This time of year I would normally be heading to Austin, TX for the annual ATX Television Festival. However, like last year, the pandemic has caused this TV camp to once again be a virtual event this year. Last year’s “ATX From The Couch” was a free three-day event that closely resembled the traditional festival quite a bit, with a YouTube stream for each day’s programming that played the panels back-to-back, along with interstersials, live updates, and other fun footage. The folks I normally attend in person with and I had a live Zoom feed each day so we could watch everything together.
The folks behind the festival have changed things up a lot this year for Season 10. Instead of the traditional 3-4 day event, the festival is being stretched across ten days (because it’s the tenth season), with mostly evening programming during the weekdays, and day-long programming on the weekends. The event also requires a paid ticket this year. Instead of one live YouTube stream per day, the ticket grants you access to the website/app to watch the individual events/panels as well as other VOD content that is added daily. This content includes episodes of shows that will be covered in panels, additional panels, and other original interviews and shorts. While some of this season’s programming can be watched on demand, the live events are only available as they air live. The non-live programming fall into two categories—Limited Run events can be viewed until 2am CT the day tey premiere=, while Festival Run programming will be available until the end of the festival.
Today Season 10 kicked off with the first of ten live info sessions, known as The Daily, at noon CT. Then the festival officially kicked off with the Friday Night Lights Pep Rally retrospective at 5pm CT, followed by the Opening Night Event, a 20th Anniversary panel for Degrassi: The Next Generation. The day closed out with the traditional TV Trivia night.
The Daily
Festival co-founders Caitlin McFarland & Emily Gipson were joined by festival directors Jennifer Morgan and Laura Kincaid to welcome attendees to this year’s event from the balcony of the Intercontinental Stephen F Austin hotel, which is normally headquarters for the festival. They gave a rundown of how this unique version of the event will take place, and gave some previews of what attendees have to look forward to. They treated it as a mini “Welcome to TV Camp” panel, and said that while the majority of programming is pre-taped, they still plan to do lots of live and unexpected things to help maintain that live, spontaneous feeling we get at the physical festival. They also told folks to make sure they have Zoom installed because there will be pop-up events and chances to interact.
ATX TV + FNL Pep Rally: 10 Festivals Later
Friday Night Lights has always been a big part of this event…it’s the show the festival was built upon. In this 90 minute program, festival co-creators Emily and Caitlin took a look back at the many FNL-related events that have been a part of the festival over the past 9 years. They shared stories and clips, brought in some fun special guests to reminisce, and had some pre-recorded messages from other cast members. Some of the cast members participating in the chat and the Friday Night Flashbacks interviews included Louanne Stephens, Zach Gilford, Brad Leland, Scott Porter, Stacey Oristano, Derek Phillips, and Mae Whitman.
Opening Night Event Degrassi: The Next Generation 20th Anniversary – Sponsored by Tubi
Festival directors Jennifer Morgan and Laura Kincaid opened up the panel with a short introduction. Then moderator Louis Peitzman brought out the first group of folks for the Zoom panel—co-creator/EP Linda Schuyler, executive producer Stephen Stohn, writer/EP Aaron Martin, and Stefan Brogren (“Archie ‘Snake’ Simpson”). They discussed some of the franchise’s more controversial storylines, and the different reactions to them in the U.S. and Canada. Then some more cast members joined in the conversation—Shane Kippel (“Gavin ‘Spinner’ Mason”), Laurn Collins (“Paige Michalchuk”), Daniel Clark (“Sean Cameron”), Jake Epstein (“Craig Manning”), Andrea Lewis (“Hazel Aden”), and Christina Schmidt (“Terri McGreggor”). They discussed their auditions, characters, storylines, what it was like doing the mall tours for fans, and more. Then three additional late addition cast members joined the session—Aislinn Paul (“Clare Edwards”), Luke Bilyk (“Drew Torres”) and Munro Chambers (“Eli Goldsworthy”)—and shared lots of stories about the working on the show, the storylines and more. I never watched TNG, but had seen some of the original series. Overall it was a pretty interesting and fun discussion.
ATX TV Trivia – Sponsored by Hulu
Last year’s virtual TV trivia allowed about 200 attendees to join in the fun. This time, 8 lucky attendees were selected to play on camera live, in two groups of 4, bracket-style. The format was similar to the ’90s TV Trivia Night event I participated in a few months ago (see video below), except this time the main theme for the questions was Pride Month. To help celebrate, there were also some pre-recorded guest appearances by the stars of some shows available on Hulu—including Love, Victor, The Bold Type, Superstore and more. These celebs tried to answer some of the same trivia questions as the contestants. It was a fun time, but the event had some technical difficulties causing most folks to lose the live stream halfway through. Fortunately, I was one of the few lucky people who were able to watch the entire event. However, the folks in the chat found a way to still have fun, turning it into a game of Jeopardy, trying to guess the questions from the answers that we were posting. That said, I hope they can work out any issues to make sure this doesn’t happen again during any of the other upcoming live events.
Here is the ’90s Trivia Night event from back in March if you want to see what the format was like and test your own knowledge:
I certainly won’t be able to watch and cover every single piece of programming at this 10-day event, but I’ll try to post some of the highlights from what I’ve seen over the next 9 days. Programming for the festival generally falls into three categories, current/upcoming shows, older shows/reunions, and topical panels. The festival organizers usually do a great job of creating some industry- or topic-themed panels with attendees that are already there for other shows. When I’m at the physical festival, I generally favor the programming for the specific TV shows, and also attend some of the less political/social justice themed topical panels. There are a lot of these more issue-driven panels in the programming schedule that other folks may be interested in—I may mention them in future posts, but don’t plan to cover them in detail.
Virtual Festival Badges and Day Passes for Season 10 are still available. To purchase a Badge, Pass, or learn more, visit atxfestival.com/attend.
