Enlarge Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame And Museum

Darlene Love performs at the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame's spring benefit concert on May 14, 2011.

Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame And Museum

Darlene Love performs at the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame's spring benefit concert on May 14, 2011.

The weeks leading up to the Television Critics Association press tour every summer are a barrage of communications and press releases, of pitches and promises and offers to talk to this person and that person about this project and that one.

This year, the words I managed to pick out during those weeks were "Darlene Love."

Tonight, PBS begins running its special Women Who Rock, inspired by an exhibit at the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, which looks at women in popular music, from Bessie Smith to Pink and Beyonce and Adele. It will bring you Mavis Staples singing "The Weight" with Cyndi Lauper, it will bring you a blistering performance of "It's A Man's World" by Christina Aguilera, and it spends some time with the remarkable, raucous Darlene Love, who came to press tour to talk about it and sat down with me. (I tried not to burst into tears of joy, but I will not lie: I have listened to Darlene Love for many years, and if you opened up my circuitry, you'd find that much of me is wired to dance to this music. It seems a fair thing to disclose. If you have Spotify, you can check out this short playlist for an idea of what I'm talking about.)

The biggest success of Darlene Love's hitmaking career — which she describes as having run from 1962 to 1964 — was credited to someone else. She sang lead on "He's A Rebel," which became a #1 hit, but which super-producer Phil Spector released under the name of The Crystals, a group he produced that she wasn't part of. She knew he planned to make it a Crystals record even though she recorded the lead as a session singer, but it was meant to be a one-shot deal. "It was supposed to happen that once," she told me when we talked, "and not again."

As you may know, I recently spent two weeks at the Television Critics Association press tour, where I attended 85 panel discussions about coming attractions — or, if you like, "attractions" — on television over the next several months.

One peculiar thing about the tour is that as you become more restless, you start to notice what everyone is wearing. Thus, I bring you this slideshow: The Fashions Of Press Tour. You may want to check it out fullscreen, because these shoes must be seen to be believed.

Enlarge Steffan Hill/Hallmark Channel

Greg Wise and Nicollette Sheridan star in Hallmark's Honeymoon For One.

Steffan Hill/Hallmark Channel

Greg Wise and Nicollette Sheridan star in Hallmark's Honeymoon For One.

I was at the Television Critics Association (TCA) press tour for two weeks. Panels started early; they went all day. Networks talked to us through lunch; they talked to us about things I hope to never think about again; they promised that every high-concept, elevator-pitch project was really about the characters. I was left ice-cold by things that went over well with almost everyone else; I got excited about things that became running jokes. I heard from Harry Belafonte and Oprah Winfrey and Gloria Steinem and Paul McCartney and Davy Jones, and I shook hands with Jon Hamm and remained upright. (BOOYAH.)

­But everyone needs a break just for survival — a moment when the brain can go into full and rejuvenating hibernation like a snoozing European hedgehog. That's how I found myself sitting in my hotel room one afternoon, looking at a growing pile of brainy screeners from Showtime and BBC America and HBO and PBS, thinking, "I'm going to take out this screener of this Hallmark Channel romance called Honeymoon For One, starring Nicollette Sheridan as a woman who finds love in Ireland, and I am going to watch the heck out of it."

Oh, yes. Oh, yes, I did, people. And I am telling you this because your chance to see Honeymoon For One on the Hallmark Channel comes tonight at 9:00 p.m. Note: I AM NOT SAYING YOU SHOULD. I am saying you can. You may. Science allows it. And if your brain is in a tired-hedgehoggy kind of place, it might even appreciate it.

So Nicollette Sheridan plays Eve Parker. And who is this woman? Well. As the Hallmark synopsis puts it, "Eve Parker is a confident, beautiful woman who has it all." As you know, in a romantic comedy (which, in fact, is what this sort of is), any confident, beautiful woman who has it all is asking for trouble with a capital T and that rhymes with P and that stands for Poor Lady Is Clearly Deluded.

Indeed, Eve is right about to get married to her boyfriend (he has a name, but we can just call him The Weasel), when she discovers that The Weasel is cheating on her and she calls it off. (Here, she suffers The Wound. Every such love story must contain The Wound.) But since she already has the tickets to Ireland for the honeymoon, she decides she'll just go. She will stay at a resort castle called ... Castlewilde. THAT'S RIGHT. It's called CASTLEWILDE. (Undoubtedly the best place to go on a first date since Ye Olde Warme Hearte closed down.)

And there's another catch, too, which is that she and The Weasel were involved in a business deal involving ... selling their jointly owned business to MacGuffin Industries or something. Obviously, the deal falls apart when the engagement does. As you can imagine, you'll want to keep that in mind.

Here are some things you should know: Eve takes more luggage than she can easily carry up the stairs. She does not have appropriate shoes for the countryside. She suffers the humiliation of being booked in the honeymoon suite alone. (Sad trombone.) But WHAT DO YOU KNOW? On the way into the hotel, she runs into a handsome fellow with a brogue and calluses on his hands because he likes the outdoors, and he helps her with her stuff. She, of course, is brusque with him, because of The Wound. If you guessed that his name is Sean because everyone in a TV movie set in Ireland is named either Sean or Patrick, you guessed correctly. If you further guessed that he works at Castlewilde so that they will be seeing quite a bit of each other during her trip, you have again guessed correctly. YOU ARE PSYCHIC.

Steffan Hill/Hallmark Channel

Could you say no to this moppet (Katie Bannon) and her father (Greg Wise)?

Determined to enjoy her honeymoon in spite of everything, she sets out and encounters the one thing guaranteed to melt the heart of every successful woman laid low by heartache: a 12-year-old moppet. Here, a moppet with a brogue. Her name is Kathleen, and who do you think is her father? WHO? WHO? That's correct; her father is Sean, and her mother is Sean's Tragically Dead Wife, and she takes a liking to Eve.

Now. From here, you know everything that will happen, from the desire not to disappoint the moppet to the healing of The Wound. Here are some other things that are part of this movie.

1. The Environmental Dispute. You know how, in Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo, they have to save the community center from being destroyed by the evil developers? It's kind of like that, only it's a forest and a golf course.

2. The Return Of The Weasel. Naturally, The Weasel still wants to sell the company to MacGuffin Industries, so he wants to convince Eve to forgive him long enough to sign some paperwork. Will she fall for it? Will Sean see her with The Weasel and misunderstand everything?

3. The Miraculous Business Presentation. You see, Eve also has a job, and it involves coming up with a logo for a giant Asian conglomerate, and she needs some inspiration. She just might find it when she explores her true self in the rolling hills. Might.

4. Castlewilde. Juuuust wanted to say it again.

It is ridiculous. It is so predictable that I found myself trying to predict lines out loud and really not doing all that badly. Hearts melt! Worlds collide! People coo! Nicollette Sheridan rides a horse a lot!

I'm not going to lie. My hedgehog brain purred like a kitty.

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Actor Jon Hamm accepts the Individual Achievement in Drama Award for Mad Men during the 27th Annual Television Critics Association Awards on Saturday night.

Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images

Actor Jon Hamm accepts the Individual Achievement in Drama Award for Mad Men during the 27th Annual Television Critics Association Awards on Saturday night.

I've been talking about press tour for a week and a half, but the most fun you can have at press tour is the TCA Awards, which were held Saturday night. It's a social event, not a working event, so everybody just gets dressed up and gets the chance, for once, to just happily salute all the stuff we really like without sticking recorders in anybody's faces to interview them.

It's always a good time: Last year, producer Damon Lindelof gave a hilariously profane dramatic reading of angry tweets he received at the end of Lost, and Tom Hanks swore to never dress up for us again. The best thing about the Television Critics Association awards, though, is that they are not televised, which means everyone is a million times more relaxed, real, and hilarious — and OH, THE IRONY, we know.

At any rate, these are awards I actually vote in, so I am proud — yes, proud! — to announce as the big news of the night that we honored Friday Night Lights, in its final season, as our Program Of The Year. It was very satisfying to be able to send off showrunner Jason Katims and actors like Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton with a standing ovation.

Outstanding Achievement in Drama went to Mad Men, and Outstanding Individual Achievement in Drama went to Jon Hamm. Mad Men had a good contingent in attendance, so they were warmly received as well.

The other show that had a particularly big night was Modern Family, which took home Outstanding Achievement in Comedy, while Ty Burrell (who plays Phil Dunphy) tied for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Comedy with our evening's host, Nick Offerman of Parks And Recreation.

Oh, Nick Offerman. Offerman's hosting was top-notch, and included a very funny little video of himself starting the day as a prepubescent boy and only turning into the man we know as Ron Swanson after being served a "bacon mountain" by wife Megan Mullally, rebuilding a carburetor, and doing a little bare-knuckle boxing. (Another chapter of the video showed Rob Lowe entering his trailer as a bent-over old man and exiting as ... Rob Lowe.)

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Actor Nick Offerman sings "I Should Stay Offline."

Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images

Actor Nick Offerman sings "I Should Stay Offline."

Offerman even sang on stage, pulling out an acoustic guitar to perform a parody of "I Walk The Line" in which he lamented the experience of reading nasty comments about himself on the internet. ("I Should Stay Offline," you see.)

HBO's Game Of Thrones also took home a big one: Outstanding New Program, while The Amazing Race, which has been sucking up awards for many years, received our first-ever TCA award for Outstanding Reality Program.

One of the more bittersweet awards went to Restrepo, which aired on National Geographic last year, and which we honored for Outstanding Achievement In News And Information. As you may know, one of the filmmakers, photojournalist Tim Hetherington, was killed in Libya earlier this year.

Outstanding Achievement In Youth Programming went to Sesame Street, while Outstanding Achievement In Movies, Miniseries, And Specials went to PBS's Masterpiece: Sherlock.

Every year, we give out a couple of special awards, and this year, our Heritage Award went to The Dick Van Dyke Show, and having that award accepted by Carl Reiner and Rose Marie was probably the actual highlight of the evening. Reiner told the story — which, yes, he's told before, but believe me, it doesn't matter — of starring in the original pilot himself before being told that the show was going to do great, because they were going to get somebody great to replace him in a show that was, basically, about him.

Our Career Achievement Award went to Oprah Winfrey, who wasn't there but sent a video acceptance that was really pretty funny — she poked fun at her appearance at press tour in January, where she famously took 18 minutes to answer one question, and she promised right off the bat not to top that record in her speech.

It's not a long list of awards; the ceremony is relatively short and sweet. No splashy production numbers, no retrospective clip packages, no In Memoriam. But when we say, "Hey, Friday Night Lights, we watch a lot of television, and we appreciate your giving us five good years," you can believe we mean it.

Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images

Paula Abdul looks for a questioner during the panel discussion about Fox's The X Factor Friday at the Television Critics Association press tour.

It is now Day 10 of panel discussions at the Television Critics Association press tour. It is already a time when nerves are frayed, there's too much coffee in everyone's veins, and the fact that we can't get Diet Coke because Fox has a deal with Pepsi begins to take on the psychological dimensions of an actual problem, which it is not. We're starting to ask weird questions like "When did you first know you were adorable?" (which someone asked of Zooey Deschanel at the panel about her fall show, The New Girl).

It was into this environment that Fox brought the judges and producers of The X Factor, the upcoming talent competition show to which Simon Cowell has taken his bristly haircut and plunging V-necks, bringing with him legendarily loopy former Idol-mate Paula Abdul — and former Pussycat Doll-slash-Dancing With The Stars champion Nicole Scherzinger, along with superstar producer L.A. Reid — to be the judges.

Enlarge Robert Zuckerman/FX

Connie Britton stars in FX's new nutty pilot, American Horror Story.

Robert Zuckerman/FX

Connie Britton stars in FX's new nutty pilot, American Horror Story.

Tuesday night, FX trucked buses of TV critics out to a screening of Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk's new fall show, American Horror Story. Not for this show the advance DVDs or the streaming of screeners on your little computer. They told us it was because the DVDs weren't done, and perhaps that's true, but it's certainly a happy accident that this over-the-top crazyfest wound up being shown to us in a theater.

I'll have a final review closer to its October premiere, but they said they welcomed initial reactions, so let me say this: American Horror Story is emphatically not for everybody. It's a genre piece, it's very campy, and a significant number of critics in the theater with me didn't like it at all.

I, on the other hand, did.

It tells the story of the Harmon family: Vivien (Connie Britton) and Ben (Dylan McDermott) and their teenage daughter Violet (Taissa Farmiga). They've got plenty of family problems, but their newest one is that they have moved into a straight-up haunted house. And it's not pleasantly haunted by friendly ghosts that look like Casper, either. It's haunted by demon-y looking things, and it may possibly cause you to hallucinate, and it has a history of not just spooking but downright ... well, devouring the people who live in it.

Great value, though. Nothing like it on the market!

There is so much going on in the first supersized episode that I wouldn't list it all even if there weren't spoiler problems. Suffice it to say it's got everything from a creepy neighbor (a fantastically wackadoodle Jessica Lange floating in and out) to a creepy maid (Frances Conroy) to creepy things in jars. Jars, I tell you!

I have no idea whether Murphy and Falchuk (two of the creators of the equally over-the-top Glee) have any idea how to keep this going. It will be very hard to maintain the frenetic pace of the pilot in terms of new spookings every minute or so, and there are so many things going on that are just weird that it will be equally hard to prevent the story from accumulating a million questions that fans will ask over and over again and never have answers for.

Several of the folks I talked to last night were talking about what utter sensory overload it was, and I can't argue with that. It's very, very over-the-top, but I also found it wildly entertaining. It utterly polarized the folks I had dinner with afterwards (this would have been a great screening for anyone who thinks critics can't think for themselves), but my reaction was that its biggest challenge may be that it's taken on far too much — that its ambition is destined to exceed its capabilities.

But after sitting through a lot of panel presentations in the last week, I have to say that a show where my biggest worry is that they're being too ambitious is a welcome change.

In short: This show is flat-out keeeee-razy. I liked it.

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Chairman of NBC Entertainment Robert Greenblatt speaks to critics at the Television Critics Association press tour on Monday, August 1.

Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images

Chairman of NBC Entertainment Robert Greenblatt speaks to critics at the Television Critics Association press tour on Monday, August 1.

The first time I came to press tour in January 2010, it was the Conan Watch tour, where everyone basically knew that Jay Leno was about to get his time slot back and Conan O'Brien was going to be asked to step aside in one way or another. When I first read O'Brien's "People Of Earth" letter effectively declining the offer to move to midnight, I was sitting in the same ballroom at the same long tables where which I've spent much of the last week.

Things haven't gotten any easier for NBC since then, really. It's still true — as I noted on Twitter yesterday — that if press tour were the Parks Department of Pawnee, Indiana where the network's Parks And Recreation is set, NBC itself would be the equivalent of Jerry, the constantly scapegoated character once referred to as "both the schlemiel and the schlamazel." They do get beat up a lot.

Bob Greenblatt, NBC's programming chief, has only been there for a few months, but he took the stage Monday to talk about the fall schedule — one that, to some degree, he inherited. He's taken on a job where the best audience news the network has to crow about this season, by far, is the strong performance by The Voice. There's also some strength in late night, where Jay Leno, Jimmy Fallon, and Saturday Night Live are all doing pretty well. And Sunday Night Football still does huge numbers. But there's not a Cosby, there's not an ER, and there's nothing on the fall schedule that stands out as having that potential.

These are still hard times. They're in fourth place, and they talk about that, and when they do, they use the words "we're in fourth place." They spotlight the things that are going well, but there's only so much spin that even a broadcast network can manage.

As nice as it might be to be making money from more scripted shows, Greenblatt certainly didn't back away from the successes of The Voice — he took the position that there's nothing inherently wrong with unscripted shows if you do them well. And indeed, particularly compared to other variety shows, The Voice has a good reputation and is nothing to be embarrassed about.

Beyond that, the pickings get slim. The irony of the paucity of commercial successes at NBC, of course, is that many of us suspect that low-rated shows we love, including Friday Night Lights, Chuck, Parks And Recreation, and Community, would not have lasted as long as they have if NBC were thriving the way, say, CBS is.

As much as they get beaten up, though, that's probably as many shows that critics still get excited about as any broadcast network has. In fact, NBC has 46 Emmy nominations this year, only four fewer than CBS and more than either ABC or Fox. It's unfair to whip them for making worse shows than anyone else. They make some of the shows about which it's easiest to be enthused. They just have trouble getting anyone to watch those shows, particularly the ones that are scripted.

So what did Greenblatt have to say about the fall slate — a slate of shows he wasn't initially responsible for, but which he acknowledges is "his schedule" now? Well, the more you listen to him, the more you realize what a battle it is, because for every upside, there's a downside.

For example, Greenblatt talked about the strengths of the reworking of Prime Suspect, a series that was so beloved in the British original with Helen Mirren that the mere announcement that it would be remade for an American broadcast network caused big-time tooth-gnashing. The presence of the very fine Maria Bello in the lead has allayed some of those fears, but a big chunk of the discerning audience that might make that show a hit is starting out from a position of skepticism, just because Mirren's shoes are so hard to fill.

He also talked about the fun, soapy energy of The Playboy Club, which ... well, we've covered that.

As always, there are hopes for the future. NBC is developing a firefighter drama produced by Dick Wolf's production company — Wolf, you'll remember from a million closing credits, is the man behind all the Law & Orders. There's a new development deal with Greg Daniels that will include work on not only live-action comedies like his The Office and Parks And Recreation but also animation, like his long-running Fox show King Of The Hill.

They'll keep trying. They're still the network of Pawnee and Dunder-Mifflin and Jimmy Fallon and — until this season — the Dillon Panthers. There's actually a fair amount to be happy about. But the broader audience has proved hard to win over, and nothing they showed on Monday screams "I AM GOING TO BE A HIT AND FIX EVERYTHING."

The good part is that late night looks pretty stable for now.

Enlarge Nick Briggs/HBO

Sean Bean of Game Of Thrones.

Nick Briggs/HBO

Sean Bean of Game Of Thrones.

It's safe to say HBO is very, very excited about the way Game Of Thrones performed in its first season, both in terms of viewership and in terms of critical reception, which culminated in 13 Emmy nominations. That pride was a big part of HBO's executive session at press tour — the session where each big network brings out some of its programming decision-makers to talk about scheduling, development, and plans for the future.

But, one critic asked HBO executives Mike Lombardo and Richard Plepler, what about the fact that Game Of Thrones is based on a planned series of seven big books, and that series isn't even finished being written yet? What do you do about the fact that the epic offers no obvious exit point once you plunge in? Initially, Plepler offered what would become the clearest statement the two would make on the topic: "We told George [R.R. Martin] we would go as long as he kept writing."

Lombardo, though, followed with a longer statement that included this ... qualification? Maybe? "As long as [producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss] want to keep doing it, and as long as they're achieving what they did this season in terms of happy with the result, there's a lot of storytelling to tell."

The conversation moved on, but this is a room that's used to sniffing out possible cracks in what seems like a solid answer, so we were destined to return to an examination of the exact plan for managing the sheer amount of story that Game Of Thrones could potentially wind up needing to cover — and return we did.

The next inquiry concerned the structure of the seasons. Asked why many HBO shows get 13 episodes a season and GOT has been getting 10, Lombardo said it simply wasn't possible to physically execute more than 10 episodes a year of the quality they want to produce. He and Plepler also tried to clarify that it wasn't a strict requirement from the network that the producers cover an entire book in each 10-episode season. Would that answer the question?

Of course not. Later in the session, we once again returned to the possibility that the entire story of GOT will somehow not wind up being told. "This is a story that sort of has to finish at some point," said the next questioner. "And it can't finish in the middle." (Of course, TV stories finish in the middle all the time, but the assumption buried in the question was clear: You do not want to deal with what will happen if you stop telling this story to this particular audience before the end of whatever winds up being written by Martin.)

What the critic wanted, though — a guarantee that HBO would finish exhaustively covering the story as it's told in the books, was not forthcoming. Already running short on time, largely as a result of answering this very question in a number of different incarnations, Lombardo said, "I don't know where the show for us ends as opposed to the books. It maybe would be fantastic to be able to say, this show will go on for ten years and do every aspect of the books. I don't know that that will be the case."

Naturally, he and Plepler went on to stress that they're optimistic, that they see no reason the show can't run for years, that they hope to be able to re-sign the producers, Benioff and Weiss, for more after their current contract runs out.

But they know what they're in for if they make a promise that they can't keep. After all, they don't even know if they'll still be at HBO when a hypothetical Game Of Thrones fifth or sixth season is being planned. The producers could leave, the audience could desert them ... things can happen. Nobody is going to promise 70 or 80 or 100 very expensive hours of television, some of which are theoretical adaptations of as-yet-unwritten novels from a notoriously painstaking author.

Game Of Thrones has done very well for HBO. But this discussion underscored that many great successes carry with them nagging questions, and 10 episodes in, those questions are already nipping at the network's heels.

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Actors Faith Ford and Tom Cavanagh speak during the presentation of Debbie Macomber's Trading Christmas at the Television Critics Association press tour on Wednesday.

Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images

Actors Faith Ford and Tom Cavanagh speak during the presentation of Debbie Macomber's Trading Christmas at the Television Critics Association press tour on Wednesday.

Some of the most entertaining panels at TCA are for things you aren't, in and of themselves, heavily invested in.

I have an example. As you knew I would.

The first day of cable presentations on Wednesday brought, among other things, a panel about a Hallmark TV movie called Debbie Macomber's Trading Christmas, which certainly appears to be your basic formulaic cable Christmas movie of the kind that is now turned out in great numbers every year, particularly by Hallmark and Lifetime, which will keep making this stuff as long as people keep watching it. Hallmark announced, in fact, that its "Countdown To Christmas," which starts on November 12 (!), would include 1300 hours (!!) of holiday-themed programming.

Listen to that again. Thirteen. Hundred. Hours. Obviously, most of that is old stuff, but there are 14 Hallmark originals coming this year. FOURTEEN. Hear Hallmark's Bill Abbott talk about some of what's on the slate:

We have great plans again this year with such movies as A Princess for Christmas, starring the iconic Sir Roger Moore; The Christmas Pageant, starring Melissa Gilbert; Cancel Christmas, with Judd Nelson; and Annie Claus is Coming to Town, with Vivica A. Fox and funny lady Vicki Lawrence. Billy Ray Cyrus, a Hallmark Channel favorite, stars in Christmas Returns to Canaan, a sequel to the network's highly rated Christmas in Canaan, which aired on the network in 2009. As he did in the original, Billy Ray will perform an original song for the movie.

I can't speak for other holiday-programming suckers, but I look at that list and think, "Is there not already a movie called The Christmas Pageant with Melissa Gilbert? Because that seems like something that I've already seen." Not so.

Trading Christmas itself stars Faith Ford (of Murphy Brown and then Hope And Faith), Gil Bellows (of Ally McBeal) and the delightful Tom Cavanagh, who starred in NBC's nifty and offbeat Ed (and lots of other things) and who now can be found here and there and on the podcast "Mike And Tom Eat Snacks," with Ed co-star Michael Ian Black. Cavanagh has done the Christmas movie thing before, although it was for Lifetime, the Holiday Hatfields to Hallmark's Mistletoe McCoys, in the films Snow and Snow 2: Brain Freeze. In both, he played "Nick Snowden," who is Santa Claus. Sort of. (Incarnations and relatives of Santa are surprisingly popular in these movies.)

The brow is not the highest in these movies, is what I'm saying, and nobody is there to pretend that it is.

There is something about a really earthy, wickedly funny guy like Tom Cavanagh doing a panel discussion about a cornball Christmas movie that brings out something peculiar and impish in the entire room. The very first question began thusly: "Christmas is the loneliest time of year for a lot of people." Cavanagh cracked up with surprise at this plunge into darkness, and they were off.

Nothing flatters a panel that isn't inherently fascinating quite like somebody who can't stop chiming in. When someone asked how it's possible to distinguish one Christmas TV movie from a zillion other Christmas TV movies, Cavanagh deadpanned, "That is a good question." Asked about his favorite Christmas movie, he broke into his best George Bailey, hollering, "Merry Christmas, Bedford Falls! Merry Christmas, you old Building and Loan!" When Ford compared him to a cross between Jimmy Stewart and Dick Van Dyke, he needled her repeatedly about his fear that they would all be sued by Van Dyke's "powerful lawyers."

The session got sillier, with a critic comparing "Countdown To Christmas" to Shark Week, which also tickled the panel fiercely, and then a long exchange with Ford about her shoes caused Cavanagh to good-naturedly heckle, "This is a fantastic question, by the way." The shoe thing went on and on, and Ford shifted over to a story about taking a neighbor shopping for her first pair of Manolos. Cavanagh, perhaps sensing that Ford's shock that the neighbor hadn't ever owned a pair of Manolos might not play all that well in print, imagined how a reader tomorrow might interpret the coverage, muttering, "'Why in every Trading Christmas write-up are they talking about shoes? Why are they mentioning shoes?'"

When someone asked about the cast's favorite Christmas traditions, Bellows came up with a Christmas toast, Ford talked about her father's love of listening to music, and Cavanagh talked about how, as a kid, he lived in Africa and wondered whether Santa would be able to find his house. Asked how old he was, he immediately responded, "Sixteen."

I'm just going to say this right now: The fact that Tom Cavanagh isn't on TV every week makes me crazy. Because he should be. I'll leave it there.

It's easy for these discussions to lapse into sameness. Sometimes they're completely riveting, but sometimes ... they aren't. Smart people talking about smart projects can bore the heck out of you. And on the right day, smart people talking about easily digestible projects can perk up a very long day in the ballroom.

Enlarge Frazer Harrison/Getty Images

This shot of the Playboy Mansion pool and the outside of the grotto was taken in 2002. It looks very much the same now.

Frazer Harrison/Getty Images

This shot of the Playboy Mansion pool and the outside of the grotto was taken in 2002. It looks very much the same now.

As far as I know, Playboy TV has never done a press tour event before, but this year, they're bringing on some new content aimed at "couples." (I interpret this to mean that they would like to befriend women.) And to introduce it, they decided to throw a press event at the Playboy Mansion, which is how I wound up sitting on a shuttle bus Wednesday night wearing a silvery wristband with a Playboy bunny logo on it.

We toured the mansion in little groups, we nibbled on finger food (the corn dogs were, I have to admit, pretty good), and we watched warily as beautiful people who were definitely not television critics (or writers of any kind) flashed their tans at each other. I don't really have a narrative here, but I can tell you five things I learned from my visit.

Hugh Hefner has a zoo. Now, I know that many people know this, particularly those who watched a lot of the reality show The Girls Next Door, which took place right there at the mansion. I, on the other hand, never watched The Girls Next Door, ever. EVER. So for me, the zoo was rather surprising. There is a big cage full of little monkeys, and our tour guide (Pilar, a Playmate from 2004, who did a great job) tells us that Hefner is also a "bird collector." Some of these birds are peacocks, which walk around the grounds saying something that, no lie, sounds like "HELP! HELP!" (Apparently, there was a whole Girls episode about the peacocks. As I said, I didn't watch it.)

Enlarge Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images

Bob Walker, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Networks and Content, The Weather Channel, meteorologists Jim Cantore and Stephanie Abrams and hurricane expert Dr. Rick Knabb speak during The Weather Channel portion of the 2011 Summer TCA Tour on Wednesday.

Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images

Bob Walker, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Networks and Content, The Weather Channel, meteorologists Jim Cantore and Stephanie Abrams and hurricane expert Dr. Rick Knabb speak during The Weather Channel portion of the 2011 Summer TCA Tour on Wednesday.

It's a little strange hearing a rundown of a television network's big and successful year that talks not only about audience growth, but also about deadly hurricanes, crippling drought, and a major heat wave. The Weather Channel isn't glad anyone is suffering, obviously, but it's been pretty good business for them. They aren't afraid to tell you how well they did during the Groundhog Day winter storm, or during the tornado in Joplin, Missouri. Fifty million people watched The Weather Channel during the week of the Joplin tornado, they'll tell you.

Speaking to television critics on Wednesday, the Weather Channel personnel — executive Bob Walker, on-air meteorologists Jim Cantore and Stephanie Abrams, and hurricane expert Dr. Rick Knabb — stressed the expansion of content across platforms and the importance of what they do and everything you hear about from everybody else, but it all comes down to the fact that weather is one of those things where people don't necessarily have the option of losing interest. Walker pointed out late in the session that the channel's data indicates that 90 percent of the U.S. population checks the weather in one way or another every day. Every day.

They walk a fine line, because they don't want to be tagged as irresponsible or exploitative. In fact, Abrams showed a little irritation talking about how she doesn't like to be lumped in with fools (my word, not hers) who, for instance, are trying to get the most dramatic shot by "standing on the seawall in Galveston when there's a storm coming ashore." (Galveston and that sea wall came up again later during a similar disclaiming of bad tactics. One sure does get the feeling that the Weather Channel people were particularly appalled by something that somebody at some network shot there.) At the same time, they know that storm coverage sucks in eyeballs in a way that maps don't; that it has universal appeal.

It's an odd business. It's a mix of the most mundane and utilitarian of content — it's going to rain; bring an umbrella — and the most dramatic and frightening — get in the basement, WE'RE SERIOUS, YOU COULD DIE. They build their reputation, in part, on their ubiquity in the in-between times. Their mobile app has been downloaded 40 million times, and that's not just so people can watch tornado coverage and snowstorm coverage. Ninety percent of the population doesn't watch disaster coverage every day; they check the weather every day.

Every network that comes here has an interest in giving the people what they want, and this one is no different. They openly acknowledge that earthquakes aren't really weather, and tsunamis aren't really weather, but they covered the earthquake in Haiti and prepared for possible tsunamis in Hawaii after the earthquakes in Japan simply because their customers expected them to and believed they were equipped to. They've expanded their definition of the mission to include, in effect, "weather plus other important naturally occurring events."

And — like, it seems, absolutely everybody else on cable — they've got a foot in reality shows. Just today, they announced that they'll be airing Coast Guard: Alaska, a show that seems to be in the great unscripted-TV tradition of Burly Men Doing Important Sweaty Work.

Of course, like everyone, they've got things they really don't want to be part of, and one of those is a discussion of whether humans contribute to climate change, which they were asked about in the first three questions of the day. Yes, the entire panel agreed, the climate is changing. But as to whether any of that has anything to do with human beings, they take no position. There are lots of factors, they say. We're still learning.

Earthquakes? Yes. Tsunamis? They're on it. Hot-button political issues like a yes or no on whether humans are contributing to climate change? No, thanks. And don't ask them about whether we're heading for another Ice Age, either — somebody tried it, and it led to the explanation of something sort of interesting: that is a question for climatologists (who study climate over the very, very long haul), not meteorologists (who study the climate over the next 90 days or so).

You learn something new every day.

Enlarge Nino Munoz/Fox

Steve Jones (second from left) and judges Nicole Scherzinger, Simon Cowell, Paula Abdul, and L.A. Reid are heading up Fox's The X Factor, which will premiere this fall.

Nino Munoz/Fox

Steve Jones (second from left) and judges Nicole Scherzinger, Simon Cowell, Paula Abdul, and L.A. Reid are heading up Fox's The X Factor, which will premiere this fall.

It's that time again: I'm headed to Los Angeles for the Television Critics Association press tour. (You may hear it referenced as "TCA" by those you follow who write about television.) This is the time when critics gather for panel discussions and Q&As with everybody from big broadcast networks to cable outlets you might not even expect to care about interacting with critics at all (tomorrow's first presentation: The Weather Channel).

The networks do their best to make these panel discussions as upbeat as possible, persuading all of us that every single new show will be absolutely awesome. This happened even last year, when the great majority of the new broadcast shows that rolled out in the fall were kaput by the end of the season. (Oh, Lone Star. I still miss you. What would have happened in your third episode ever?)

But the questions can sometimes be withering — there's always an "Emperor, about your clothes" moment sometime during tour. Some of those moments are substantive and essential, like when the people behind Outsourced were asked whether it would be fair to say their show trafficked in racial stereotypes, and some of them just make you want to crawl under the table, like when Matthew Perry was asked what ever happened to David Schwimmer.

Press tour is made of moments both great and small — Patrick Stewart opining about reality television, or Oprah Winfrey taking 20 minutes to answer one question, or Louis CK wondering why Conan O'Brien wanted The Tonight Show so badly in the first place. And, of course, speaking of The Tonight Show, it's a time when big news can break: both Conan O'Brien's ouster from his spot at NBC and Simon Cowell's planned farewell to American Idol broke open at the very same press tour in January 2010.

There's nothing obvious hanging over the heads of TV journalists that's quite as potentially nutty as the Conan situation already looked when we all headed for L.A. a year and a half ago. Conan has a new show now, and everybody has kind of forgotten Jay Leno ever left his regular spot, and Simon Cowell has been gone for a whole season and Idol rolled along without him, and now he's headed for The X Factor this fall.

But there are always great stories as you go along. Maybe you buttonhole somebody you never expected to talk to at the same party where you literally bump into Shaq. Maybe you win a gazpacho ingredient guessing contest (I am still proud of that one). And maybe you actually learn something interesting about the fall season.

In that spirit, here are some of the things I have my eye on as we plunge into another tour.

The very, very gendered fall season. Particularly in comedy, it's hard to miss just how much gender politics is stamped on the fall season. Most of the new comedies are either about groupings of women or groupings of men, or they're somehow about men fitting into women's worlds or the other way around. (It was Time's James Poniewozik who noted that you can tell a show is about men because it has "men" in the title, and you can tell it's about women because it has "girls" in the title.) From ABC's Last Man Standing and Man Up to CBS's 2 Broke Girls and Fox's The New Girl, the broadcast networks are hitting hard on the theme of defining what it means to be, in particular, a single woman or a married man.

Speaking of Simon Cowell... The fact that Cowell's departure didn't hobble Idol terribly in its first season, the addition of his obviously similar The X Factor, particularly in light of the success of NBC's The Voice (which seems to have caught almost everyone off-guard to at least some degree) cannot be an entirely comfortable development for those who are in charge of Fox's traditional spring juggernaut. The idea, of course, is that both Idol and X Factor can succeed, one in each half of the year. But while Idol got good marks for its new judges this year, there still may be blood in the water and a sense that three singing competitions is ... a lot. The Voice has momentum and freshness, and The X Factor reunites Simon Cowell and Paula Abdul. Where does that leave Idol?

Buffy returns. Okay, okay, it's not Buffy. It's Sarah Michelle Gellar, returning to television this fall in the CW's Ringer. This is massive, earth-shaking news for a lot of people who were part of the WB's original youth-oriented rise. (It's interesting to note that this season also brings James Van Der Beek — Dawson himself — back to series TV on ABC's Apartment 23, where he plays a version of himself.) Keep in mind: Buffy was a pop show, but it was also a critically adored show, and a good number of folks who are TV writers in 2011 count it among the fandoms they've been part of at one time or another. Whether she'll be able to get a word in edgewise that's actually about the new show remains to be seen.

Looking for the new prestige cable drama. There aren't quite as many obvious candidates for Next Emmy Hog as there have been when we first saw Treme or Boardwalk Empire presented. But AMC is rolling out Hell On Wheels, a drama about the building of railroads after the Civil War, starring Anson Mount and Common. BBC America is in the hunt with The Hour, starring Dominic West (that's McNulty from The Wire to you) and Ben Whishaw, who's starred in films including Bright Star and Brideshead Revisited. Or maybe you want to bet on Showtime's Homeland, starring Claire Danes.

Downton Abbey. That's right, people. It's coming back to PBS in January 2012, and PBS is bringing a panel of the cast to press tour. (And no, this doesn't mean I get to see it yet.) But this soapy darling of those who like romance and intrigue and very good acting is sure to get some solid buzz going, and rightly so. PBS has other stuff on the docket as well, including Ken Burns' new epic, Prohibition, and an ambitious project called the PBS Arts Fall Festival that will include rock, ballet, and Steve Martin narrating a documentary about American music.

You can always count on press tour to be a mix of spontaneous storytelling, analysis of new trends, and stuff that's just plain weird — like the time everyone got completely distracted from the panel discussion about Fox's sadly short-lived The Good Guys by the appearance of Bradley Whitford's mustache. (Oh, and sometimes I lose my mind.) I'm going to try to bring you just as much spiffy coverage as I possibly can, so fasten your ... couch-belts.