It's ABC's day at Thank God We're Working TV Press Tour 2008. Which means it's time for the traditional TV Press Tour new-season rollout-dates announcement:
ABC's PRIME-TIME PREMIERE DATES:
Fri., Sept. 19
10-11 -- "20/20"
Mon., Sept. 22
8-10 -- "Dancing with the Stars" (special two-hour performance show premiere)
10-11 -- "Boston Legal"
Tues., Sept. 23
8-9 -- "Opportunity Knocks" (new series debut)
9-11 -- Dancing With the Stars" (special performance show)
Wed., Sept. 24
8-9 -- "Dancing with the Stars Results Show Special" (special day and time)
9-11 -- "David Blaine Special"
Thurs., Sept. 25
8-9 "Ugly Betty"
9-11 -- "Grey's Anatomy" (special two-hour season premiere)
Sun., Sept. 28
7-9 -- "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" (two-hour season premiere)
9-10 -- "Desperate Housewives"
10-11 -- "Brothers & Sisters"
Tues., Sept. 30
9-10 -- "Dancing with the Stars Result Show" (regular day and time period premiere)
Wed., Oct. 1
8-9 -- "Pushing Daisies"
9-10 -- "Private Practice"
10-11 -- "Dirty Sexy Money"
Fri., Oct. 3
8-9 -- "Wife Swap"
9-10 -- "Supernanny"
Sun., Oct. 5
7-8 -- "America's Funniest Home Videos"
8-9 -- "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" (regular time period premiere)
Mon., Oct. 6
9-10 -- "Samantha Who?"
Thurs., Oct. 9
9-10 -- "Grey's Anatomy" (regular time period premiere)
10-11 -- "Life on Mars" (new series debut)
Tues., Oct. 14
10-11 -- "Eli Stone"

Because FX's "The Shield" is about to start its final season, TV critics naturally greet the cast and crew of the series who show up at Summer TV Press Tour 2008 with one topic of discussion: the finale. Will it be "Seinfeld" dreadful? "Sopranos" pretentious? "St. Elsewhere"/"MASH" brilliant?

"I think if and when you watch the finale, it will feel like 'The Shield' universe," series creator/executive producer Shawn Ryan tells the throng of adoring critics.

" It will feel completely appropriate."

Zzzzzzzzzzzz...

"It's the greatest finale ever, that you'll ever see anywhere -- hands down," actress CCH Pounder jumps in. "Blew my socks off. I'm not a great fan of 'The Shield' as a watcher in the sense of I'm like a cringy person -- I'm a bit of a chicken, even though my role is so huge and non-chicken-like," she says while looking not at the critics in the audience, but rather at herself in the monitor. "But this finale is what [lead actor Michael Chiklis's character] Vick Mackey deserves."

"With 'The Sopranos,' it's been mixed reviews about that finale, but I will tell you about this finale: There will be no mixed reviews. You will get your money's worth. Money-back guarantee!" brags cast member David Marciano.

"You guys are talking to the critics!" warns Chiklis, who is appearing via satellite from somewhere or another.

"Yeah, that's a real dangerous thing," Ryan says of the actors's boasts to the critics. "You know, you guys will decide what you think about it," he told the critics. "All I can talk about is what we attempted to do and what we attempted to do was give FX, the network, an ending to the series that the network deserves...an ending to their first scripted drama that they could be proud of and could set a template for their other series to come."

Yeah -- that's not boasting.

"What thrills me about the finale is you will not see this coming," Chiklis enthuses a few minutes later. "You will not know what we do. That when you look back at it you'll go, holy cow, yeah, that's exactly right!"

"But I also think something, you know, that's important to remember too -- my husband is a huge sports fan and he's really into football and we have to TiVo the games and he doesn't want to know how the game ends and he wants to be able to watch the game from beginning to end," cast member Catherine Dent says, leaving many critics wondering why they should care.

"It's going to be a great game that you're not gonna want to know how it ends. You're going to want to watch every quarter, every minute of that game because it's so intense...It's a kick-ass show," she says, finally getting around to her point.

"We're verging on being very self-congratulatory," Ryan notes, in a moment of way-crazy understatement.

"I don't mean to congrat -- but I think it's like a good game, though. Don't you think that you want to watch the whole game?" Dent says -- we think her feelings were a little hurt.

"Yeah, no, you're absolutely right in many ways," Ryan concedes.

"The second-to-last episode is extraordinarily as satisfying as the final," he adds, throwing his verging-on-being-self-congratulatory worries to the wind.

Karl Rove came to the press tour to plug his role as commentator at Fox News Channel. But one TV critic wanted to know whether he watched the Fox broadcast network's animated series.

"I don't, no," Rove said.

"Because they really beat up on you a lot," the critic explained, "and I just wondered how you felt about that."

Rove said a lot of people beat up on him, citing - you know it's coming - the New York Times.

"My attitude is I know who I am. I'm not the myth that I've been developed into, and there's nothing I can do - I'm like Grendel and Beowolf. People talk about me a lot, and they don't see me very often."

-- Lisa de Moraes

Are you living with the shame of not understanding what the heck is going on in JJ Abrams's ABC series "Lost"? Did you only pretend to have any idea what was up with the whole Rimbaldi thing on Abrams's "Alias"?

Don't be embarrassed - you're not alone.

"I was at my friend Greg Grunberg's house year ago -- he was on 'Alias' and Heroes' now -- ...and 'Alias' was on," Abrams told TV critics at Summer TV Press Tour 2008. "He put it on and I was watching and I wasn't thinking about it. I watched a few minutes and was so confused. I was like, literally, it was impenetrable. I was like: 'I know I should understand this. I read the - who the [expletive] is THAT guy?!'"

-- Lisa de Moraes

Best at-mike patter by on-air talent at Thank God We're Working TV Press
Tour 2008 goes to Aaron Brown, former CNN anchor/whipping post who is the new
host of PBS's "Wide Angle" and who was introduced at a "Wide Angle"
cocktail reception by WNET's VP of national programs, Stephen Segaller.
But Segaller first reads rave review e-mails the station had received about
the addition of Brown to the show.

"Getting my mother the computer and teaching her about e-mail has paid
off," Brown tells the gathering of TV critics and reporters, who are
sitting around, eating cheese and crackers, drinking wine and beer, taking
notes.

Brown just got back from Jordan and Syria and is some kind of seriously
jet-lagged."I am so totally brain dead," he jokes. "You all should have been with me
at 3:30 this morning when I woke up because I was really good -- funny and
I bought cappuccinos for everybody."

Brown tells the critics about the piece he's working on for "Wide Angle,"
about Iraqi refugees and what is the United States' responsibility in re
Iraqis who cannot go home "because they're dead if they go home."
"It was great to go out and make television again that way, to be out
there talking to people and reporting. The truth is, I liked anchoring
shows and also got tired of anchoring shows -- perhaps they got tired of me
anchoring shows before I did," jokes Brown, who famously got shown the door
by CNN, in favor of Cable News "It" Boy Anderson Cooper. "Maybe the single worst thing I do is mingle at a cocktail party," Brown says of the cocktail party/news conference.

"With that said, thank you all for coming because this would have been
really embarrassing if no one had showed up. When you do television, you
have this great kind of mythical belief that people are sitting at home
taking notes. They're sitting -- they're fully dressed, sober and paying
attention and taking notes. I finally found a place where they are, so
that's pretty damn cool too."

This is in marked contrast to Brown's appearance at the press tour in
January of 2002 to talk to TV critics when he joined CNN. He and CNN's
other new hire then, Paula Zahn, made quite an impression on critics that day,
when they sniffed at many of the questions and at their news competition.
When USA Today's critic reminded Brown CNN had done its share of shark-attack and car-chase stories, for instance, Brown asked what paper he was from.

"That's the paper with all the color pictures, right?" Brown said when the
critic gave his affiliation. In fairness, Brown's sniffiness that day couldn't hold a candle to Zahn's.

Anyway, the new Aaron Brown went over much, much better.

Kevin Kline, brilliant actor, came to Summer TV Press Tour 2008 Sunday to take questions about PBS's upcoming broadcast of "Great Performances: 'Cyrano de Bergerac.'" The show is the sold out limited-engagement Broadway production of Edmond Rostand's romantic story about a lawyer-poet with a gimongous proboscis who is in love with his beautiful but, you have to admit, dim cousin Roxane. In a wonderful bit of typecasting, "Alias," "Catch and Release," "Kingdom" and "Juno" hottie Jennifer Garner plays Rox to Kline's Cyrano.

"Kevin is a celestial actor, but where is Jennifer?" asks one TV critic, demonstrating how TV critics get such a bad name.

"It seemed like a kind of funny casting trick: Let's get a big audience: We will put on the star from 'Alias' from TV who, you know, is a spy that runs around in tight clothing.

"Can you talk about how it was to act with her?" the critic finally got around to asking Kline.

Kline insisted Garner came "in full blossom" as a stage actress though, judging by the clip shown to the critics beforehand, he was being kind-ish. (On the other hand, the New York Times reviewer seemed smitten by her, too, saying she "radiates megawatt beauty," speaks the "peppery rhymed translation with unaffected sprightliness" and "when she arrives at the siege of Arras bearing baskets of food for the soldiers, you feel like singing, 'Hello, Dolly.'" Strange as it may seem, we're pretty sure that was supposed to be a compliment.)

One TV critic wonders why Kline has so few TV credits:

"Do you avoid TV? Have you been asked to do series? What's your thinking?"

To his credit, Kline -- who has played Hamlet, King Lear, Richard II (and Jeffrey Anderson, the washed-up actor reduced to playing Willy Loman in a dinner theater in Opa-Locka, in "Soapdish") -- neither laughs nor spits at the critic.

"I've been asked to do TV," he acknowledges, adding his response has always been, "You mean, play the same role week after week after week?' ...

"Not just to avoid being pigeonholed, but just the tedium of doing the same character didn't appeal to me. So I started avoiding television early on and I guess it just became a habit," he says.

"Others relish the idea of being stuck for seven or 14 or however many years. It's not for me."

You'd think that would have put an end to it. But TV critics don't give up without a fight:
"'Law & Order' has never come knocking for you?" one critic asks, incredulously.

"Everyone I know in New York -- all the New York actors are on -- is it 'Law & Order'? -- is that Sam Waterston?" Kline asks.

Jaws drop.

"I think they may have knocked once or twice," Kline continues. "They stopped calling from 'Law & Order' ... but I hope they'll call again -- so I can say 'no.'"

The reality television genre has "exploded in the last five or six years," David Lyle, president of Fox Reality Channel told critics at Summer TV Press Tour 2008 Friday.

According to Lyle, in 2002 broadcast TV networks introduced 27 reality shows, and 22 reality shows were introduced by cable networks. This year there will be 32 new reality shows on broadcast and 140 on cable.

"Reality is no longer alternative programming. In fact, it is the cornerstone of modern television, like it or not," he said.

In the critics' case, that would be "or not."

British actress Gina Bellman says she's recognized more in the United States than in the U.K. as that actress from the British comedy series "Coupling."

Bellman came to Summer TV Press Tour 2008 here in Beverly Hills on Friday to plug her TNT drama "Leverage," from Dean Devlin, producer of "Independence Day" and "The Patriot." The new show is about a group of hackers, thieves, con artists and grifters who help out people who are being taken advantage of by powerful bad guys.

One critic wondered whether Bellman gets recognized a lot as "the 'Coupling' lady."

"I don't know if it's because the British are a bit more laid-back, but I think it's more a case of 'Coupling' still runs here and it hasn't run in England for a long time ... actually I get much more recognition here because it's on all the time," she said, adding, "and I love that."

The Reporters Who Cover Television are keenly interested in asking any African American they can get their hands on at Summer TV Press Tour 2008 what they think of Barack Obama's presidential campaign and the likelihood of him succeeding. That's the case because filmmaker Shelton Lee, aka Spike Lee, predicts that as of Inauguration Day 2009, "you will have to measure time Before Obama and After Obama."

Director and filmmaker Spike Lee. (Frederick Brown/Getty)

Among those things touched by the "seismic change in the universe," he said, is the entertainment industry. Really.

"The gatekeepers are not people of color and that's how things are going to change," Lee said.
"Because there's only a few people...who decide what films get made and don't get made, what goes on television and what doesn't."

Just a few short years after TV networks took shots at the TV press tour over the absence of African Americans in front of and behind the camera, Comedy Central introduces to critics "Chocolate News," a sketch comedy show that focuses, the cable network says, on "the urban experience in America from the African-American perspective." It was created by and stars David Alan Grier. It is executive-produced by four white guys, who join Grier on stage at Summer TV Press Tour 2008.

Actor David Alan Grier (Stuart Ramson/AP)

"I can't help but notice that most of the panel are white guys," one sharp-eyed TV critic notes right off the bat.

"You represent, yeah, but why aren't there more African Americans up there?" the critic asks.

"What do you mean by that?" Grier asks.

"I don't know if you noticed that the guys to your right are white," the critic says. To be completely accurate, the critics should have mentioned that the guys to Grier's left are white as well, but we'll let that go.

"Exactly. I can explain that, sir," Grier responds. "These two gentlemen are octoroons and -- no, we have African Americans on our staff. These [exec producers on stage] are the guys I've known a very long time. Fax [Bahr] and I went to college together. We worked together. Fax and Adam [Small] and I were on 'In Living Color' and these are the guys I really wanted to write with. So it all comes through me -- I'm African American. It's all good. We're going to 'chocolate' it up more."