CBS’s TV Press Tour session for “Viva Laughlin” seemed to be fairly evenly divided between two camps – those who had never seen the BBC’s “Viva Blackpool” and therefore didn’t get where the show was coming from, and those who had seen its inspiration and loved it, and were none too comforted by the blasé responses from the panel about their listless adaptation of that really kind of brilliant miniseries.

Honestly, in all Your Mayor's years of covering TV Press Tour, I’ve never emerged from a press conference for a show I wanted to like with such negative feelings (Quietus®, anyone?).

“Viva Blackpool” was a hilarious and energetic six-episode pseudo-musical British miniseries about a delusional dreamer (played with unbelievable charisma by David Morrissey) who thought opening a casino in a dying, seedy British port town would reverse that city’s fortunes, not to mention his own. Of course, many obstacles lay in his way, such as an inopportunely placed corpse and a lady-killing detective investigating that ostensible murder.

By contrast, “Viva Laughlin” boasts virtually no sense of humor. Hugh Jackman plays the evil casino owner with spectacular dash. But his appearances are being scheduled capriciously – what good is a drama if the antagonist rarely shows up?

And here are some more concerns, from the press conference:

THE MAYOR OF TELEVISION: In the BBC series, while the actors were singing, they were playing directly to the cameras, sort of winking at the audience as they were singing along, and that sort of gave the show a sort of cheekier sensibility. How much discussion went into deciding that the actors shouldn't eye the camera while they're singing, and why did you decide they shouldn't?

BOB LOWRY (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER): We didn't want to break the fourth wall. We didn't want the audience -- I don't think being in on the joke, because it's not a joke. We didn't want the audience to be taken away from the story. We wanted them to remain engaged, and we felt that breaking the fourth wall was -- sort of removing the viewer from the actual story that we were telling. ... In looking to the camera, it sort of removed the actors from the actual story.

Bad move. Because the BBC version understood that characters breaking into song was a kind of joke. Lowry spoke a lot about “teaching the audience how to watch the show,” until, at some point, he realized how condescending that sounded, and then he said, “I don't think it's so much teach them how to watch a drama with music as much as it is allowing them the opportunity to become engaged and still tell a good story.”

(Someone else at CBS suggested to Your Mayor that the consensus at the network was that American viewers were just too dumb to get the humor from characters winking at the camera. Well, in defense of that point of view, George W. Bush won the Presidency twice.)

And then, another question:

THE MAYOR OF TELEVISION: The BBC series was only six episodes, so how much of a challenge has it been to break stories and extend that? And how long can you extend the murder mystery or the preparation of the hotel before it opens?

BOB LOWRY: The challenge is enormous. … I needed to create characters that didn't exist in the BBC version. The phrase I often use is I had to crack it open for 22, so we had to create different characters to play off of each other and to be intertwined in each other's lives, and we hope to keep the -- I don't have an answer for you that the murder mystery will be resolved by 13 or by 22. But as a writer, I can tell you that the murder mystery will be resolved after we have exhausted every possibility of examining all of the suspects who could have killed the character.

… which sounds like more obfuscating on a level that most TV viewers won’t kindly accept. “Lost” dragged out storylines to the point of stretching them to death, much as Lowry seems to be vowing to do; viewers abandoned the show. Lowry sounds like he’s content with picking at a scab until the entire continent will be bored.

Too bad. “Viva Blackpool” moved with an effortless grace; “Viva Laughlin” sounds like it’ll proceed at a glacial pace without a smidgen of the wit of the original. It almost sounds as if “Viva Laughlin” will make viewers nostalgic for NBC’s remake of the British sitcom “Coupling.”

Understanding that TCA members have better things to do than fill space on this blog, I nonetheless throw out the question - has anyone else been soured on a show they liked after hearing the cast and creators discuss it during a press conference? If you blog on it, I'll offer links to your thoughts here.