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The CW Shows Some LegPlus: tipsy scenes from the Fox party.

By Troy PattersonPosted Friday, May 18, 2007, at 5:52 PM ET

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I ran into some Gilmore Girls fans upset that the CW had not given the show a dignified series finale. One fan, asked if he was excited about the new Fox show from Gilmore auteur Amy Sherman-Palladino, said, "I was until I saw the clips." Allegedly a comedy, The Return of Jezebel James stars Parker Posey as a book editor with a fertility problem and the redhead from Six Feet Under as her kid sister/surrogate womb.

I asked Ligouri himself whether—given the widely accepted idea that the upfront market itself is growing obsolete—parties like this would have to disappear. Maybe, he said, "but we'll be pretty grey before that happens." I chose to ignore the fact that Ligouri is salt-and-pepper, handsomely so.

Trying to leave at a reasonable hour, I was detained by a friend who turned me around so we could discuss whether gins-and-tonic is the correct plural. We fell in with some junior ad people who'd spent the whole week entertaining a client from out of town. They hadn't seen her in a little while and had just started trying—amid discussing the evident shabbiness of Fox's Terminator adaptation, The Sarah Connor Chronicles—to get her on the phone. I excused myself.

In the men's room, two women in wrap dresses were waiting for the stall. The guy at the urinal adjacent to mine struck up a conversation by mentioning the terrible trouble he was having with his zipper. Leaving, I was spotted by a guy wearing a buttery-tan suit similar to mine. "Dude, you're fucking my shit up," he said in all chummy good humor. "You go over there, and I'll go over here."

I went over there, where the concern about the lost client had elevated to Code Orange. It had been a couple hours since they'd seen her. It was her second trip to New York. Despite the distraction, the ad kids made subtle arguments about the long-term viability of Back to You, a Fox comedy starring Kelsey Grammer and Patricia Heaton as feuding news anchors. "What happens when those two start wanting $2 million an episode?"

A disco band played to a heaving dance floor. Was that the Pussycat Dolls I heard? The ad kids forecasted the impact of the DVR, yelled genially about the problems of monetizing Web video, hoped it was brilliant of NBC to move Friday Night Lights to Friday night. I definitely nattered on about next season's tough-girl trend—something for everyone from Mary Wollstonecraft to Russ Meyer!—and exactly how wicked awesome the full Bionic Woman pilot had been. We made a community bonded by television and everything it sells, from dreams to Vitajex. When they finally got in touch with their client, she was back at the hotel, in bed alone, watching Grey's Anatomy.