Star Time (32 page)

Danny had been in trouble before and considered
himself
a fighter. He would just have to play games with the bank, he determined, and in the meantime, break his ass to come up with a hot new show for next
season. He could just about make it to next year. But he needed a blockbuster.

"Excuse me," Biff said.

Danny looked over and froze. A
schvartzer
!
he
thought fearfully.

"Don't touch me!" Danny screamed. "Mike Tyson is a personal friend!"

Biff extended a hand to shake Danny's. "It's really an honor to meet you, Mr. Vickers. I'm Biff Stanfield.
A writer."

"I'm a little occupied right now."

Biff was apologetic.
"Oh, sorry.
It's just that I overheard you talking about a show like
'CSI,
' and I've got it."

"What a lucky break for me!" Danny remarked sarcastically and turned back to the urinal. Now that he knew the
schvartzer
was some half-assed writer, he was no longer concerned about his safety. Writers were like toilet paper. You just pulled more off the roll when you needed them. He looked down at his penis.

“Fucking enlarged prostrate. Come on already.”

With Danny a captive audience, Biff quickly outlined his series idea: Entitled
Under Cover of Darknes
s, it was about a black man whom the world thinks is only a neighborhood lawyer with a storefront practice, but who is actually a brilliant undercover agent for the most secret of government agencies defending the U.S. against threats from foreign governments and unscrupulous corporations. He assumes all kinds of disguises: maintenance worker, file clerk, telephone repairman,
butler
—a parade of black menials who are virtually invisible in the corridors of power. His nemesis is a white FBI agent, who mistakenly thinks the Intruder is a dangerous enemy he has nicknamed the Intruder
,  but
has never actually seen him. Although tempered by cynical humor, the world depicted in the show would be perilous, often terrifying, and peopled by harsh, unconventional characters. This was a world from which Hollywood was insulated, but which Biff knew only too well.

"I hate it," Danny told him.

In that instant the last flames of Biff's belief in his future as a writer were extinguished. He had been deluding himself all this time. The guys at the top in this business could see how poor his ideas were and how meager his talent. Biff slunk from the men's room.

At that same moment Arnold Mandel was entering it.

"How did it go?" Arnold asked Danny.

"Canceled," Danny admitted. "Maybe they'll give you half an hour of my slot."

Arnold shook his head. "They still haven't made up their minds. Their option runs till midseason. I've got to start looking somewhere else to sell it."

"Arnold, I just had an idea for a show. What do you think?" Danny recounted Biff’s concept for
Under Cover of Darkness
.

"Terrific," Arnold said enthusiastically.

"You mean it?"

Arnold nodded.
"Unusual hero.
Intriguing, gritty milieu.
Suspense."

Danny rushed for the door. "I've got to see someone."

He ran to the emergency stairway. If he hurried, he could catch the kid—what did he say his name was? What a great idea the kid had! Of course the show's hero could never be a
schvartzer
.
Make him the sidekick, like on
Leverage
or
Lethal Weapon
. And they'd be cops. Having reduced the concept to a familiar formula, Danny felt more comfortable. The real genius was his own, he decided, in being able to recognize how to make an ordinary idea valuable.

Danny was puffing like an ancient steam locomotive when the elevator doors opened on the ground floor to reveal a forlorn Biff. Danny rushed forward.

"Why did you run away when I told you how much I liked your idea?" Danny managed to get out between great gulps of air.

"You said, 'I hate it.' "

"You didn't hear me right. I said 'great,' not 'hate.' "

The closing elevator doors knocked them into each other. Danny swung an arm around the bewildered young black man as they staggered out.

"You know who I’m really close to?” he declared.
“Beyoncé.
She’s begging to sing at my next birthday party." He halted. "How's this for a name:
Lowe and High
."

"For my show?
What's wrong with
Under Cover of Darkness?"

"You've got to be kidding me."

The status and influence of the select few who anchored network news broadcasts was almost inseparable from the news they conveyed. Covering catastrophes, they expressed the nation's shock and grief. At political conventions, they discerned trends and asked the questions viewers wanted answered. At their best they helped to keep government honest. When the country's most trusted newscaster, Walter Cronkite, attacked administration claims about the success of the Vietnam War on the
CBS Evening New
s, President Lyndon Johnson understood that because he had lost Cronkite, he had lost the support of the American people and declined to run for another term. That changed drastically with the advent of Fox News and radical, mostly right-wing radio commentators, who politicized news presentation and splintered the American broadcast audience into warring factions.  Now, more people
trusted the satiric
The Daily Show
and its host, the comedian
John Stewart
,
than the real news programs.

Chris was no stranger to the national spotlight, having been a White House and foreign correspondent, the co-host of a morning magazine show, and raised to gossip-column celebrity status by marriage to a notable political figure. However, her prior experience had not prepared her for the intensity of interest that instantly focused on her. Beginning with the very night of her announcement, she heard her motives and abilities not only critically and prominently dissected, but made fun of by Jay Leno, David Letterman, and Conan O’Brien. She was unable to stay up late enough or to switch channels in time to hear additional mockery from Craig Ferguson, the
Jimmys
Kimmel and Fallon, and Chelsea Handler, whom she sardonically envisioned
might want to compare vaginas. 
At restaurants she drew a star’s attention. Interviewers tried to elbow onto her tight schedule to obtain five or ten minutes of her remarks they could print. The press had always treated her gently, but to generate more controversy for their pieces, they now attached barbs to their questions: What made her think she had the talent and stature to replace a news icon like Ray
Strock
?
Oh,
and why had she had him fired? That immense salary of hers, didn’t she agree it was exorbitant? And what did she think about the criticism going around that she was picked only for her looks and sex appeal? She felt she had become a walking circus. She knew it would get worse once she actually went on the air. 

Greg immediately set about restructuring the company. Operations were streamlined and combined. An entire level of vice presidents was eliminated, a tier that had evolved with no other function than to supervise lesser vice presidents, who insulated them from accountability for failure. Having worked within a number of departments, he had an insider’s insight into their effectiveness. He
laid
off the dead wood and retained the most talented, granting them greater responsibility. Despite generous severance benefits, the extensive firings and changes throughout FBS increased anxiety among employees and resentment against Greg. Many people expressed their displeasure anonymously to the reporters and gossip columnists who found Greg as an easy target and repeated
unascribed
characterizations of him as "Roderick’s midget," "a lightweight," and "a figurehead in way over his head."

A couple of small changes he made went almost unnoticed: He beefed up the overnight news broadcast by enhancing ties to foreign broadcasters, adding a nightly catalogue of stories to which FBS could attach English voiceovers, if necessary, and added a one-minute news
update just before the 10
p.m.
.
hour
to retain viewers who might otherwise switch to early local news. Bolstering their previous opinions that
Lyall
was all show
surface
and little business substance, several critics derided the latter move as a blatant attempt to curry favor with do-gooders and his socialite friends. Few discerned that that the news update slipped in an extra commercial, while spreading the News Division's overhead across more airtime.

Diane's daytimes were busy. She had quit her job, refusing even a consultant’s title to enhance the P.R. agency’s chances of retaining her clients, and she had cut back on nearly all her charitable activities, except for
he
predominant cause in her life: building the children's hospital to be named after her father. Her personal lobbying among the hospital directors convinced her that she had the votes to approve turning over the hospital’s adjoining empty lot to the new facility and was already canvassing wealthy friends who might make major contributions and gain their names' exposure on appropriate wings, departments, and rooms. She hoped to announce the new children's hospital at the wing’s annual dinner coming up in a few weeks.

For the first time in her marriage, however, she was forced to spend many evenings without Greg and missed him. Without his presence beside her at social events she felt awkward, at home reading or watching TV lonely; it seemed almost as if she were widowed. She tried to be awake when he arrived home late and was more eager to make love to him.

Before the Reagan years, broadcasters kept hands off their news divisions, afraid that the FCC would lift their licenses for failing to use their monopoly of the airwaves in the public interest, which usually meant allocating substantial airtime to news broadcasts. As cable and VCRs lured away a large segment of the networks' audience, the network evening news broadcasts lost some 25-million viewers, half its earlier audience, evaporating the political climate that insisted on strict oversight. News had to pay its way.

NBC had the foresight to create the cable news channels CNBC, MSNBS and CNBC World, which were more than doubling the revenue of the next closest network’s news operation and spreading the overhead across them as well, with correspondents often crossing over for broadcasts. Barnett Roderick, like Larry
Tisch
at CBS, had refused to reduce income by investing in cable channels. Now, with cable a giant force in communications that earned subscription as well as ad money, their networks were paying for their shortsightedness.

To cut costs, Greg and Alan Howe, who had recently been named to head the News Division, were reducing that bloated division’s domestic bureaus to four key cities in addition to New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington D.C. Foreign news bureaus were cut down to thirteen. All would reduce staff and increase their reliance on part-timers, free-lancers, and so-called “digital journalists”,
who
went out alone on stories with a video camera and then edited their stories as well. Strengthened ties to foreign broadcasters would allow coverage where the foreign bureaus could not. Greg would investigate the possible purchase of a cable channel that already reached a substantial cadre of viewers. But he also saw what Roderick, with his ignorance of computers and the Internet, could not: that the Internet’s growing stature in the lives of young people, and many older ones, provided a new opportunity to overcome the absence of cable channels. He intended to leapfrog the other networks by increasing FBS’s online presence, not merely to show reruns of network offerings or simultaneously to stream content being broadcast, but to create new channels with new content

entertainment, news, education, and sports

that would be available on every computer and every digitally-connected TV,
iPad
, other tablet, and smartphone in the world.

When Greg announced that he was personally taking on the responsibility for revamping the nightly news broadcast and increasing its audience, Howe was grateful, rather than miffed. He did not know Greg well or whether Greg was competent in that area, but recent years were littered with the bones of news executives who had failed to raise Ray
Strock's
rating.

On Monday morning, a week before she was to begin anchoring its nightly news, Chris walked unannounced into the FBS newsroom. She was wearing jeans, a blue sweater, and a windbreaker. She knew a few people, one a producer of whom she thought highly that FBS had already hired away from her old network. Several new
hirees
would soon be arriving, even as a number of present employees would be dismissed, bought out, or informed that their expiring contracts would not be renewed.