TV Press Tour update: Slouching Towards Irrelevance

"Congratulations on still having a job."

Those were among the first words I received by way of greeting at this summer's TV Press Tour, thusfar a remarkably spiritless affair, for any number of reasons: For the first time in memory, none of the networks (aside from CBS) sent out screeners of their fall programming, so there's precious little to talk about and nothing to start generating any buzz over, and what discussion there is as journalists slouch from session to session tends to concern fallen colleagues who are not in attendance because they've either lost their jobs or their papers have axed the TV beat or their publications have opted not to spend the money to send them to a swanky hotel for close to three weeks to interview what so far has predominantly been talent for an endless string of reality shows. (There's one coming about a 500-pound woman who's trying to lose weight; during the session, she spoke darkly if fleetingly about repressed memories, but at least she has a job - if the show runs until she loses all the weight she wants it could challenge "Law & Order's" longevity; oddest of all, it's on the Style Network.)

(On to the "Gong Show" press conference!)

The first session I attended was for the Hallmark Channel, a dispiriting affair despite the banal uplift promised by each of the 10 movies trotted out. Already, the questions were of the rote, uninspired variety ("For any of the actors, do you guys have any favorite recipes that you're good at making?") usually reserved for the final day of press tour, when everyone is exhausted and miserable and just wants to go the hell home.

At that point, The Hollywood Reporter's Ray Richmond had already questioned the point of bothering with the event and The San Francisco Chronicle's Tim Goodman had hoped against hope that news would come out of the thing but wasn't really expecting much out of the broadcast networks.

Things would get worse: The Washington Post's Lisa de Moreas would contribute one of her precision-scalpel eviscerations of press tour buffoonery, calling out critics for not calling out 74-year-old Florence Henderson for shoehorning herself into the Baby Boomer Generation (well, that would've been plain rude; I was more amused by her contention that Boomers are "the fastest-growing segment of the population," which given the fact that they by definition aren't making any more of them these days is an outright lie or downright delusional), followed by an unambiguous demand from Defamer.com to stop Press Tour in its tracks. As in, like right now.

So that's been my week so far. How's yours?