"Press tour" close-out sale: a climactic collection of locatetv-generated items

Two and a Half Men's Angus T. Jones/CBS photo

The winter Television Critics Association "press tour" remains fresh in the memory while your dogged correspondent is in the final throes of toweling off. Here are some tasty leftover nuggets from Pasadena, all of them generated by locatetv.com questions in various hotel ballroom settings.

*****Angus T. Jones, still the half-man of CBS' Two and a Half Men, was just nine years old when the show started. His Jake Harper is now a lippy teen, but Angus remains pretty mum about all the Charlie Sheen-spiked drama of the past year.

"Just in the interests of including you . . . what are your thoughts about all that's gone on with the show?" he's asked.

"I mean, my thoughts, I'm just really along for the ride," Angus replies with some discomfort. "I don't know. I try not to worry about it too much -- like if worrying would be an issue.  I just go to high school, do normal things. It's a job."

OK then. But no fair writing a tell-all book down the road if times get tough as an adult.

***** Cheech Marin, forever famous as an integral part of the Cheech & Chong pot-smoking duo, is now playing Rob Schneider's conservative, car wash-owning father-in-law on the new CBS sitcom Rob. In fact, the character's views on immigration are to the right of Michele Bachmann's. He advocates cannons along the border. Anything for a laugh.

"Many Mexican-Americans are conservative," Marin says. "I mean, he's kind of in the Archie Bunker range, and that's exactly how I wanted to play him. He's not a bleeding heart liberal. He's a hard-nosed businessman."

"The idea that Hispanic people just have to be all liberal is not true," Schneider chimes in. He's "shocked," for instance, that many of the major supporters of Arizona's restrictive "racist" immigration law are Hispanics.

"All of the Texas Mexicans are all Republicans, man," Marin adds. "That's really what shocked me."

*****Primo producer J.J. Abrams' new Fox series, Alcatraz, is centered on the mysterious disappearance of 302 inmates and their guards just before the famed island prison closed down in 1963. They then reappear in present times, with further foul play on their agendas.

Alas, two of Alcatraz's most famous inmates, Al Capone and Robert "The Birdman" Stroud, were transferred out before the 1960s. Still, this is a J.J. Abrams series. So anything's possible from the mind behind Lost and Fringe. Right?

"Well, it's definitely a bummer that they weren't there to be time-traveled," Abrams says. "I mean, that really is unequivocal for us. But having said that, who's to say we can't flash back a little bit further? And that would be fun to do."

Co-executive producer Jack Bender notes that the show tries to tell the back stories of various featured prisoners. "And we've often made jokes about going by the cell of a guy who has 400 parakeets in a cage. But we haven't done that yet."

*****Season 6 of Showtime's Dexter brought Debra Morgan closer than ever to her adopted brother -- and the show's serial-killing title character. They're not genetically related, so any romantic entanglement next season wouldn't be strictly taboo.

But in real life, Jennifer Carpenter and Michael C. Hall met on the show, got married and then were very messily divorced. So it seems fair to ask the network's entertainment president, David Nevins, whether this particularly touchy plot development had to be OK'd by both actors. "It's got to be a little difficult," he's told.

"It makes for an interesting ripple in the show," Nevins says. "But we do have conversations. When you have actors like Michael and Jennifer . . . they know what's going on. Michael and Jennifer have a very good relationship, so it's quite comfortable. But that has been a conversation, and will continue to be a conversation."

And oh to be a fly on the wall.