"Mad Men" fanatics alert: Some swell tidbits were shared by series creator/exec producer Matthew Weiner and his assistant-turned-staff-writer Robin Veith during Wednesday night's panel sesh with Emmy-nommed writers at the Writers Guild Theater in BevHills.

Most awesome, to my ears, was the anecdote that Veith shared about the unforgettable scene in the seg toward the end of season one where a stressed-out Betty Draper shocks her children by picking up a BB gun to shoot the neighbors pigeons as they fly overhead against a postcard-perfect blue sky. The neighbor had threatened to shoot the Draper's new puppy after the dog got a hold of one of the pigeons.

Veith vividly remembers being a shocked at the age of 7 or 8 while growing up in "farm town Maryland"  when her own mother did the very same thing after her dog, Boo, snapped the neck of a pigeon kept by their very unpopular neighbor -- whose birds were the scourge of their cul-de-sac.

"It was the greatest thing I'd ever seen," Veith said, with obvious pride.

Veith (pictured left) gave us another insight relating to an element in this season's segs that has generated a ton of commentary in "Mad Men" blog-o-sphere.

"Sally Draper mixing cocktails for her parents -- that was me," Veith said, noting that daiquiris were among her specialties. There was a momentary hush in the aud.

Another funny bit relating to a plot point from the first-season finale, "The Wheel," for which Veith and Weiner (pictured above) are nommed (Weiner's also up for the pilot): Weiner bought an actual "Relaxercizer" machine that he found in a thrift store more than three years ago, before "Mad Men" was even set up at AMC, with the idea that he would use it in the show one day.

"That's how I work," he said.

Emmy's picks for writing and directing nominees in the series categories are kinda like a state of the craft report card every year. They're often the category where new and innovative programs are recognized long before they crack the more prominent races.

But in a year when Emmy voters seemed to embrace new and different, the choices in the writing and directing heats seem more pedestrian, though some of this year's contenders were so obvious (Bryan Fuller and Barry Sonnenfeld for "Pushing Daisies" Pie-lette, Matthew Weiner and Alan Taylor for the "Mad Men" pilot) as to take some of the suspense out of the race this year. Sonnenfeld (pictured left) and Taylor (pictured right) have already bagged DGA Awards for their work on these pilots.

Sonnenfeld, IMHO, can safely begin rehearsing his acceptance speech for comedy helmer. (Coming from him, it oughta be a doozy.) The competish is strong -- a six-nominee category meaning that there was one tie in the nom ballotting -- but nothing was quite so inventive and visually distinct as that first slice of ABC's "Pushing Daisies."

From my viewfinder, the dark horse in the race could be James Bobin of HBO's "Flight of the Conchords." Bobin, co-creator of the series with Kiwi comedy-rockers Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie, is up for the "Sally Returns" episode of "Conchord's" 12-episode frosh season.

Dan Attias nabbed a nom for the "No Cannes Do" installment of "Entourage." Paul Lieberstein has shown that there's no end to his talents by performing, writing and directing segs of NBC's "The Office," and now he's up for helming the seg "Money" Parts 1 and 2 (sounds like a James Brown hit from the early '70s). Also nommed from "Office" is Paul Feig, for handling the season finale, "Goodbye, Toby," which happened to mark the farewell of Lieberstein's character. Michael Engler of NBC's "30 Rock" is up for the "Rosemary's Baby" installment.

We should've seen this coming. There's nothing Golden Globes voters like better than big stars in new clothes, and that's what FX served up this year in "Damages."

Legal murder-mystery thriller led the TV noms tally with four Globes chits, one for drama series, for star Glenn Close (pictured left) and costars Ted Danson (pictured right) and Rose Byrne.

It was a given that AMC's "Mad Men" would get some traction this year -- Globes voters rarely snub the buzz -- snaring a bid for best drama series and a richly deserved nod for its handsome star Jon Hamm. Same goes for ABC's "Pushing Daisies," a contender for comedy series and for stars Lee Pace and Anna Friel.

Back to the stars we-know-and-love derby, no surprise that Showtime's "Californication" made a good stand with a bid for best comedy and for star David Duchovny. Donald Sutherland of ABC's "Dirty Sexy Money" made the cut in the supporting drama actor; so did Christina Applegate as lead comedy actress for ABC's "Samantha Who."

And in the spirit of the giving season, there was even a little something in the Globes stocking for 90-year-old Ernest Borgnine (pictured left), a telepic lead actor contender for Hallmark Channel's sweet-'n-sentimental "A Grandpa for Christmas." The last time Borgnine was nommed for a Golden Globe, he won -- for lead actor in 1955's "Marty," in which he played a less-than-handsome guy who's convinced he'll never meet Mrs. Right. (With all due respect to Borgnine, and I do mean all due, he was good in the bigscreen rendition of Paddy Chayefsky's telepic, but it's Rod Steiger in the original TV version of "Marty" who reaches down your throat, rips your heart out, pounds it into mush and then puts it back in just in time for him to find happiness with a young Nancy Marchand.)

In an effort to rev up for the fall season, it's time to inaugurate what I intend to make a regular feature of this blog, namely lots of video snippets from our favorite, and even not-so-favorite and we're-not-sure-yet, shows.

Let's call it Clip Madness. (This edition was made possible by the kind folks at Fox and ABC who helped me quickly wrangle some clips. In subsequent weeks we'll spread the spotlight around to all the nets that care to offer up easy-to-embed snippets.)

Clip Madness is presented in the spirit of this wonderful time of year, the tail end of the honeymoon period when every new show is full of promise, this year's sleeper, a new "Friends," the next "CSI," a slow-building gem a la "The Office," etc. etc. Showrunners are starting to stock up on Mylanta, vodka and Vicodin, but network marketing mavens are in their element as they head into the final now-or-never stretch of piquing the American public's interest in what the programming department came up with this year.

(Pictured above: A scene you're not likely to see on ABC's "Pushing Daisies," for reasons that will become clear in the clip posted below. Pic of actors Lee Pace and Anna Friel kissing comes from the Aug. 16 screening of "Daisies" at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery.)

I'm told a splendid time was had by all last night at the "Pushing Daisies" screening at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Pilot was said to have been enthusiastically received by the non-pros in the audience, just as it has been by industry insiders during the past few months since it was picked up by ABC back in May. Pilot helmer and exec producer Barry Sonnenfeld looks like he was having a good time, all decked out as a pink cowboy. And here's a pic at left of something we're unlikely to see anytime soon on the show -- stars Lee Pace and Anna Friel smooching!

"Daisies" revolves around a guy, Ned, with an unusual talent to bring the dead back to life with the touch of his hand -- with the catch that if he touches them again, they're back to .... pushing daisies. Chuck happens to be Ned's long-lost childhood sweetheart who Ned reconnects with, unfortunately a little too late when she's already been bumped off. He revives her and the flower of their youthful love re-blossoms in a big way...but only if they don't actually touch.

"Pushing Daisies" has a few tough tasks ahead of it. It's got great industry buzz that it has to live up to. It has to open a night for ABC (Wednesday) at 8 p.m.; and it has to build on the Ned-Chuck storyline without the "no touching" rule feeling tired, and it has to keep the franchise murder-mystery element of Ned reviving murder victims to catch their killers from running out of steam too. If anyone's up to the task, it's "Daisies" creator Bryan Fuller, a man with a naturally sunny-morbid disposition who spent the past season on "Heroes" and has a loyal cult following for his previous offbeat dramas "Wonderfalls" and "Dead Like Me." And he's got formidable help from fellow exec producers Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen (who flank Sonnenfeld and Fuller in the pic at right, with Bruce on the far right). Go, Bryan, go...

(Group pic by Jean Baptiste Lacroix/WireImage.com)

Now here's a clever promo idea. ABC has skedded a promo screening of its buzzed-about dramedy "Pushing Daisies" at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery on Thursday night. "Daisies" creator/exec producer Bryan Fuller will be on hand to introduce the screening, and ABC is promising "a limited number of special treats at the conclusion of the event for attendees." The Hollywood Forever midnight screenings of movies, morbid-themed and otherwise, have been a local treat for a few years now. With its focus on a guy who has the ability to bring people back from the dead, briefly, the lighthearted (really) "Daisies" is a perfect fit with the Hollywood Forever series, especially now that billboards for the show are sprouting up all over town. "Pushing Daisies," starring Lee Pace and Anna Friel, bows at 8 p.m. on Oct. 3.

For more info on "Pushing Daisies," read this On the Air column with Bryan Fuller from a few months ago, and this dispatch from TCA last month.

Been thinking a lot about why primetime TV is in such a superhero-loving moment. No, it wasn't brought on by the onset (onslaught) of Comic-Con this week. It was Television Critics Assn. press tour and all the yak yak yak during the past fortnight about the upcoming season's new shows.

I was struck by the superhero-mania by realizing that that even high-end, Emmy-winning drama types a la writer-producer Kevin Falls and director Alex Graves are working in the genre (sort of) with NBC's "Journeyman." Our hero in this show is a San Francisco newspaper reporter who can travel through time and change the course of people's lives. Falls and Graves during the TCA sesh on the show took pains to stress that they were going for "grounded sci-fi," and that the show would hinge not on time travel but on relationships.

"It's a a time-travel show made by people who don't believe in time travel," assured Graves, whose past  credits include "The West Wing," "Sports Night" and "Ally McBeal." Still, "Journeyman" has a mandate, one that he doesn't quite understand, to change people's lives for the better (and to keep viewers from changing the channel). Sounds superhero-ish to me.

It was NBC's own "Heroes," of course, sparked the most recent mania for supernatural storytelling with its breakout sizzle this past season. (BTW, the two pics posted here are from the soph season opener of "Heroes," tantalizingly titled "Four Months Later," set to air Sept. 24. Not many clues revealed in them but I figured they were a nice touch for anyone interested in this column's topic.)

In the coming season we have variations on the superhero theme in not only "Journeyman" but NBC's "The Bionic Woman," Fox's "The Sarah Connor Chronicles," and to a lesser degree (more about people with special powers than save-the-world-itis) in CW's "Reaper," ABC's "Pushing Daisies," from "Heroes" alum Bryan Fuller, and Fox's "New Amsterdam."

So why all the interest in characters with power to bend Newton's laws?

POSTED BY JON WEISMAN

In whimsical ABC fall entry “Pushing Daisies,” romantic leads Ned and Chuck  are forbidden to touch. So, how will the young lovers played by Lee Pace and Anna Friel (pictured left) endure what Friel called “the longest foreplay ever?”

At TCA on Wednesday, series creator and exec producer Bryan Fuller mentioned that auds would see “Saran-Wrap kisses” and “dancing in beekeeper suits” after floating a much more provocative suggestion for an 8 p.m. show.

“Mutual masturbation,” Fuller said. “It’s very now. We’re trying to bring masturbation back.”

That would certainly help get a show launched.

But even without the afterplay, “Daisies” will be one of the most talked-about shows of the upcoming season, having won over the hearts and minds of a great many critics. Expert pie-baker Ned has a unique ability to bring dead folks back to life with a single touch – only to kill them for good if he touches them a second time. Resurrecting the love of his life puts Ned in what Fuller calls an “impossible romance.”