STUDIO CITY, CA–Murtz Jaffer, your Tiki torch has been snuffed.
Had to vote my old Survivor pal off the island at this photo op set up on Day One of the TCA Summer 2011 press tour Tuesday. The Reality Obsessed star would have enjoyed today’s TCA Studio Day session at CBS Radford, the storied TV lot which is home now to Big Brother and many other shows and once housed such gems as The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Newhart, Rhoda, Hill Street Blues, Get Smart and Gilligan’s Island.
CBS invited press tour early birds to interview a few of their biggest Twitter stars: @LLCoolJ (NCIS: Los Angeles), who has an amazing 1.49 million followers, @PauleyP a.k.a. Pauley Perrette (NCIS), who has 127,000 followers, Survivor host @JeffProbst, who live tweets during episodes to 132,000 followers and two of the @GoodWifeWriters, Meredith Averill and Corinne Brinkerhoff, who tweet to 6,110 followers. Hey, that’s 5,500 more than I have @BillBriouxTV (where I’m tweeting the current press tour at #TCAs11).
Probst says the tweeting meant nothing to CBS at first but they began to dig it when the show seemed to gain (likely younger) fans as a result. He’s heard from viewers who used to DVR the show but now say they sometimes catch up just by reading his live tweets–which sounds actually counter productive if you’re buying ads on CBS.
Adorable Pauley, who talks so fast she winded the transcriber, admits she’s a tad obsessed with connecting with fans via twitter and does sometimes ask herself if this is how she’s going to be spending the rest of her life. She was worried she might one day withdraw from society like Betty Page.
LL Cool J was the coolest member of the panel. When one twitterphobe from Philly asked if all this tweeting wasn’t contributing to the general slide in spelling and grammar, LL (or “Todd” to his friends) replied, “If grammar is your pet peeve, stay away from social media.”
He also dropped this Mcluhanesque beauty: “Privacy will be the new fame.” The statement seemed to stun the room; Probst did a whole Town Hall number on it.
“I like how you held the moment,’ he told Cool J, who looked like he might revoke the “Todd” thing. “You didn’t look on either side if somebody tried to interrupt. You knew you landed something. ‘Just
everybody shut up for a minute. I landed something big. Privacy will be the new thing.'”
He got Cool J to say it again. “That’s what he Tweets all day,” said Probst. “You do find yourself going, ‘Shit, that’s pretty cool.'”
And then he snuffed out the torch: “What does it mean, though?”
What it means is that LL Cool J has more than 10 times as many followers as Jeff Probst.
