The CBS upfront extravaganza with, from left, Jason Segel, Alyson Hannigan, Neil Patrick Harris, Cobie Smulders and Josh Radnor at Carnegie Hall.  The network upfronts are about entertainment, but how do they stack up as entertainment?  Go to one of them â it doesnât matter which â and youâll probably come away thinking: âTwo hours of cheesy hype with a few good jokes thrown in.â But go to a bunch and you might start to view them as artfully constructed character studies, poignant tableaus in which a central figure â the network â uses a facade of jokes and stardust to hide a mass of fears and insecurities. Dang it, these gaudy spectacles are actually small masterpieces in the best tears-of-a-clown tradition.  The upfronts, which took place this week across Manhattan, are dress-up gatherings at which networks large and small unveil their coming schedules for advertisers and try to make the case that their shows are a better ad buy than anyone elseâs shows. Making that case generally involves leading with some jokes, then reminding the audience that each and every one of the networkâs returning series or sports programs is the most-watched show on television among some obscure demographic. At some point, glimpses are provided of new series, all of which feature the most exciting actors working today and were created by someone who once had a series or movie that was successful or at least wasnât a complete flop.  Stars are trotted out to wave and then go back to wherever it is that TV stars spend their downtime. Throughout, the crowd is pummeled with so many dizzying video collages that pop-up migraine clinics materialize outside the theaters.  A talk-show type, if the network has one, might do a jokey monologue, and the executives too try their hand at stand-up. The most fearless is Steve Koonin, president of Turner Entertainment Networks, who this year served up a funny bit in which he did acrobatic flips, juggled while riding a unicycle and showed off formidable break dancing skills. At least, it looked like him. The flashy stunts were actually performed by look-alikes, dressed and bewigged to mimic his distinctive appearance, which is â to be polite â not particularly athletic.  Staid CBS surprised the crowd at Carnegie Hall with a funny bit by Jo Ann Ross, the networkâs president of sales, who announced that she was not there to give the ad buyers in the audience a hard sell. While she spoke, messages like âBuyâ and âYour ad hereâ were projected onto her skirt.  Later in CBSâs event, Robin Williams, who will have a new series called âThe Crazy Onesâ on the network this fall, vamped for a few minutes about the good old days, when ideas for new shows were hatched amid mounds of cocaine. Is it a good sign when your president of sales is funnier than your biggest fall-season star? Maybe not. (Another not-good sign: both the CBS event and NBCâs at Radio City Music Hall featured parodies of the same âLes MisÃ©rablesâ song. Thus is creativity defined in TV land.)  Taken collectively, the executive humor at the upfronts tends to be rooted in self-deprecation. But when the real comics come out, the tone shifts; now the events are akin to those themed restaurants where the waiters and waitresses insult and otherwise abuse the diners. Jimmy Kimmel, a fixture of the ABC upfront â this yearâs was at Avery Fisher Hall â has this down to an art form. (Parodying the executives who had appeared earlier, he spoke of âa revolutionary new made-up way for us to take your money from you.â) Conan OâBrien did similar stuff at the TBS/TNT event at the Hammerstein Ballroom.  Hear enough of these two types of humor, the self-debasing and the just-give-us-your-dough material, and you begin to recognize the classic defense mechanisms of the insecure: either make fun of yourself or make fun of those you fear. And there is plenty of insecurity at the upfronts.  Networks these days are beleaguered, with viewership declining and audiences looking for entertainment in other places. At every upfront, a sense of desperation was lurking: these networks are desperate to convince advertisers that they are not networks in the stodgy, old-media sense.  âMultiscreenâ may have been the most-used word of the week as executives described various initiatives to reach viewers on cellphones, notebooks, whatever. Phrases like âscalable marketing initiativesâ and âcomplete cross-screen measurementâ came out of executive mouths.  âWeâve built proprietary algorithms,â Mr. Koonin boasted, because these days if you want to lay claim to being innovative and savvy, the word âalgorithmâ is the way to do it.  Some of theater and filmâs greatest works have been built on these defining dynamics of the upfronts: the vulnerable clown, the aging protagonist who is trying to convey that heâs still relevant. Charlie Chaplin. âGlengarry Glen Ross.â Dare we say âKing Learâ?  Yes, the upfronts, beneath all the red-carpet nonsense and noisy video collages, are sublime performance art, as rich in pathos as they are in dazzle. They are about survival, the most gripping drama of all. One of the zillion film clips in those infernal collages was for a new TNT series, âThe Last Ship,â about a destroyer that, after four months of radio silence, emerges into a world that has been ravaged by a pandemic.  âOur mission now is simple,â one character says. âStay alive until they find that cure.â
The art within the artifice emerges when the TV network preseason upfront productions are considered as a whole.