ABC Exec. caught between a Geek and a hard place.

by: Lufguy 1 year, 4 months, 6 days, 23 hours, 21 minutes ago 3

By Lisa de Moraes for the Times Union.

The caterwauling of TV critics was so horrible when ABC Entertainment chief Steve McPherson blew the tops off their heads by refusing to divulge scoops about “Lost” before the next day’s comics convention, his publicist finally cut short the news conference.

Afterward, out in the hallway at Summer TV Press Tour 2007, McPherson slammed new NBC Co-chairman Ben Silverman as “clueless or stupid.”

Brutally honest, mercurial, great programming instincts, low hooey threshold, McPherson is the Practically Perfect Programming Executive. But critics don’t seem to like him. It’s inexplicable.

Wednesday’s melee started innocently enough when a TV critic, that nice Susan Young of the Oakland Tribune, said she’d heard “major” announcements about “Lost” would be made at the Comic-Con gathering in San Diego on Thursday. “Would you like to tell us today what that might be?” she asked nicely.

“Yeah, let me give those announcements now, of course I don’t,” McPherson said, dripping sarcasm.

“Oh, come on,” she said, nicely.

“They do have some announcements that they are going to be making that I think everyone will be pretty excited about,” said McPherson, twisting the knife, which, in retrospect, may not have been a good call.

“Can you tell us?” she pursued.

“No,” he said.

Pop! Pop! Pop! went critics’ heads.

“Do you want us to go to Comic-Con tomorrow instead of the (ABC) sessions?” she pursued.

“Let’s go now. Do you want to go? ... You and me, we’ll just go on a little road trip down to Comic-Con,” McPherson said, now bathing in sarcasm.

Hundreds of years ago, Comic-Con was a sweet little comic book convention. But it’s been totally co-opted by the studios, and now, for four days each year, it’s the center of the cultural world.

This year Comic-Con expects about 120,000 blogging geeks, who will rake in whatever the studios shovel out about upcoming movies and TV series.

On the TV side, pilot episodes of “Bionic Woman” and “Chuck” (NBC), “Pushing Daisies” (ABC) and “The Sarah Connor Chronicles” (Fox) will be screened for the geeks who, you can bank on it, are going to fill the blogosphere with rave reviews.

Comic-Con is irksome to the TV critics at the press tour.

“I don’t think my editor is going to be very happy when she reads on a blog later this afternoon that Steve McPherson promised that the biggest news regarding one of the highest-rated shows on the network would be coming at a fan convention the next day,” said one critic.

“Hear, hear!” others chimed in, which is something we didn’t think happened except in crunchy gravel BBC adaptations of novels.

“A lot of newspapers spend a lot of money to get us out here. A lot of us are fighting to stay out here,” one TV critic told McPherson, severely. “We write about all of your television shows. If you are not going to tell us what it is, you can at least tell us why you are not talking to us. Are we not important enough for you, or do you just not want to talk to us? A serious question: Why are you deciding to go there and not here?”

McPherson began to talk about how sometimes announcements are made here and sometimes there, when his publicist walked onstage whispered in his ear.

“OK. All right. They just spoke to (’Lost’ creator) Damon (Lindelof) and he is OK,” McPherson told the critics. “It’s going to be announced that Harold Perrineau is returning to the show.”

McPherson had yet to be asked a single question about Isaiah Washington, and only softball questions about his controversial new sitcom “Cavemen.” The publicist, who’s no dummy, took no chances; she cut off the news conference a few questions later, a lot sooner than executive Q&A sessions generally run.