Teri Hatcher is not now, nor has she ever been, married to Howie Long. Dennis Franz has no hair on his legs. Get too close to Nicolette Sheridan and you could get an eye poked out. These are but a few of the lessons to be learned at “ABC Primetime Preview Weekend”, a three-day annual affair for the media that took place this past weekend at Disney’s California Adventure theme park.
The slumping ABC network, which has fallen to fourth place in prime time ratings, has big hopes for the fall lineup that will be premiering over the next few weeks. Owned by The Walt Disney Company and overseen (for now) by CEO Michael Eisner, ABC has been struggling since the late Nineties to recover after putting all its eggs in the Who Wants to Be A Millionaire? basket that burned out viewers and left the network without enough dependable programming.
The comeback began this weekend as television, print, radio and online journalists braved the Anaheim heat to spend their afternoons in one-on-one chats with more than eighty television stars. The routine went something like this: Celebrity is announced, photos are taken in front of an ABC backdrop (“Mark…Mark Cuban, look to your left!”), the talent sits in one of five small outdoor bungalows shaded by a black tarpaulin, press selects the most important celebrity out of the five and stands in that line, while ABC reps beg them to get out of, say, the Jim Belushi line and go chat with the goofy neighbor on Rodney instead.
It all creates a somewhat surreal environment: Belushi gets up from his interview chair, walks over to the buffet table and scoops up some napkins, then shoves them up through the bottom of his shirt to mop up sweat; George Lopez, in a moment of spontaneity, pulls a Sharpie out of his pocket and writes “Watch George Lopez” in the middle of the ABC backdrop in big letters – within minutes, workers have taken away the tainted wall and replaced it with another (Disney plans for everything!); “Sweet” Alice Harris, a community leader for more than thirty years in the slums of Watts, struggles to record a radio I.D. (“Hi, this is Sweet Alice Harris, and you’re listening to Mojo in the Morning!”).
After each star spends an hour smiling and gamely entertaining journalist’s questions and photograph requests, Disney dumps them into the star-struck tourist throng outside, where even one of the kids from Complete Savages gets mobbed like he’s Elvis Presley circa 1963.
Disney has hyped up the weekend to their tourists, and the crowds have turned out to get a picture of the stars, the has-beens, and even the not-yets. A theater nearby shows pilots of new shows like Less Than Perfect, Lost and The Benefactor. Booths are set up throughout the park giving Dick and Jane Nobody from Idaho the chance to get liposucked on Extreme Makeover. Some of the best “I can’t believe I’m seeing this” moments, however, come courtesy of the daily parades that the park has scheduled, as people like Emmy-winner Gordon Clapp ride in a float and wave to the crowd among whispers of “Is NYPD Bluestill on the air?”
“Son,” adds Chris Harrison, the rose-bearing host of The Bachelor, as he’s introduced to the photographers as “Chris Harris” by the ABC announcer. Moments later, some of the picture professionals get visibly angry when an event publicist pulls them away from the bungalows and insists they have to limit their snapping to “the paparazzi area”.
ABC seems to have a winner in Desperate Housewives, a show whose soap-opera structure should appeal to women, whose sexy lead actresses should get some male eyeballs, and whose HBO/Showtime/FX-inspired determination to break the rules (it’s narrated by a dead woman, for Pete’s sake!) will pique the interest of those who’ve fled to cable. Life As We Know It, from the makers of Freaks and Geeks and starring Sean Faris and Kelly Osbourne, is already getting buzz as the “can’t miss” teen alienation show of this year.
Then there’s Lost, the high-concept plane crash drama from J.J. Abrams (Alias, Mission Impossible 3) that promises to crank out more twists than Auntie Anne on a sugar high.
There is a glow that radiates from a celebrity when they know they’re actually part of something good. When you’re sitting across from Seann William Scott and he’s saying that he’s proud of Evolution, for instance, an interviewer has the luxury of looking into his eyes and knowing he’s just toeing the company line. This past weekend, however, there were a lot of actors who genuinely seemed certain that they were onto something special.
And so, Nicolette Sheridan appears not once but both afternoons to show that she is the most Desperate Housewife of all: playing a vamp on the program, Ms. Sheridan’s confident, in character poses unashamedly flashed a pair of pointy accessories that made you expect Walt Disney himself to rise from the ground and throw a blanket over her chest.
Mark Cuban, self-made billionaire and perhaps the friendliest interviewee of the weekend, sits back in a Mickey Mouse t-shirt and enthusiastically discusses his plans to knock Donald Trump off the reality show throne. Nick Searcy, the veteran character actor who stars in comedian Rodney Carrington’s sitcom Rodney, describes the show as “Seinfeld meets Hee Haw” and knows that there’s a Blue Collar audience out there for exactly that.
Even Kirk Cameron and Chelsea Noble, now married and with six (!) kids aged seven or younger, speak of the Growing Pains 2: Return of the Seavers TV movie with not-too-subtle hints of bringing the beloved sitcom back after the movie’s anticipated success. “We’re going to call it Growing Pains Reloaded,” suggests Cameron with a smile, still looking like a Tiger Beat centerfold at age thirty-four.
Never has corporate synergy been so welcomed, you think to yourself as you wonder whether there’s enough time between the Less Than Perfect and 8 Simple Rules pods to go for a ride on the Tower of Terror. The Disneyland vibe seems to have taken hold of the celebrities too, as many have brought their families along and they seem extremely happy to be answering even the most absurd questions. And after a day of asking what it’s like to work with Andy Dick, a journalist itches to wander off the beaten path.
“I once had a friend who swore that you and Howie Long were married,” I relayed to Teri Hatcher, caving in to an urge. “Those Radio Shack ads always seemed to imply you were. Is my friend the only idiot that read that much into them?”
Hatcher, now headlining Desperate Housewives, flashes a grin as she uncrosses and then re-crosses a pair of legs that once made her the most downloaded woman on the Internet. “I did have people who thought that we were married, but we never were married. He’s been married to his high school sweetheart for you know, whatever, twenty years.”
Asked and answered – but the Ving Rhames-Vanessa Williams relationship enigma continues.
The weekend concluded with a plethora of NYPD Blue stars descending on the media, eager to discuss the show’s recently announced final season. For more than a decade, Detective Andy Sipowicz has been one of the toughest, most ornery, complicated characters on television. But Sipowicz would seem to have at least one more surprise for the audience, it would seem, when four-time Emmy winner Dennis Franz shows up in a pair of shorts that would look more appropriate on Reno 911’s Lieutenant Dangle.
Sitting in a director’s chair and reflecting on his character, it’s hard not to notice what a wonderfully charming guy Franz is – and it’s equally as difficult to not make the observation that this famous tough guy doesn’t have a single hair on those Olympic-swimmer looking stems. Like ABC’s upcoming season, they are smooth, shocking, defiant – and for now at least, hard to look away from.
[Twice a month, Larry Carroll’s TV opinion column “Where’s The Remote?” takes a look at the latest television trends and some of the personalities responsible for them. To reach the author, please email larrycarroll@filmstew.com.]
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