It's press tour time!

For a fourth-place network, NBC has a funny way of dominating the news as I get ready for the start of the Television Critics Association press tour. The day before the summer tour six months ago, Ben Silverman announced he was quitting. (Later, his successor Angela Bromstad inadvertently gave us a lot of laughs when she suggested "I think that this has always been Ben's plan" to leave with the network doing much worse than when he arrived.)

And, of course, as critics like me were getting ready to go home and pack for today's start of the winter tour, news broke that NBC might be moving Jay Leno back to late night. (The picture above is Leno in disguise as a reporter for NBC's exec session at the summer '08 tour.)

So I've been a little too preoccupied to pen an update to my traditional guide to press tour, which means if you don't know the drill by now, you'll have to go read the old version.

For practical purposes, I'll be doing a lot of blogging and/or tweeting (depending on time, mood, etc.) about the sessions that I'm attending. Sometimes, I'll be saving material for a story down the road, or otherwise occupied doing a one-on-one interview, or busy writing reviews of the many, many shows that are (as always) inconveniently debuting during the winter tour. So I can only write as much as I can write.

And, as always, my actual blogging about what's airing on TV is going to suffer while I'm in California. If I've seen a show in advance (like "Chuck" or "Friday Night Lights" or the "How I Met Your Mother" 100th episode), I'll be writing something about it to go up after the episode ends. But for a lot of shows, you may have to wait a while, or just accept that, say, the ABC Wednesday comedies are going to be skipped for a week. I'm limited by time, time zone, and by the speed of the hotel's internet connection. So as with most things press tour, we'll be playing things by ear.

I'll be flying for a good chunk of today, then attending visits to the sets of "FlashForward" and "Community," so don't expect a lot out of me until CBS' day at the hotel begins tomorrow.

See you on the wrong coast...