Duchovny, Baldwin share thoughts on TV

THR: Alec, do you feel somehow unfulfilled because you can’t swear on “30 Rock”?

Alec Baldwin: You know, I said a lifetime’s worth prior to doing this show, so I have to say no. There is something challenging about doing a show clean, but Tina (Fey) and everyone who writes it knows how to get right up to that line without crossing it. But as I’m getting older, I find that I don’t really like curse words.

Danson: If a show is good, it really doesn’t matter what the characters can say, what they can’t say or whether people are watching it on cable or broadcast.

THR: But the fact that there is an FX, an AMC, a Showtime, an HBO for shows that don’t fit into the restrictive broadcast parameters has to be good in terms of inspiring greater quality and variety than TV ever has before offered, no?

Cranston: No question. It’s been overused that we’re in another Golden Age, but I think we are. The bar has been set really high. I don’t think a show whose lead character is cooking crystal meth in the heartland could ever be considered for a broadcast network. So cable is opening up a lot of avenues for story lines that have long been closed.

Baldwin: I once pitched a show to (Fox president of entertainment) Kevin Reilly. I told him I wanted to bring back space travel on TV, like “Star Trek,” but that I wanted to have sex in the space capsule and get really adult. In the show, the space capsule will have left Earth, and because of global warming, the Earth is dying. I’m the commander of this ship and I say, “We can never go back!” So Reilly is sitting there listening very patiently and finally says, “Well, we’re never going to do that.”

THR: Do you think the reason they rejected “Sex Trek” is because it’s way less expensive to book another reality show?

Neil Patrick Harris: Actually, I wonder if the explosion of original cable shows came as a direct result of reality programs taking up so many of the networks’ slots — or if it’s just a matter of technology allowing digital cable to program stuff on Channel 164.

THR: MARK, do you ever feel shackled by the creative limitations of working in broadcast as far as situations and language and all of that?

Mark Harmon: I think you just have to be fine with wherever and whatever you are. I’m on a successful series. What matters, what’s nice and gratifying, is that people are watching us. It’s funny, I was once on a show where if you changed one word the writers would come after you and tell you they could find any actor to say those same words. And this was a show heralded as really good television. Eventually, we’ll probably be doing sex in outer space.

Wilson: I would love to have sex in outer space.

Duchovny: You know, the first time I saw the Fox show “Cops,” I thought, “F---, that’s how a drunk person really acts.” And as an actor watching these reality shows, even though they’ve become less real as time has gone on and more edited and pushed, it still lights a fire under you because you see that there’s a palpable realism to it.

Harris: It’s been honed so much now that I sense there’s a reality style of acting.

Baldwin: Reality shows work because of the changing arc of the relationship between actors and their audience. Long ago, people wanted actors who were everything they were not: gracious, beautiful, elegant, sophisticated — people they could look up to. In the 1960s and ’70s, that evolved into the audience wanting actors to be more like them. Now we’ve reached the point of “No, no, no, we don’t want to see actors on TV. We want it to be us on TV. We’ll be the stars.”

Spade: Whenever I turn one of these shows on, I get pulled in for far longer than I think I will.

Duchovny: No, David, that’s your security gate camera you’ve been watching.

Spade: Really? You know, as entertainment, it’s not bad.

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