TVSquad

FX held panels for Archer and Sons of Anarchy on Friday morning, but by then press tour fatigue had set in, and the energy in the room was low for both. It was especially low for Archer, a Adult Swim-esque spy cartoon by the creator of Sealab 2021 that most of the critics hadn't yet seen. The panel seemed to be more content with answering with wise-ass remarks that made themselves laugh but the just served to make us tired masses annoyed.

Things perked up, though, when the network presented five of its show-runners to talk about what it's like to develop edgy dramas for basic cable. But since the theme of the week has invariably been "Leno at 10," the questions often came back to the fact that NBC with one fell swoop wiped out five hours of scripted drama per week. And the show-runners took every opportunity to bash the Peacock for it.

And it got ugly: "I feel they should take the American flag down in front of the building and just put up a white one," said Rescue Me's Peter Tolan, "because they've clearly given up."

I wanted to wait a bit before I posted about the ABC showrunner panel, because a) I already posted about the "news" from Shonda Rhimes about Katherine Heigl's statements, and b) I wanted to think about why these panels seem to be so much more informative than the individual show panels?

We'll get to that more later. On the panel were Rhimes (Grey's Anatomy, Private Practice), Marc Cherry (Desperate Housewives), Silvio Horta (Ugly Betty), Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse (Lost), and Greg Berlanti (seemingly the rest of ABC's schedule). As you'd expect, Rhimes got the Heigl questions, Lindelof and Cuse got the most esoteric questions, and Chery made the most jokes. The funniest line, though, came from Horta.