One minute, you're hearing from the sublime cast and creator of AMC's deliciously smart drama Mad Men. The next -- literally -- it's Dave Attell talking about his remake of the hallucinatory '70s fave The Gong Show, replete with wiener jokes, fart symphonies and a drag queen crooning about "hot pussy." (S/he's holding a kitty cat, people.)

So this is why TV critics love their press tour. No, it's not just for meeting celebs. (Many are less than interesting without a script.) It's not for the free food. (Ain't always so hot, and if you're typing missives like these during rare session breaks, who has time to eat?) It's not even for the nightly partying hearty. (OK, maybe when we were younger and the networks were more spendthrift.)

Nope, we're here for the big, wide, wonderful world of TV into which we're plunged, wet and dripping (just like that hot kitty), for a whirlwind couple of weeks each summer. Members of the Television Critics Association or their publications pay their own way out to L.A. to hear about and see so much TV that -- as one of the Gong Show judges puts it about a tubby guy in need of a bra who breaks out of a straitjacket -- "My eyes were vomiting."

Luckily, that's not the reaction all the time. The very first interview session I hit at this summer's press tour opened my eyes to a moving series I never would have otherwise paid attention to. Who needs another reality show like WE's The Locator? But wow, what an emotional impact for this morning's first-up hotel ballroom panel with person-finder Troy Dunn [above right], his investigator mom, and an adopted daughter and biological mother he reunited. Dunn turned out to be a heartfelt guy, inspired by his own adopted mom's decade-plus search for her biological mother -- who then summarily rejected Dunn's entreaties for a meeting, tellling him "If I knew it [her baby] was going to call, I might have aborted it."

Whoa. "We believe you can't find peace unless you find all the pieces," Dunn said of his work for yearning souls -- a line of patter that looks canned on paper but sounded heartfelt here. This was right after I asked his mom about her "negative" experience, and she amazingly said being rejected by her birth mother was actually "positive" because, though she'd "hoped for a new beginning," she needed closure, and got it, and even got to give "a gift to my birth mother" -- the "peace of mind" that "it" would never show up in her life unbidden.

Neither Dunn and mom nor the shy reunited pair who answered questions alongside them seemed stoked for celebrity. It was easy to take Dunn at his word when he called The Locator a "pay-it-forward scenario," in which he hopes to inspire viewers to go for their own closure.

Going for it also seems to be the promise of the second season of AMC's Mad Men, already showered with critical hosannas, awards and buzz galore. "You think it's gonna go one way," said Golden Globe-winning star Jon Hamm at the show's Q&A session, "and the material takes you in a different direction." Recurring costar Robert Morse, the old lion at the show's 1960 ad agency to Hamm's ambitious young exec, promised "an astounding direction" to the new episodes starting July 27, so exciting that Morse said he goes to the table reads of scripts he isn't even featured in.

The season premiere provided for critics' preview finds Hamm's Don Draper challenged by yet younger ad creators, while his wife (January Jones' Betty Draper) becomes a somewhat new woman after a chance encounter with an old friend turned "party girl" (polite-speak for paid escort). The office even acquires a newfangled Xerox machine!

I'm not being sarcastic there. Mad Men finds depth in superficial moments like that. It continues to be an enthralling drama of sneaky power -- sinuous and savvy enough to win over even an initial skeptic like me. Though I felt the first half of AMC's first season was engaged in some smoke-and-mirrors salesmanship itself -- elegant and moody on the outside, cold and empty inside -- the subsequent episodes pulled me into their unpredictably tangled web. (The first season just came out on DVD.) The characters' emotional distance reveals itself as a social mask (and more), and there's a lot more "there" there than at first glance. Like the ads these guys produce, it's so thoroughly thought-through that it seems effortlessly slick. Weiner says he knows viewers (and critics) adore the show's surface sheen of Kennedy-era chic, "but I'm always trying to put the poison into it also -- the snagged material" of those perfect sheath dresses and tailored suits.

Don't go looking for those on The Gong Show. This Comedy Central remake of Chuck Barris' drug-tinged hit of the Studio 54 disco era is decidedly low-rent and frat-happy. Premiering July 17 at 10 p.m. ET, host Dave Attell introduces it as "the wet spot on the casting couch of Hollywood," and things head downhill from there. If low is where you wanna go, watch a magenta-haired guy push a needle all the way through his arm or see 15 bikini-clad babes stand atop a guy calling himself The Human Floor.

The giddy glee of Barris' original network (un)talent(ed) show for the entire familiy has been replaced by cable's adolescent naughty-boy ick factor. Judge Steve Schirripa (Bobby from The Sopranos) gets it right in the critics' screener episode when he tells one wannabe, "This is a talent competition, and you're more of just an idiot."

But The Gong Show has its place, as does Mad Men, as does The Locator, as do the other 16 shows presented to TCA critics today alone. Before two weeks are out, critics who avail themselves of everything offered at press tour will have attended a hundred Q&A sessions and a half-dozen set visits, along with corralling creators, cast members and network execs in hotel hallways and evening events for one-on-one access.

It's all TV, all the time, of all kinds. Need anyone ask why we love this medium?