TESS is not a statistical mission, but the data present a valuable opportunity for studies of exoplanet populations. In order to conduct such studies, it is essential to understand the properties of the target sample - why were specific stars selected, others excluded, using what criteria. The TESS prime mission produced light curves for the 2-min target stars, and is producing a larger light curve catalog from a subset of the stars observed at the 30-min cadence. Both sets were assembled using

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... information from the TIC, with the bulk of the 2-min targets drawn from the ranked CTL. Here we describe the global properties of both the 2-min and 30-min sets, including their physical parameters and their observational and variability characteristics from TESS related to transit detection. We review the "K dwarf desert", the trends of photometric precision with stellar type, and the implications of the difference between the CTL population and the actual 2-min cadence population.