TCA press tour: An ABC show-runner extravaganza

Show runners are just what the term sounds like: They are the powerful people who plot the course of TV shows.They decide what we see, and the best known are in front of me right now — Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse of “Lost”; Shonda Rhimes of “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Private Practice”; Marc Cherry of “Desperate Housewives”; Greg Berlanti of “Brothers and Sisters” (and a long list of other shows); and Silvio Horta of “Ugly Betty.” As you see, ABC has more famous show runners than any other broadcast network, and they do us the favor of rounding them up once a year and putting them on a panel together.

The results are hilarious, even if they aren’t always that informative. It’s not as if Damon and Carlton are really going to tell us what they’re planning for the next season of “Lost.” (Production starts in August, and they expect to be finished writing the season about the time it debuts in February.)

Instead, we start today with them heckling Cherry as he tells a story about going to a baseball game with ABC boss Steve McPherson, “the funniest thing about this story being that I was at a baseball game.”

“Touchdown!” Damon says, raising his arms.

“He thought he was going to ‘Damn Yankees,’” Carlton adds

Marc explains that he and Carlton were on the Writers Guild negotiating committee together, “and people kept saying things like ‘This is fourth down and we’re on the goal line.’ I said, ‘Why does everything need to be a sports metaphor? Why can’t we use more musical theater metaphors’”

The questions are very haphazard, with everybody cutting in on everybody else and the panelists sometimes answering one another’s questions, or not getting to answer at all. A lot of attention is paid to the “Katherine Heigl situation” — i.e. reports that since she carped about the writing, this year, Shonda will give Izzie a brain tumor. (”Put her in a coma,” Silvio shouts out) Shonda, of course, won’t discuss storyline, and she just keeps saying she didn’t think Heigl insulted the writers. Nobody keeps her mouth shut better than Shonda Rhimes.

I’m sorry to end this with no “Lost” scoop. Damon and Carlton can’t stay to chat, and the best they’d do was to say we’ll see Daniel Dae Kim “in some form” again. “Human form,” Damon amplifies. But you know that could mean anything. Asked about killing “the only Korean-American hero in prime time” (not counting Sandra Oh, who is a Korean-Canadian heroine), they point out that “we’ve killed a lot of white people too, and chances are good that we’ll kill a lot more this season.”