The Television Critics Press Tour Is Shrinking — How Small Can It Get? 5

Jimmy O. Yang hadn’t been on stage for 20 minutes when the nameless reporter — they never announce their names — asked him “where he went wrong” during his journey from UC San Diego economics major to stand-up and actor. Yang was facing roughly 100 members of the Television Critics Association to plug his new series, a Hulu adaptation of Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown, but the conversation was drifting off topic. 

“How did we all go so wrong to be in this room right now?” he responded to the Pasadena hotel ballroom last week. “We could do better for our parents.” 

The initial question was asked in jest, and Yang responded accordingly. But for plenty of actors, producers, publicists, executives and even journalists who’ve ever attended a similar panel, Yang’s existential query likely resonates. Participation in the TCA press tour, the event in question and a twice annual marathon of press conference-style junkets that dates back in some fashion to the 1970s, can feel a tad surreal. Companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars (in the days of off-site parties, millions) to participate in a single day, filling panel seats with talent from new and returning series and buffet tables with all-you-can-eat breakfasts — and lunches and dinners. When it gels, it’s a symbiotic success. Reporters engage in fruitful conversations with creatives. That prompts coverage and, crucial to said companies, higher odds of viewership. Yet, just as often, these exchanges go off the rails with non sequiturs, silence or, most painfully, faux pas. 

That’s one of several reasons why entertainment industry participation is waning. Frustrations with a staid press conference format, accelerated by Hollywood belt-tightening and the COVID-era shift away from in-person gatherings, to say nothing of severe budget cuts across the media landscape, have taken a visible toll on the press tour. An event that once stretched more than two packed weeks wrapped its latest cycle on July 17 after a thin eight days. Powerhouse streamers such as Netflix, Apple and Amazon were absent, and not a single programming executive took the stage to face down the press.

“Everytime we submit to this, we find ourselves asking, ‘Why?’” says one publicist whose company has scaled back but not yet pulled out. “The minute we wrap one TCA, we’re asking ourselves if we really want to do it again.”

Platform (née network) participation was long considered compulsory, and there was little negotiation of how it would all go down. The TCA, a consortium of critics, reporters and bloggers, set a schedule and expected each broadcaster to show up — even if it meant eating $100,000 to halt production on a series in the middle of the week to shuttle its cast and producers over to Pasadena’s Langham Huntington or the press tour’s former summer venue, The Beverly Hilton. Each day was a marathon of panels and pre-arranged interviews, typically leading up to a party or dinner.

It’s difficult to imagine it now, but the press tour, not unlike the upfronts, used to be an occasion for unfettered shmoozing. During the ’00s, when Fox was drunk on the success of American Idol and corporate events hadn’t yet been permanently kneecapped by the Great Recession, the network regularly shut down the Santa Monica Pier for a TCA afterparty where the talent outnumbered journalists. Fox is now a no-show, and those who did throw closing parties this year largely kept them to brief open bars in the hotel lobby. 

Another stark difference between the press tours of yore and the outings of late is the absence of “executive sessions.” The list of relevant TV chiefs to appear before the TCA over the years is probably longer than the one of those who’ve never showed. Canceled and/or deceased media titans such as Roger Ailes and Les Moonves both faced the TCA. Oprah Winfrey famously sat down to defend her fledging OWN network in the wake of its rocky start.

There are a few executives who still participate on this level. Though each took the summer off, both PBS CEO Paula Kerger and FX Networks chair John Landgraf met with the TCA in February. Landgraf’s sessions have become almost a separate affair, graduate lectures on the state of the industry accompanied by illuminating slideshows on the content wars and a Q&A. The press tour is where the term “Peak TV” entered the vernacular. But for every Landgraf, there’s many more who’ve now written it off. “Never again,” says one executive handler whose company long ago pulled its brass from the TCA stage. “No film chief would ever sit down on a stage and let 150 people hammer them with questions. In no other industry, with no other CEOs, does this happen — short of the president, who is accountable to the American people.”

Journalistically speaking, unmoderated exchanges between industry power brokers and the reporters who cover said industry are not a bad thing. And of the approximate 200 current members of the TCA, it’s safe to assume that the majority cannot easily be granted individual interviews with executives or certain echelons of talent. A diminished press tour means diminished access. 

“My goal is to get every network and streamer in the room,” says current TCA president Jacqueline Cutler. “We invite everyone to participate and work to ensure it’s worthwhile for them and for us. I have meetings set with those that did not participate this time and some have indicated they want to return.”

But for those populating the TCA stage, the supposed worth has been in question for a while. There is, after all, no shortage of examples when TCA panels have gotten contentious. Sometimes, it’s a delight — like in 2015, five months to the day before he would announce his first presidential bid, when Donald Trump clashed with the room after being called out for falsely describing The Celebrity Apprentice as “the No. 1 show on television.” It did not crack the top 50 that season. Other times, it’s a slow-motion car wreck and a poor reflection on the organization, like when one unnamed reporter used a 2014 panel for HBO’s Girls to tell creator-star Lena Dunham, “I don’t get the purpose of all the nudity, particularly by you.” (Dunham was stoic throughout the mess, though producer Judd Apatow minced no words when he turned on the reporter and asked, “Do you have a girlfriend? Does she like you?”)

It’s panels like that which have prompted some talent to declare the press tour a no-fly zone. They also stick in publicists’ memories, especially as the TCA has proven so difficult to reconcile with the internet era. What started as a way for local and syndicated journalists across the country to bank months’ worth of content for a then-robust media landscape, is now largely a flurry of Tweets and clickbait stories that have little lifespan after the tour wraps. To help justify participation, most companies use the excuse of having talent under one roof to knock items off their to-do lists — electronic rotations, international press, marketing spots, photo shoots.

Ancillary activities for sitcom stars, however, will not future-proof the press tour. And while none who spoke on background for this story, either current or past participants, was ready to rule out future participation altogether, no one at a network, platform or studio expressed confidence in the current format.  

“It’s antiquated system,” says one. “It needs to evolve. Into what? I’m not sure.”