Hallmark: My heartstrings hurt from being yanked on

Just finished a marathon session for nine million Hallmark Channel movies. Every one of them includes a familiar TV face - most of them dating to the 1980s or  beyond - and every one of them brings a comforting and emotional message.

Jane Seymour is just like Martha Stewart except she's nice and solves murders. Daphne Zuniga is a Wild West con woman who finally learns to trust when her violent past shows up on her doorstep. Florence Henderson, Donna Mills and Pam Grier renovate a house together and rebuild their own lives. Ed Asner teaches his grandson to be a man and learns to loosen up a little in the process. Tom Arnold is a widower who finally bonds with daughter Candace Cameron after a sleigh accident helps them both find the true meaning of Christmas. Tom Arnold!!

Bleccch, am I right? Old school, at best.

There's one good one, with Chandra Wilson of "Grey's Anatomy" as a homeless woman and Kathleen Monroe as the L.A. cop who bonds with her over caring for her pets. I'm a sucker for a good animal story, and this is a love project for Wilson and everyone else involved. The real L.A. cop whose tale it is was on hand, and I'll give you more on that one later.

But as is often the case on press tour, the real fun was when the actors were talking about anything but what they're supposed to. Wilson defended her "Grey's" co-star Katherine Heigl over the latest Emmy brouhaha, saying that Heigl was simply telling the truth when she said she didn't have the material she needed to enter herself for best actress in a drama. Everyone else in the world thought Heigl was dissing the writers and trying to talk herself off the show, but Wilson said uh-uh, it's just about finding the right episode.

"If you don't have the show that's like, your show and you're breaking out in tears," then you don't have what you need for a submission, Wilson said. "It was amazing to me the way it got blown out of proportion."

OK. Sure.

Then there were these comic gems:

• Jane Seymour on taking a role where she keeps her clothes on: "My husband said, 'Can we slow down on the cougars?'"
• Ed Asner on what he taught his young co-star, Alex Black: "How to roll a reefer." (He was joking. I think.)
• Chandra West - that's right, two Chandras - when asked if she had any idea what was going on in her previous series, HBO's "John From Cincinnati": "The short answer is no."
• Hallmark programming chief David Kenin greeting the TCA: "Glad to see you all at the front end of the tour, before your eyes glaze over and you begin to openly despise us."
• Tom Arnold on filming in small-town Vermont: "I'd never stayed at a bed-and-breakfast before. It was creepy."
• Cheech Marin on why he likes playing a priest: "Actually you get 100 hours of community service knocked off (your sentence) for every role."
• Arnold on the possibility of an actors strike: "There's not going to be an actors strike, but we've got to let these guys work it out...I wish the actors would just shut up. That's not a knock on Tom Hanks, though. I'm in his movie, he's a great guy."