Plenty of reputable entertainment journalists have already broken down a great deal of the newsworthy things that went down at the 2nd Annual Austin Television Festival (ATX). I’m not here to do that. I’m here to give my impressions of the event, both from a professional and a personal level. Everything below will be more or less true. The important stuff will be true. The rest of it won’t be intentionally false, but may accidentally fall under the realm of 1) incorrect memory, 2) crazy amounts of BBQ coursing through my veins, or 3) the fact that I’m pretty much exhausted while writing this down.
The beauty of this? I have no editors to whom to submit this piece, so it can be as haphazard, out-of-sequence, and in-depth as I feel like. Some things that went down felt important. Some things just felt fun. Others were just weird. Without further ado…
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As a primer: I didn’t go here primarily as a critic or journalist, but rather someone that really, really wanted a vacation. My wife and I bought tickets on the first day they were available last summer. I’ve since learned that other journalists like myself who moderated panels throughout the weekend seemed to have gotten in for free. I only know this because the co-founders hugged me during our first face-to-face meeting, after which they thanked me for actually paying to attend. When I asked if I could have my money back, they suddenly developed acute hearing loss.
Still! I didn’t mind. I offered my help early this year if they wanted it, and didn’t expect anything in return. I’m glad I paid, in that this is the type of event I like to support. In essence, it’s TV Camp: while there were plenty of panels that dug deep into certain aspects of the medium, this was a celebration for both TV viewers and TV fans first and foremost. We went since it’s still a small yet robust weekend, on the upwards swing towards something approaching Comic-Con or SXSW but still years away from attaining that status. (In talking with the co-founders, it’s unclear if they even want to achieve such size.) To get a festival vibe without the need to stand in line for 8 hours in order to see someone recite platitudes from a stage a football field away sounded like a good way to spend a few days. And even if I didn’t actually help out in an official capacity, and even if the panels were semi-lackluster, at least the two of us would have a weekend filled with good food, good drink, and hopefully a few friends. Seemed like a no-brainer to us.
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I used a football analogy above for a reason: Without a doubt, the “important” thing that happened from a news perspective was the “Friday Night Lights” reunion that kicked off the Saturday programming schedule. FNL was a big part of the first year’s programming, and it makes sense why: the location of the festival, plus its status in the hearts of hardcore TV fans, made it a must-have for the event. This year, many of those that appeared during the inaugural ATX were announced for an outdoor screening on Friday as well as a Q&A panel on Saturday morning. Scott Porter, Gaius Charles, Matt Lauria, and others were publicly announced.
What many, if not all, knew was that ATX had an extra surprise up its sleeve in the former of Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton. When they appeared onscreen, you would have thought One Direction, The Wanted, and a dozen other boy bands simultaneously hit the stage topless while spraying each other with fire hoses in a playful manner. (Is this the time to state the demo for those attending was 75% female? Probably.) There was plenty of talent announced for the festival beforehand, but the combination of surprise and star power involved with Chandler and Britton dropping by felt like the moment where ATX went from a “nice to attend” festival to “shit, I should probably go next year, shouldn’t I???” moment for those following along outside of Austin.
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The food…I mean, sweet Mary. I’m no foodie, but I actively started to panic on Friday (the midpoint of our five-day stay) about all the restaurants I wasn’t going to be able to visit during our trip. I’m typing this with a belly full of the BBQ goodness from The Salt Lick, a place from which I had to be physically dragged away from in order to make our flight home.
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The best part of the “FNL” panel? When Kyle Chandler accidentally called Scott Porter “Jason.” Porter didn’t even blink an eye, not realizing he wasn’t Jason Street talking to Coach Taylor. Connie Britton had to bring them both back to reality. The question I wanted to ask at this panel but ultimately couldn’t (given the large crowd in attendance) was this: Assuming you all have lengthy careers ahead of you, will your roles on this show defined your career, and how OK would you be with that?
I have no idea what their answer would be, but the ease with which Chandler and others slipped back into their relationships from the show after several years apart indicates these actors haven’t quite gotten these roles out of their system yet.
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Professionally speaking, I moderated a panel on the first full day of the festival entitled “Casting Deconstructed”. To be honest, that’s not my normal jam, as I avoid all the buzz around casting and the mechanisms behind it and focus more on the finished product onscreen. But I used the opportunity to familiarize myself a bit with some of the minutiae, and had great assistance from the panel itself, which consisted of actors (Lindsey McKeon), coaches (Devon Odessa), casting agents (Bet Sepko, Kelsey Mayfield-Porter), and one writer (Liz Tigelaar). But mostly I spent the panel cheering up “Revenge” actor Nick Weschler, who either has an insanely dry sense of humor or had spent the night listening to The Cure. In answering my initial question to him and actress Lindsey McKeon about their perspective on the pilot process, Weschler essentially said, “My advice, if you want to be an actor: Don’t.”
Allllrighty then!
He actually had a lot of salient points to make, and was very (almost too) honest about his career. But I wasn’t sure how much of it was me not reading his sense of humor and how much I was supposed to be sweeping the small stage for sharp objects.
One of my favorite parts of that panel came from Mayfield-Porter, who many mostly know as Scott Porter’s wife. But she’s also a casting agent for several reality programs, including “The Biggest Loser.” Part of her job in that capacity involves actively seeking out people online with inspirational stories that also happen to be overweight. Once identifying them, she has to cold call them and ask them to be on the show without it seeming like she’s stalking overweight people on the internet. After she explained this, I replied, “That was YOU?”
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No, seriously, have I mentioned the damn food? Because shit, son, get thee to Austin with an empty stomach. Waiters would hand me menus, and I would say, “Yes.”
Also? Every waiter that served us had seemingly moved there in the last six weeks. That place is booming, economically speaking, and everyone there seems to love living there. It’s like Boston, only the love is real, and no one is named Smitty.
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My other professional responsibility this weekend consisted of hosting a screening of FX’s late, great, gone-to-soon show “The Riches.” Attending this panel was creator Dmitri Lipkin, along with actors Shannon Woodward and Todd Stashwick. Eddie Izzard also filmed a greeting to the audience, which played about how you’d expect an Izzard intro to sound. (Read: rambling, semi-incoherent, and very funny.)
There were many screenings throughout the weekend of many shows, but very few involved the talent from those shows actually watching along with the crowd. All three people involved with the screening watched the episode, and my dialogue with them afterwards emphasized how much they still feel connected to this program. There was a very “unfinished” business vibe to the proceedings, but not in a negative sense. These were people who simply seemed to enjoy getting to talk about a show that is rarely discussed.
(Also, I’ll say that my experience rewatching the 20 episodes that were produced: a LOT of the DNA that exists in the FX programming that currently dominates the ratings and critical acclaim can be found in “The Riches”. There are strains of “Sons Of Anarchy” and “Justified” all over the place in this show. And while it was imperfect, “The Riches” tapped into a storytelling vein that network is still mining to this day.)
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One of my favorite parts of the weekend: meeting lots of people I only knew previously through social media/writing, or those that only knew me through those mediums. Like most writers, I’m pretty much an introvert, choosing to converse with people in 140 character bursts on Twitter rather than a face-to-face dialogue. But I intentionally put myself out there this weekend, checking in on Foursquare all over the place and generally encouraging people to stalk me. And stalk me they did, even if said stalking apparently sometimes involved identifying me sitting near them in a crowded panel and having someone else nearby tweet about that discussion. Which is creepy. And awesome! But also the creepy part.
Still, it was something of a trip to have people come up to me, say hi, and mention they like my writing or podcasts. It’s a very solitary profession/passion, and one I choose to do willingly. But it was still nice to have some in-person feedback. All of it was positive, which means either I’m awesome or those that comment on my articles/reviews simply didn’t show up. Probably the latter. But I’m going to go on believing the former for the time being. I’m still glowing from all the brisket.
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BECAUSE SERIOUSLY GUYS THE FOOOOOOOOD!
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Official panels/events I attended:
Thursday: Opening night premiere (“Arrested Development” screening with Q&A with Alia Shawkat and Mae Whitman, followed by after party)
Friday: “Casting Deconstructed” panel; “The Riches” screening; “Friday Night Lights” outdoor screening
Saturday: “Friday Night Lights” Q&A panel; “Pilot/Pitch/Pickup” panel (involving Kyle Killian, Julie Plec, Tigelaar, and some industry show buyers); the “Veronica Mars” panel (featuring creator Rob Thomas and Chris “Piz” Lowell); “Enlisted” screening with cast/crew; closing night party.
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About that “Veronica Mars” panel…
Given the Kickstarter craziness a few months ago, it was inevitable that this would be one of the hottest tickets around. Oh, at this point it’s probably wise to describe how the ATX ticketing worked: if you had a “Panelist” or “Press” badge, you could get into pretty much anything you wanted. Otherwise, you could enter an online lottery a few weeks before to try and get physical tickets for up to three events per day. ATX sold tickets for roughly 50% of each venue’s capacity, then shut things down for the event. After that, you could stand in line and queue up for a chance to get in. After that, you could tap dance wildly and pray to a pagan ticket god. Or something. Honestly, it got slightly confusing, and is something the festival will need to figure out before it can scale upwards in a meaningful manner.
The point: I didn’t try to pull the “I’m a Panelist, therefore I’m avoiding lines” move with the exception of this event. (For those covering these panels for specific filings? That made all the sense in the world. I had no specific assignments, so it didn’t really matter for me.) I felt like this was the newsiest event of the week, and wanted to cover it and report on it. And yet, five minutes in, I realized that almost no real news would be imparted, since the movie is starting to film in a week and Thomas was on lockdown about anything pertaining to the specifics of its plot and who has been cast. The two big news items that came out of it: 1) Veronica hasn’t handled a case between the end of season three and the start of the movie; 2) Lots of casting announcements will be dripping out over the next ten days. It’s a smart but cynical approach: by announcing one actor per day, Warner Brothers gets to keep the story in the press for a much longer cycle. Since outlets won’t collectively agree to only post one article once everything is announced (nor would they want to anyways, given how many more hits ten articles would generate as opposed to one), we’ll get day after day of articles that continue to not say a damn thing of substance about the movie at all.
Still, when a “Veronica Mars” panel involving the show’s creator is the worst panel you go to that day, you’ve had a pretty great freakin’ day.
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About that “Enlisted” screening…
There’s a certain dog-and-pony show that comes with screenings such as those at the festival. But the majority of the screenings at ATX concerned current or past shows. Only one featured a show the viewing public hadn’t seen yet: FOX’s upcoming comedy “Enlisted,” the newest show from “Cougar Town” creator Kevin Biegel. Originally scheduled for the smaller of two theatres, the festival moved this over once it realized there was a huge appetite for unaired pilot episodes of upcoming shows. (I can see a half-dozen of these appearing in the third year of ATX.)
So the onstage antics of the show’s core cast (Geoff Stults, Chris Lowell, Parker Young) weren’t about recreating chemistry based on a long-standing show, but selling the audience on it after they watched a single episode. Both Biegel and co-executive producer Mike Royce (“Men of A Certain Age”, “Everybody Loves Raymond”) assured me that the lunacy onstage accurately represented the intense, fast-forming chemistry the three forged during the filming of the pilot. I don’t have any way to know that for certain, but I did see the narrative wheels whirling behind the eyes of Biegel and Royce as they watched the three fictional brothers from “Enlisted” proceed to deploy the more anarchic panel of the weekend. (Poor Angelique Cabral didn’t have a chance in the world of getting a wordwise in edgewise, although she did note that she didn’t have much chance to do so on-set either.) Moderator Ben Blacker did a yeoman’s job of keeping things from flying completely off the handle, but most of this was out of anyone’s control.
The thing is, though: no one in the audience wanted Blacker to control it. What was semi-obvious from the pilot (which is much, much, much better than its lackluster trailer would have you believed) became fully evident onstage: there’s a lot of material to be mined from watching these actors just bounce off each other. “Enlisted” is something of a hard sale, and Biegel and company are going to have to overcome a lot of preconceptions and strongly-held beliefs about the American military in order to make this a hit show. But those that come for the simple relationships between these three brothers will find a toehold in a world with which they might not immediately think is ripe with comedic potential.
On that note: those that watch “Cougar Town” already know about Biegel’s propensity to slide real-world stakes into his ostensibly silly shows. Stults’ character comes back from the front lines in the opening moments of the pilot. But not all of his character truly comes back. How “Enlisted” plays that out should hopefully make it more than just the silly, broad comedy FOX would have you believe this is.
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About those unofficial events…
Look: part of why you go to events like this, either as a professional or a fan, is to share the same oxygen as the talent that makes them. I tweeted dozens of photos throughout the weekend, because let’s face it: it’s awesome to hear Mrs. Coach say “y’all” while you’re in the same room as her. The ATX festival is at a size where most of the talent is accessible and happy to take pictures or simply talk to fans. It’s not terrifically hard to poke around twitter for ATX-related hashtags (such as #ATXTVS2) and find hundreds of selfies featuring Ansen Mount should you want to do so.
I was fortunate enough to spend some quality time with lots of the talent there, both offstage and onstage. Most of those were impromptu, off-the-cuff, off-the-record stuff. They were having a good time, I was having a good time, and most of them were insanely generous with their time. I didn’t break out my voice recorder because it felt gauche to do so. I got to hear their perspective about their industry as well as the journo-critical complex. (One person in particular knew most of The A.V. Club’s TV critics by name, which was awesome as well as slightly intimidating.)
Again: it will be incredibly easy to find plenty of stories about how self-effacing and generous most of the talent was with their times. These stories are not bullshit. They are all true. But you want to know about my experience, not the number of people whom I met while you were outside of Austin. (You think you might care. But you really, really, really don’t care.) The only thing I’ll mention, since I’ll be transcribing it this week, was a roundtable interview I conducted with several members of the cast of “Scandal” alongside some other journalists. The cast had some interesting things to say about the show until this point, and have some fun predictions about season three. At one point, I asked a question that made one of them stammer, which I didn’t think was even possible. So look for that soon.
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I’ve talked a lot about the various panels and screenings so far, and I’ve only touched upon 10-15% of the programming, tops. At any given time, up to five events were happening simultaneously in three different buildings, and there were generally 4-6 slots per day in which things were happening. There were plenty of things that didn’t interest me in the slightest, but holy crap were a lot of people excited for that “Boy Meets World” reunion. A good festival programs across a broad spectrum of interests, and ATX succeeded in this regard. I got a lot out of everything I attended, and almost no one I talked to this weekend felt their time was ill-spent thanks to their personal paths through the programming.
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Were there problems? Sure, but the type of problems that come from these type of events. The lines, especially on Saturday, were pretty draining, especially for those stuck in the Austin heat. It was a rare time in which I would ask two people involved with the festival a question and get the same answer. For example: I asked one coordinator if I was supposed to introduce the episode of “The Riches” or simply conduct the Q&A afterwards. She said I need only show up afterwards. But when I got to the theatre, the extremely friendly but incredibly shy in-house coordinator wondered why I hadn’t been there earlier, which forced her to get up onstage and do it herself.
There were little things like that throughout. But these were hardly make-or-break problems. The biggest confusion actually led to one of the better experiences of the entire weekend. On Friday night, ATX hosted an outdoor screening of the “Friday Night Lights” season one finale “State”. They hosted it in a parking lot of a hotel about one and a half miles from the rest of the festival. My wife and I walked over early with a friend who happens to live in Austin. (And whom I happened to meet the day before, after ten years of online-only chats. THE INTERNET, Y’ALL!) The event was scheduled from 6-10 pm, but there was no indication about when the actual screener would start. The hardcore fans got there at 6 pm on the dot and quickly scooped up the few seats laid out. The rest of us who didn’t bring lawn chairs as our carry-on items on the flights to Texas found ourselves standing in a hot parking lot at 6:30 pm with little to no idea about when the episode would start.
To be fair, there were bands playing music, and plenty of trucks serving beer. Also? I should have assumed that the screening wouldn’t happen until it was dark. That’s totally on me. But that still meant two and a half hours of standing up in a parking lot to watch an episode of a show I’d already seen. The ability to also have my picture taken with Brad Leland (who played Buddy Garrity) and other assembled cast was fine, but not enough to stoke the fires of my excitement.
Luckily, my native friend knew about another way to spend our time and still have a sense of when the screening would start. She took us up into the hotel itself, led us to the bar area, and helped us score three poolside seats. We drank, talked, enjoyed the atmosphere, and even saw a couple get engaged ten feet away. (True story. I honestly have the only pictures in the universe of it. We gave our info to the hostess so they can contact us for them.) By the time the episode was about to start, my wife and friend didn’t want to leave. When I wandered back, very few others had actually arrived, and when the episode started, no one really talked to each other anyways.
None of this is to take anything from the event, because it WAS pretty amazing to hear those opening credits echo into the Austin sky. And I know many will cite that screening as the defining moment of their festival. But I ended up walking back to the pool after ten minutes, realizing I’d rather spend time in a comfy poolside chair than having asphalt dig into my rear end. ATX didn’t directly create those poolside moments, but they certainly helped create the conditions for them. It was just one of a hundred that happened due to buying two tickets on a whim last Fall.
And I look forward to a hundred more when we return next year.