Musings on Los Angeles, PaleyFest, and Nice Boys

Wow, what a week! I do so enjoy visiting Los Angeles and getting up close and personal with our favorite shows, but it’s nice to be home again. We’ll be reporting more from the PaleyFest panels later in the week (in case you missed the live reports on Twitter), so in the meantime here are some random thoughts on L.A., PaleyFest, and the week in general.

• If you have the opportunity to attend a Paley event, do it! They’re well-organized and fairly intimate in size, so it feels like you’re sitting in a big living room with other fans. The moderators have prepared questions, but the fans do get a chance to ask their own during the Q&A session.
• Be sure your camera takes good photos without the flash. No flash photography is allowed during the panels, which we knew going in, but what we didn’t expect is for my camera to die completely and BethAnne’s to insist on using the flash. I think she managed to get one decent photo, from The Mentalist.
• Get a GPS unit. Bring your own, rent one with your car (we used Budget; nice Grand Prix for cheap!), or buy one while you’re out here. We used Google Maps on my phone a lot, but it doesn’t have the surface street feature, so we ended up on the freeway a lot. And by “freeway”, we mean “parking lot”. Also, I have a horrible sense of direction out here, so we ended up touring a lot more of L.A. than we intended. Sorry, BethAnne!
• The Warner Bros. VIP tour is still the best one for the money. We toured the sets of Chuck, The Mentalist, and The Big Bang Theory, plus a bunch of back lots. Everyone is done filming for the season, so we could roam around pretty freely. Be sure to tell your tour guide if you’re a fan of a particular WB show; they’ll do their best to get you on the set!
• Half the fun of PaleyFest is meeting up with fellow fans and bloggers, including Whores and Addicts.
• Owain Yeoman is way hotter in person than he is as Agent Rigsby on The Mentalist. Also, he’s hilarious. Definitely Nice Boy material.

I also wanted to mention, for fans of The Ex List, that Elizabeth Reaser is in Vancouver right now to film the next Twilight movie, New Moon. LaineyGossip.com has some exclusive photos of her arriving at the airport there. I’m not a Twilight fan, but it’s nice to have her involved with something so successful. Here’s hoping it brings her back to the small screen soon!