Spring forward with daylight saving time, Philly’s St. Patty’s Day parade guide | Morning Newsletter

If you feel like you slept in longer than usual today, don’t be alarmed, it’s daylight saving time. Moving forward, in today’s Q&A, we’re chatting with our TV critic Ellen Gray. She’s recently returned from an exhausting conference many entertainment reporters attend that gives journalists all kinds of opportunities to chat with TV stars, producers, and executives as well as unique access that can lead to a plethora of stories for the year.

— Tauhid Chappell, Aubrey Nagle (morningnewsletter@philly.com)

Each week we go behind the scenes with one of our reporters or editors to discuss their work and the challenges they face along the way. This week we chat with our TV critic Ellen Gray, who recently returned from the Television Critics Association’s winter press tour, which puts TV professionals and stars through a gauntlet of interviews over the course of about two weeks.

There is so. much. TV. to watch these days. How do you prioritize what you watch, let alone what to cover for the Inquirer?

With difficulty. The good thing about there being so much is that I can’t possibly watch it all, much less cover it, so I can pick my spots. The easy calls are the series we already know readers care about — something like Game of Thrones or This Is Us — meaning they’ll have a frame of reference if I want to look closely at some aspect of the show. Having analytics is hugely helpful — we know that online readers are very interested, for instance, in The Goldbergs — but I also pay attention to email and phone calls. Sunday Inquirer readers seem to watch a lot of British and foreign-language TV (as do I), and I try to keep that in mind.

You may have noticed we don’t run a lot of full reviews of new shows any more. I try to give people a sense of what to expect in the weekly highlights, but with DVRs and streaming, people aren’t watching TV the same way they used to, and it’s more fun to try to start a conversation about something they may already have seen than it is to tell them why they should or shouldn’t watch a show that’s not yet on.

You recently spent a few weeks in L.A. for the Television Critics Association’s winter press tour. What was it like, and what did you take away from it all?

It’s this strange event that was long ago dubbed “a death march with cocktails,” where reporters get face time with TV stars, producers, and executives. There are eight to 10 hours a day of press conferences, which often end with scrums in which, say, 15 or more of us are crowded around someone like George Clooney, trying to get a quote that the 200 other people in the room don’t have. Many evenings include parties, where more informal interviews can take place with some of the same people, and others. Clooney, who was there to promote Hulu’s Catch-22, told me something that will probably figure in a story I was collecting string for throughout the trip.

The first thing I look for is the local angle. Is there a star from Philly? Did this producer go to Penn or Temple or Drexel?

If there’s no local angle, I try to find the people who might interest readers. It’s a crazy way to go about it, but I can’t think of another event where one day I might be talking to Outlander’s Caitriona Balfe about women directors and the female gaze and the next chatting with Lorena Bobbitt about the Amazon documentary Lorena, which sets out to reframe the story of the woman who became infamous for cutting off her husband’s penis.

What do I take away from it all? Material and ideas for several months of columns.

Does writing about TV for work change how you watch TV for fun?

It introduces me to many more shows that I’d like to watch for fun, while making it harder to keep up with them. There’s always a long list of screeners I should be watching — this is the kind of job that invades evenings and weekends — but like anyone else, I can easily fall down the rabbit hole of Netflix or Hulu or Amazon and end up bingeing something I figure I’ll never write about. Of course, sometimes I end up writing about them, anyway — a column a few years ago about my tendency to goof off by watching Scandinavian shows brought out a lot of readers who love these shows. Who knew?

What’s the one show (new or old!) that you can’t stop talking about?

Right now, it’s Netflix’s One Day at a Time. It’s a smart, funny, heartfelt remake of the old Norman Lear series, this time featuring three generations of a Cuban-American family. Justina Machado plays a nurse and Afghanistan veteran raising two children while sharing an apartment with her mother, who’s played by Rita Moreno (who has all the best lines, of course). The show appears to be on the bubble for renewal again — there are three seasons so far — and I’d encourage anyone who loves it to finish it quickly, because Netflix apparently pays attention to how fast people consume shows. Which is sad, because I understand the impulse to make good things last.

Keep up with what Ellen is watching by following her on Twitter at @ElGray, or staying in touch with her through email at GrayE@phillynews.com.

Jury duty isn’t so bad when you can take a nice photo for the 'gram, right? Thanks for this kaleidoscopic shot @mattanderson4098. Tag your Instagram posts or tweets with #OurPhilly and we’ll pick our favorite each day to feature in this newsletter and give you a shout out!

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Why should Mr. Spahr be burdened to fix an overwhelming urban problem? At age 37 he has dealt with enough of it. He too has the right to just move. Maybe by doing that he serves as an example of the economic freedom one has with an education. His life is his contribution to urban dwellers who want to make it. He was probably the quiet kid who did his homework causing no disruption to his or others education. Mr. Spahr moving out can be a good example to those other quietly achieving students who are just so fed up with the mess they find themselves living in. — Gtmunyan, on After getting shot, a Philly lawyer is looking for a safer place for his family to live.