-term relationship is really what our mission is, and I think our cast are all feeling pretty excited about it. I mean, Charity and Dotun are together, Gerry and Theresa are together. I won’t give away the end of Joey’s season. But, yeah, we just want to tell the stories of real people who people can root for and get behind. So we’re pleased with our cast relationships.
It’s a terrible answer to the question, but it’s at least an answer, which longtime producer Bennett Graebner sitting next to her didn’t provide with his stony silence. That lack of an answer is itself instructive, but it’s also confusing, because you’d think that after so much reporting on the manipulative realities of reality TV production, they might have considered how they’d address a question related to it. But it was foreshadowing for what came after, when NPR’s Eric Deggans asked the Bachelor producers about the show’s struggles with race over its history:
“I wanted to ask "The Bachelor" producers about the way the show has struggled with race. In particular, when you've had Black people as stars of the show. During the Matt James season, you had a controversy that led to Chris Harrison leaving the show. Matt was a little critical of how you presented his father, his scenes with his father and some other things. Rachel Lindsay, the first Black Bachelorette, has been critical of how the show talks about race. Why does it seem that "The Bachelor" and "The Bachelorette" have such a hard time dealing with racial issues in-depth? And have you learned anything from these past scandals that led to the departure of Chris Harrison?”
Deggans is an expert at asking these questions, having had lots of practice over the years. Talking about issues of race and representation in the ballroom is inherently challenging: everyone on that stage gets incredibly defensive about it, and it’s hard not to build value judgments into the question itself. Here, Eric deftly frames this through the critiques of others: he’s not personally judging the show for its choices, but rather reporting that Lindsay and James had issues with their respective portrayals, which led to Harrison’s firing, and then putting that question to the producers. He’s also making the question reflective rather than reactive: he’s not asking them to apologize for what happened, but rather asking them how they’re moving forward with these events having transpired.
And while I have a great respect for the transcribers who bring the panels to life, they absolutely failed to capture what happened next. Because while Freeland eventually gave a non-answer that’s not worth publishing, there was a lengthy silence beforehand as Graebner—the only producer onstage who was involved in those seasons—sat there making no movement toward answering the question. And when Deggans pushed the issue further, noting that Freeland had not addressed the core question about why the franchise struggled with race, there was another lengthy silence, leading Deggans to conclude “I guess we have our answer.” If there was ever a time for an editorial “*crickets*” from the transcribers, this was it.
It was a stunning failure on Graebner’s part, and it immediately became the headline of the panel, making it to all the major trades (my tweet about it even made it to The Hollywood Reporter). Afterwards, Graebner did actually answer the question for Decider’s Nicole Gallucci, but the fact he failed to do so on the panel became the entire story, which is no doubt a thorn in ABC’s side after hoping the Golden Bachelor had ushered in a fresh new era for the franchise. But the lesson isn’t that they shouldn’t have done the panel at all—the lesson is that Graebner needed to be able to answer an expected question in a way that didn’t become the story. If you’re the producers of a reality franchise that famously fired its host over his comments related to your show’s handling of race, you need to be able to tell that story to a group of reporters.
In simpler terms, and to pull these three panels together: while Deggans has been doing this long enough to know that he probably shouldn’t expect a satisfying answer from Graebner in this situation, to get no answer at all was shocking, and perhaps said more than an actual answer could have ever managed.
Episodic Observations
The reality producers panel is actually one of the few where I wasn’t able to ask a question, but after the panel I listened in as the Dancing with the Stars producers continued defending casting Sean Spicer, so I think it’s safe to say I would have been dissatisfied with their answer to my question about Tom Bergeron’s exclusion from the tribute to Len Goodman last season.
Following on my earlier discussion of “scrums,” FX broke the seal by allowing journalists to ask followup questions onstage after the panels for Clipped and Shogun, which was much appreciated, and stars from Percy Jackson and the Olympians and The Rookie also stayed onstage later in the day for additional questions. And I guarantee you that reporters in the room got more out of those sessions as a result, to the benefit of all parties involved.
On the subject of Percy Jackson, one of the fun details of press tour is seeing stars in real-life settings, and it gets no more charming than the young leads of the show roaming the halls of a fancy hotel in pajama pants and slippers just hanging out.
Another charming moment: to announce the renewal of Abbott Elementary, ABC brought star William Stanford Davis in character as Mr. Johnson, and had him arrive onstage unannounced. It was a great little viral moment in the ballroom as we all noticed at different intervals that he was casually onstage cleaning before he eventually take the microphone to make the announcement. Fun stuff.
We’re off for Super Bowl Sunday, and then it’s PBS, set visits at Warner Bros., NBC/Peacock, and then a CW day to end things.
You have to let them know where you are in the ballroom so they can see you—it’s a real test of knowing your right from your left, and then flipping that for the people onstage, and then remembering to do it and not just say “over here” as though they know where the sound is coming from. People…well, they sometimes fail this test.
I’d love to hear more about subcedurals, which I presume means “procedurals that appeal to subscribers.”
To me nothing is more indicative to the death of Twitter than the lack of this info in my feed. Even though getting the same quotes over and over again is never ideal, it gave me a sense of the room and different perspectives. This year, nothing, and these Episodic Mediums are the only way I’m getting the details.
I've enjoyed your coverage of the TCA, but in particular your insights into the complete disaster of Bennett Graebner failing so utterly at something that, as you say, he should have seen coming. How embarassing. He and the franchise deserve the trade press scrutiny. (Not that I'm shocked he couldn't answer the question--it's what I would expect given the franchise's terrible track record re: diversity.)