ABC’s all-star party shines a false light

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

You are standing at the bar, next to Heather Graham. Continue to be indifferent; it is your indifference, after all, that has brought her and her coterie of publicist-girlfriend-protectors drifting into your orbit. In observing this coterie for the last hour you have noticed that Heather is mostly approached by women with tape recorders, while the men of the press leer but keep a fearful distance from her circle. Probably every TV reporter/critic guy here is afraid of Heather Graham, afraid of her beauty, but you, you are not. As you have made clear, in both body language and general mien, you are indifferent. You’ve had your back to her all this time -- brilliant! And now here she is to your right, practically at your elbow. She is in your space. The space you have established at this bar, the space you have created. You could talk to her, of course, talk to her about her comedy pilot -- but talking, and pilots, aren’t they so not the point right now?

Sipping your martini, indifferently, smoking, indifferently, you gaze now over your shoulder with slight amusement and creeping horror at the conversation Heather is apparently going to have with that judge guy Bruno from “Dancing With the Stars.” He is talking her ear off, this Bruno, this motor-mouthed dancer, and, you are quite sure, boring her to ballroom death.

But then of course you do lose her (nice strategy, indifference), and Bruno’s gone too, and you wake up and it’s just the ABC all-star party. The ABC all-star party is like all the other network all-star parties during TCA week in one crucial way: It’s where a person who covers television actually think he’s meeting Heather Graham in a bar.

The networks subtly set up this fiction; they are evil this way. Selling their fall product, they hold parties in big bar/nightclub-type places that are rented out for the occasion, and because they’re rented out they’re not really that crowded, and the drinks are free (thus eliminating the always-awkward retrieval of the smaller bill from the wallet while in midconversation with Teri Hatcher).

And so you get this unique co-mingling of the species, the networks suggesting -- subtly, not out loud -- that the guy on the TV beat from Cleveland or Cincinnati will not only get to chat with Nicollette Sheridan from “Desperate Housewives” but hey, who knows, maybe go home with her if things work out that way.

It’s equal opportunity, of course. At the CBS party, I watched a female reporter idly stroke her upper arm as she held a tape recorder at “CSI” costar George Eads’ face. They were seated in the courtyard at the Hammer Museum, Eads was having a beer, and that tape recorder, let me tell you, it was just a prop in our little drama.

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