After Two Years Online, ATX TV Festival Schedules a Weekend of Must-See TV

ATX TV Festival founders Emily Gipson and Caitlin McFarland (Photo by John Anderson)

In TV, shows get preempted all the time. American Idol skipped a week because of the Oscars. AEW Dynamite moved from Wednesday to Friday last June for the NBA playoffs. So when the ATX TV Festival had to shift online in 2020 because of COVID, it was kind of in keeping with the medium. Of course, no one expected the in-person event would be on hold for two years, but now the celebration of all things broadcast and streaming is back in a theatre near you, with much of the delayed programming back on the schedule for the return to in-person programming for 2022.

So, that means all the pressure's off for the festival bookers, right?

"One would think that that would help," said Emily Gipson.

"Although," Caitlin McFarland added, "hilariously, some of the people who were confirmed then aren't coming, and some of the people who weren't confirmed then are coming."

As festival founders and co-executive directors, Gipson and McFarland saw the event through two online years, and now are marshalling it back into a physical space for season 11. The remit of the festival remains the same: a place of discovery of TV mixing panels, retrospectives, and new shows. However, when it started in 2012, the TV landscape was completely different: The networks still ruled the ratings, sweeps week was still a big deal, and Netflix only had one original series (anyone remember Lilyhammer?). The duo deliberately picked June for the festival because TV was effectively on hiatus, making ATX what they still call "a summer camp for TV fans and professionals." Not that everyone approved. McFarland said, "People would get mad at Emily and I that we were in June. They were like, 'TV's over in June. Nothing's on, it's just USA new shows.' And now look at the number of shows that premiere a wild week in April, maybe late May."

However, that's only opened up programming opportunities. This year the festival gets a panel preview of season 4 of HBO's Westworld, as well as the world premiere of AMC's new Navajo Nation crime drama, Dark Wings. There's still an element of reruns, with special retrospectives and reunions for fan favorites like Scrubs, Parenthood, and Justified. Gipson said, "We talk about balance all the time, of past, present, and premiere when it comes to screenings, and in conversations between industry and consumer." Not that it's a clear line. "We find that the industry that comes are consumers, and the consumers that come are interested in the industry."

In 2020, the festival had barely nine weeks to shift to virtual programming after South by Southwest was canceled. McFarland said, "Looking back there was something very cool about the first year, because people were willing to try anything. … There was no downside, because if we tried and failed people would be, 'Well, at least you tried.'"

The first decision was what to do with all the big anniversary retrospectives: 20 years of Scrubs, and a decade each of Justified and Parenthood. The answer was to give the panelists the option of being online or waiting for the next in-person event. McFarland recalled, "They all said, 'We want to be together in Austin.'" The delays mean that the festival missed the big anniversaries, but in some ways it's made the events more timely. In the case of the Scrubs reunion, if the festival had gone ahead as planned, then showrunner and ATX year-one veteran Bill Lawrence would have been deep in development on a new series and would be missing the festival. That show? Oh, only Ted Lasso. "That was a very COVID-discovered show," McFarland said. On the Parenthood side, "Dax Shepard is a bigger deal than he was three years ago when we were first trying – and weirdly, he wasn't coming to the reunion before, and he is now, which is great." Add on the fact that this will be the first time many of the stars and panelists will have seen each other since the pandemic started. "I think it's going to be very emotional," McFarland said, "and it's already very emotional."

Virtual year one was all on YouTube, with no screenings but a lot of live and prerecorded conversations. Year two, the festival went behind a virtual paywall, allowing them to host premiere screenings as well as panels. However, it was also a time for the team to plan ahead for what they wanted the festival to be going forward: a year-round project, with the launch membership program, as well as hosting virtual screenings, "and we've started doing happy hours in person," said McFarland.

2022 means bringing all those loyal fans, who have only grown in number over the pandemic, back together for in-person screenings, and that's where McFarland sees the real purpose of the festival. "It's about discovery and community," she said. "It's standing in line and talking to a stranger about your favorite show, or saddling up to the bar, seeing who's there, talking about what you've seen."

Of course, not everything got better over the pandemic, with the loss of the Alamo Ritz as one of their core venues. However, the pair also saw this as an opportunity to really think about the schedule. They weren't pulling back, but instead viewing it all through the growing realization that, in earlier years, they'd sometimes overbooked and ended up splitting the audience. "We'd have a full theatre and then 30 people in all the other things," McFarland said, "and that wasn't fair to some of the programming."

But this year, they're confident that it's the right size, and presenting the right eclectic mix of shows that people love already or are eager to start bingeing. Gipson said, "When you hear somebody say, 'I'm so excited about [Euphoria star and ATX TV Breakthrough Award honoree] Sydney Sweeney and Baron and Toluca,' which is an independent pilot, I'm like, 'Huh? That's great!' We're all TV fans. Don't try to guess anyone's shows, ever."

ATX TV Festival, June 2-5. Tickets and info at atxfestival.com.