TV stars, some nibbles and the liquid courage

Paul Brownfield has been filing online dispatches from the Television Critics Assn. meetings in Beverly Hills. Here’s the latest:

Went to the NBC party at the Century Club, having dinner high on the list of my motivations. Two martinis in I find myself badgering Rainn Wilson of “The Office” to tell me whether they killed off the Nate character Sunday night on “Six Feet Under.” Because Rainn used to be on that show. Me: “They killed him off, didn’t they, they killed off Nate, or he’s in a vegetative state, right? Alan Ball would want to do something [profanity that means twisted] in the last season, right?”

I’m paraphrasing, but that’s the gist, and poor Rainn, who’s already hinted that he knows, is giving me the inscrutable look as I continue to nudge him about it. “What, what is it? You know,” I’m saying, until he excuses himself from my immediate vicinity.

Really, as I said, I had come to the NBC party mainly to eat. The Century Club is a bar-restaurant-nightclub-type spot with a big courtyard and a large room inside, where later Amy Grant, soon to be appearing in NBC’s do-gooder reality show “Three Wishes,” was going to perform.

The thing about eating dinner at a network-party-for-the-stars-and-press is that you don’t eat dinner, exactly, you eat a little of everything from all these spreads, which is to say spicy tuna rolls and pizza and Caesar salad and pot sticker things. And then you have a brownie. And then you have a bar mitzvah stomachache. And meanwhile all around you the TV press are mingling with one another while the braver ones, or the conscientious ones or maybe the merely curious, they’re taking advantage of the fact that, say, Vincent D’Onofrio is sitting at that little table over there, available for an interview, it’s just a matter of you working up the nerve to go sit down and introduce yourself to him and the woman he’s with and whip out your tape recorder.

You could just walk right up to Benjamin Bratt, standing there in a sharp suit, and he would have to talk to you (as opposed to, say, my encounter just that afternoon with Ben Affleck, whom I spotted standing alone outside a store in Beverly Hills. “How’s it going?” I said. Ben: “What good can come of this?” He said this not aloud but with his eyes).

At the parties, though, the star-stalking is sanctioned. So there’s Ben Bratt, and Vincent D’Onofrio, and Jonathan Cake of “Inconceivable.” There’s Steve Guttenberg, I’m sure for some good reason. There’s Jason Lee of NBC’s new comedy hopeful “My Name Is Earl.” And the women, where are the actresses of NBC? Standing around last night, it felt as if the network did all its development and forgot to look for the next Jennifer Aniston or Evangeline Lilly.

For Brownfield’s notebook, go to calendarlive.com/tca.