There is no denying it: Comic-Con has become the place to break news and make news about broadcast and cable programming. Here's a download including news on the Battlestar Galactica finale and the thunderous ovation fans gave the cast at their Comic-Con session.
Heroes
NBC really made clear the importance of Comic-Con on Saturday when, during a session for Season 3 of Heroes, it screened the first half of the show's two-hour season premiere in the giant-sized Hall H at the San Diego Convention Center. I'm told the hall has 6,500 seats, meaning it holds more people than Radio City Music Hall - and almost everyone in the room instantly spread word about what they had seen via text, Twitter or social network. (For Heroes spoilers, go here.)
From their homes across the country, members of the Television Critics Association began buzzing in outrage. TCA had ended its Summer 2008 tour with a day devoted to NBC programming just five days before the Heroes mega-event at ComicCon and had not been offered so much as a clip. Surely, NBC was aware of the fireworks near the end of the Summer 2007 tour, when ABC Entertainment president Steve McPherson was attacked onstage for allowing the producers of Lost to break news about their show that very same day at ComicCon. (The two events overlapped last year.) As it happened, the "big news" that day was that Harold Perrineau (the actor who portrayed Michael) would be returning to the show this past season after being off it for one year. In hindsight: Big deal.
Last year's Lost reveal was chump change compared to NBC's dramatic Heroes stunt this weekend at the Con. Certainly, I get why NBC wanted to create a sensation here: There is no better place to start a tsunami of support for a show, especially a geek fave like Heroes. But I don't think it would have taken the edge off the Con job had NBC screened the same hour for 200-plus critics on closed-circuit a few days earlier at the Beverly Hilton Hotel.
Doctor Who and Torchwood
There were many other news-making sneak-peaks and previews throughout the Con. On the opening morning, BBC America presented a first-look at this year's eagerly anticipated Doctor Who Christmas special featuring the return of the Cybermen. And in the session that followed, the network announced that it had picked up domestic rights for Season 3 of the sexually super-charged science-fiction adventure Torchwood, a spin-off of Doctor Who. (How sexy is Torchwood, you ask? As they took the stage, series leads John Barrowman, Gareth David-Lloyd and Naoko Mori made clear that anything goes on that show. The thousands of fans in attendance went wild.)
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