It was set visit day yesterday, with a group excursion to the sets of Lopez Tonight, Conan, Cougar Town, Parks and Recreation and Criminal Minds spin-off Criminal Minds. The morning began on the Warner Bros. lot set of Lopez Tonight with George Lopez and new executive producer Bob Morton, who had the following to say about season two:”
“I think when the show started, it was approached more as a talk show, and we basically said we wanted to do comedy, especially with Conan coming on. So we pretty much just refocused everything. The comedy pieces we’ve made, I think, are a lot stronger, a lot quicker-paced, as is the overall pace of the show. Before I was here they were going a little longer. And the one thing I learned — one of many things that I learned from David Letterman – was these things have to have a sense of urgency. And that feeling of the live show just creates an energy that you can’t get any way else.”
Next up was Conan’s new talker, with Conan O’Brien and executive producer Jeff Ross. Said Conan about working for TBS:
“I came to this show thinking I just want to go for it in every single way creatively, and I don’t want to over-think things. If someone has an idea and it sounds like, gee, I haven’t seen that before, we try it. And what’s nice is we are partnered with people who have encouraged us since day one. The people at TBS have made it very clear that we want you to do what you think is funny and what you enjoy doing, and I think that’s led to a feeling here of experimentation in silliness.
The crew, the staff, a lot of the people in their early twenties who are working on the show, we’ve all been through something in the last year, and so there’s sort of a spirit. There’s a little pirate-ship feeling to this show, which I love. Everybody has it because we all went through it. None of us knew what was going to happen, were we going to get other jobs, how were we going to make it through this thing. We stuck together. We did. And that creates a real strong dynamic here at the show that I think is coming through on television.”
After a short bus trip to the Twentieth Century Fox lot, there were two sessions: Funny Women session with Julie Bowen, Alyson Hannigan, Jane Lynch, Lea Michele, Martha Plimpton, Cobie Smulders and Sofia Vergara; and Funny Men session with Ty Burrell, Chris Colfer, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Neil Patrick Harris, Matthew Morrison, Eric Stonestreet, Ed O’Neill, Josh Radnor, Jason Segal and Lucas Neff. And set visits to Cougar Town, Parks and Recreation and Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior capped off the day.
