When South met East

CBS dances alone ... for now

Will CBS jump on the Hulu bandwagon?

Such a move would seem to make sense. Hulu already has ABC, NBC and Fox on its service, not to mention tons of library product. It doesn't make any money, but then again what online video site does? At least by becoming the online home for television content, Hulu has a chance to succeed.

Certainly the heat will be on CBS, which has been criticized by Wall Street for its pricey $1.8-billion acquisition of online portal CNET last year. CNET was to become the cornerstone of CBS's Internet strategy. Its own video site, TV.com, which looks remarkably similar to Hulu, is growing but does not have nearly as much product or buzz as Hulu. CBS has had tremendous success with its online coverage of the NCAA basketball tournament, but that happens only once a year.

CBS' issue with Hulu is exclusivity. CBS' strategy is to put its content all over the Web while keeping control of advertising. By partnering with Hulu, CBS would have to allow Hulu to act as distributor and salesman. In the wake of the Disney deal, CBS said it believes "controlling our own rights...in all media preserves its value in a multi-platform system."

 Another issue for CBS may be more philosophical. While Disney, News Corp. and NBC Universal have lots of partnerships with rivals, CBS has generally embraced a go-it-alone strategy under its chief executive, Leslie Moonves, with the exception of its joint venture with Time Warner's Warner Bros. in the CW network. But that was out of necessity and face-saving.

So for now, CBS will likely sit tight. Joining Hulu, however, would mean acknowledging that the CNET deal hasn't panned out as hoped, and that might be a tough pill for Moonves and his Internet guru Quincy Smith. Furthermore, its ratings are on the rise, a claim no other broadcast network can make this season, so it doesn't need to rush to a deal for defensive purposes. And, as Broadcasting & Cable's Claire Atkinson noted, CBS may not want to alienate cable operators by joining up with Hulu. CBS counts more heavily on compensation from cable operators in return for carrying its TV stations than rivals NBC, Fox and ABC.

But ultimately if Hulu's popularity continues to explode, CBS will likely have to go play nice with everybody else.

--Joe Flint

Photo: Moonves by Nicholas Roberts / AFP/Getty Images

Talking with Rob Thomas about the increasingly fun 'Party Down'

There’s usually a fair amount of angst this time of year in the TV world, as word of cancellations starts to leak out.

Here’s one bit of good news: “Party Down” (9:30 p.m. Friday, Starz; three and a half stars) is probably coming back next year. (Clips and full episodes from the show can be found here; previous stories on the show can be found here.)

Rob Thomas, one of the show’s co-creators, said he’d been hearing good things from Starz, the pay cable network that commissioned the show about Los Angeles creative types who moonlight as catering waiters.

“All signs are saying that we will get another year,” said Thomas, who said that an announcement should come in the next few weeks.

“Party Down,” which premiered in March, has developed into one of the most reliably enjoyable comedies on television, and its cast has the kind of easy chemistry that most new broadcast network comedies notably lack these days.

Adam Scott manages to give his character, a failed actor named Henry, a sense of pathos but a wry kindness as well. Kyle (Ryan Hansen) can be quite stupid when he’s not exhibiting his self-absorption, yet he’s never intentionally cruel, and Hansen somehow makes Kyle’s overconfidence endearing.

Though Ken Marino is talented, his character, Party Down manager Ron Donald, is a little too frantically needy at times; mellower scenes, like the recent one in which he hung out with some rappers at a Sweet 16 party, suit Marino’s subtle skills more.

Thomas describes Constance (Jane Lynch) as someone who is “pleased as punch” by her life, which consists of miniscule parts in TV dramas. Constance thinks she’s a success, and she’s so hopeful and energetic that no one has the heart to tell her otherwise. And though the failed screenwriter is a Hollywood cliche, the withering, geeky sarcasm of sci-fi auteur Roman (Martin Starr) is tempered by his naïve crush on aspiring actress Casey (Lizzie Caplan).

One thing that’s clear is that “Party Down’s” writers are not interested in eviscerating its characters and simply mocking their lives, which teeter on the lower rungs of the L.A. food chain. Though the humor is dark and the career prospects for these characters are dim, the show’s well-paced stories are shot through with compassion and even sweetness.

“Each member of our team has a different stomach for bleakness,” Thomas said. Co-creator John Enbom, who runs the show on a day-to-day basis, “has more stomach for bleakness than the rest of us, but at the same time, he’s not a hopelessly bleak guy.”

Caplan, who also had a prominent role in the first season of “True Blood,” was the last person cast in the show, and she was “the biggest wild card in the bunch,” Thomas noted.

But the writers quickly seized on the great chemistry between Caplan and Adam Scott, and “took things a little more in that direction.”

“We knew going in that we were, very intentionally, not going to play the ‘will they or won’t they?’ card” with Henry and Casey, said Thomas. “We wanted to tip that on its head” by having them get together quickly and then figure out what they mean to each other.

But Caplan’s casting did change the dynamic between Henry and Casey a bit. Originally, the character was going to be more hopeful than the often dour Henry, and the writers originally saw their differing outlooks as an obstacle to their relationship. But as Thomas noted, Casey is “equally if not more misanthropic [than Henry]. It allowed them to mesh,” he said.

The only catch to the positive “Party Down” picture is that the Season 1 cast signed one-year contracts, not the multi-year contracts that are typical in television.

“All the actors had a really good time, and it’s a pretty happy place to work. I’m hopeful we can sign them up for another year,” Thomas said. “The chances are good.” We want everyone back, we hope we can get them, but I can’t guarantee that."

Before “Party Down,” Thomas (who’s also the creator of ABC’s “Cupid”) was best known as the man behind the cult teen drama “Veronica Mars.” And while plans for a film version of that TV show have stalled, according to Thomas, he’s been able to give several cast members of that show work as “Party Down” cast members or guest stars.

Kristen Bell of “Veronica Mars” will play the similarly named Veronica Moon in the May 22 season finale of the show. Veronica is a former Party Down employee and the leader of Valhalla Catering, which, aside from her, is composed entirely of extremely handsome men.

Thomas and co-creator Dan Etheridge got the idea from a gay wedding they attended, and other members of the cast and writing team have drawn on their experiences as well (Actor Paul Rudd, one of the show's creators, served time as a deejay for a firm called “You Should Be Dancing,” believe it or not). And members of the “Party Down” team have been “calling in favors,” Thomas said, to snag guest stars; Scott, he said, had worked with J.K. Simmons and Breckin Meyer, who ended up appearing the April 24 episode as a Hollywood mogul and a hot-shot actor.

For Thomas, the show also allows him to revisit his past as a musician in Austin, Texas, the kind of place where delaying the onset of reality is a way of life.

“It’s like ‘Logan’s Run,’ in a way,” he says of that era of his life. “If you’re playing in a band and you’ve hit 30, the window has, in most respects, closed.”

A few other tidbits from my interview with Thomas:

He would like to get Steve Gutenberg, who played a recurring character on "Veronica Mars," as a Season 2 "Party Down" guest: ""He's as funny with his own self-image as anyone I've ever met before. He behaves as I wish I would if I were Steve Gutenberg. But I wouldn't have the chutzpah to do it. He lives a persona that isn't actually him. He'll say, 'I'll get my assistant to do that.' He doesn't have an assistant. He plays the role of Steve Gutenberg. If we asked him to play himself, he might."He also wants to get Paula Marshall, with whom he worked on the first version of "Cupid," as a Season 2 guest star. The show has a very tight shooting schedule -- each episode is shot over four days in one location, and there was only two days in post-production for each episode. As a result of the very compressed shooting and post-production schedule, the more ad-libbed moments from cast members often didn't make it into the final cuts of the episodes (Thomas estimated that what you see on screen is about 95 percent scripted). "If there was one complaint the actors had," it was about their more improvisational stuff ending up on the cutting room floor, but "you will see more ad libs in Season 2," Thomas said. You'll probably only see scenes that take place at or around the parties, with rare exceptions. Due to logistical issues, it's hard to shoot scenes in other locations, though there is one "away from a party" scene in Friday's episode of the show. In the early stages of setting up "Party Down," Thomas encountered an actor who had been in national TV ads, someone that Thomas and his wife had become friendly with. He started explaining the "Party Down" idea to this acquaintance -- who was at that moment working as a cater-waiter at a book release party Thomas was attending: "There was no way to back out of the story. I tried to get out of it as quickly as I could. It was very awkward." J.K. Simmons would like to come back and do the show again, so the writers have talked about having the Party Down crew work the movie release party for the Edgar Allen Poe movie that Simmons' character, a ruthless movie producer, is working on. Enrico Colantoni, who was a "Veronica Mars" cast member and appeared in the "Party Down" pilot, "would kill to do the show again. We talked about his character divorcing his wife and playing for a [crappy] cover band at one of the parties."On whether any of the Party Down employees will ever make it in the entertainment business: "We fully expect Kyle to be a huge star in 'The Palisades' or some show like it. And Henry secretly knows, 'Of course -- this guy'" will make it. Regarding a "Veronica Mars" movie, the chances of that now appear slim. Thomas said the economy has hurt its chances and a Warner Bros marketing survey did not apparently indicate sufficient interest. "I would love to do it. Both of us [he and Bell] would love to do it." But over the past six months, the momentum the project appears to have been lost. He's thought about continuing "Veronica Mars" as a comic-book series but "I only want to do it if I'm writing it. And finding the time is the tricky part." Some might consider this spoilery, so skip out if you don't want a few words about the season finale: At some point in the past, Kristen Bell's character, Veronica Moon, "did something terrible to Ron Donald."

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