The Next Best Thing (36 page)

“Hey!” said Tariq, hurrying into the room. He glanced around the table before taking a seat. “Is Dave coming?”

“No Dave,” I said, hearing the edge in my voice.

The test results had been okay. Good, not great. The show’s overall score—the percentage of viewers who’d said that they would definitely watch or would be likely to watch
The Next Best Thing
—was in the seventies. The low seventies. Shelly, my agent, had called with the news. I hadn’t said anything except for a quiet “Okay” when she’d told me the numbers, but they’d felt like a punch to the gut. A seventy-two was the worst grade I’d gotten since a pop quiz in tenth-grade geometry after I’d been out for a week with strep throat. Shelly was quick to reassure me, explaining that, in TV land, a seventy-two wasn’t that bad.
Friends,
one of the most successful sitcoms of all time, had clocked in at forty-one. In contrast, the best-testing show in network history, a post-
Seinfeld
spinoff starring Michael Richards and another bunch of bold-faced names, had notched an unheard-of ninety-one and still had lasted for only three episodes. A seventy-two was fine. And I’d be fine, too, with whatever the research revealed,
and with Dave as nothing more than a colleague and a friend. I’d survived worse.

“Shall we begin?” The vice president in charge of the research firm, a middle-aged, heavyset lady named Marcia, got to her feet. She wore low heels, pale-blue eye shadow, and a strand of pearls. Her suit had shoulder pads the size of throw pillows, her lipstick was the bright pink of cheap bubble gum.

Joan, who’d been on a call, slipped her telephone into its pink knitted cozy, put the cozy into her blue felt purse, and peered around the table. “Maybe we should wait for Dave.”

“Dave’s not coming,” I said.

Joan smiled at me, holding her hands up, palms out, in front of her, as if I’d thrown something at her face. “Easy, easy.”

“Sorry,” I said as Marcia stood at the front of the room, smiling benignly, as if she’d seen this all before.

“People enjoyed
The Next Best Thing,
” she began. “They liked the central dynamic, the relationship between the grandmother and her granddaughter. Seventeen percent of viewers compared it favorably to
The Golden Girls.
As you know, there’s a great deal of residual affection from people who remember Cady Stratton from
All Our Tomorrows
and are curious to see what she’s been doing.” As I smiled, she clicked a button and read off some of the viewers’ comments that appeared on the screen. “‘Funny!’” Marcia read. I felt myself relax. “‘It could be funnier,’” Marcia read. My hands clenched into fists. Marcia hit a button, and more comments filled the screen. “‘Cady’s character complains too much,’” she read.

“But they’re funny!” I protested. “Funny complaints!” Marcia gave me a look. “Sorry,” I said again, feeling my face burn. “Sorry.”

“Let me get right to what our audience identified as our biggest issue.” Another click, and Annie Tait’s face—warm, weathered, familiar, kind—filled the screen. I smiled, feeling
my shoulders descend from where they’d been hovering, tensed, around my ears. I loved Annie.

“Here’s our problem,” Marcia said. Around the table, heads were nodding—network heads, studio heads, and the lank brunette ponytail of Alice, who was no longer Vince Raymer’s assistant and was now the assistant to the vice president of comedy for ABS, despite having no discernible sense of humor.

“Annie?” I said. “Annie’s our problem? Annie’s great!”

“She was fine,” said Loud Lloyd. “But we think that we could be getting more bang for our buck.”

“A bigger name,” amplified Joan, who’d dressed for the meeting in a sweater vest of alternating pink-and-blue stripes, with a turtleneck patterned with tiny whales underneath. She looked like she was ready to lead a group of preschoolers in a singalong. I wondered again how someone who seemed so sweetly inoffensive could have attained and held a position of power in such a cutthroat world.

“You’ve written a great part,” said Tariq, running his palms over his bald head. He was dressed as sharply as ever, in a perfectly creased shirt made of finely woven cotton, with dark-blue pants and a black leather belt with a rectangular silver buckle, but one of his shoelaces was untied, and he’d spilled something sticky on his iPad’s cover. “There are probably a hundred actresses the right age who’d kill to play it.”

“Okay.” I spoke slowly, but my brain was churning as I tried to figure out how to make the case for Annie. “But we went to all the big names when we were casting the pilot. Are we sure there’s going to be new interest, given our budgetary constraints?” “Budgetary constraints” was code for “cheapness.” ABS was notoriously parsimonious in launching its new shows, paying actors as little as possible for as long as it could. Which was why, of course, all those big names had turned us down in the first place.

“Signing on to a pilot’s different than a show that’s been ordered to series,” said Loud Lloyd in the scolding tone he might use to remind a kid who should have known better that two times two is, indeed, four. “We’re fishing in a different pond now that actors know they’ll be getting a guaranteed nine episodes’ worth of work.”

“Hang on.” My armpits were getting clammy, and I could smell the acrid tang of flop sweat. If Annie was replaced, that would mean that all her work was for nothing. The great performance she’d turned in would serve as a first draft for the actress who would eventually be cast as Trudy. It also meant that horrible Justin was right. One of my stars was being replaced, and I, the showrunner, the woman ostensibly steering the ship, was the last to know.

Choose your battles,
I told myself before raising my chin. The Daves, had they been here, might have told me otherwise, but as far as I was concerned, this was a battle worth fighting. “Annie was fantastic,” I said.

“People don’t know her,” Marcia countered.

“Here’s what we’ll do,” said Joan. “Let’s make a wish list of, say, six actresses we think would give us the kind of buzz we’re looking for. We’ll put the word out—”

I interrupted. “Do we tell Annie this is happening?” Thinking:
Do I tell Annie this is happening?
It was a conversation I couldn’t imagine having:
You were amazing, everyone loved you, but too bad, so sad, you’re just not quite famous enough.
“Listen, I know she’s not the biggest name,” I said. “But she was hands-down the best person for this part. She killed it in the room. She nailed it onstage. And if the show’s a hit . . . I mean, who was Estelle Getty before
Golden Girls
?”

“Estelle Getty,” Lisa mused, and tapped at her handheld before turning to Tariq. “You think we could get her?”

“She’s dead.” My voice was shrill. How on earth would I tell
Annie she’d been axed? And how would I tell my grandmother, who’d adored Annie Tait since her debut in the 1960s and had been thrilled to have Annie playing the television version of herself, even a radically and unpleasantly altered version?

“Annie will understand,” said Joan. “Annie’s a pro. She’s been through this before.”

But I haven’t
. I sat there, fuming, as Marcia proceeded through a minute-by-minute dissection of the show, pointing out each instance where the dials had dipped down. “People really responded to the physical humor,” she said, tapping the graph where Cady did her Rollerblade split.

“And we’ll have that in every episode. I promise. But it’s not going to be all just girl-stuck-on-a-balcony. Or girl-trapped-in-a-closet. Or girl-with-her-butt-sticking-out-of-the-doggie-door.”

Loud Lloyd boomed laughter, until he noticed that no other executives were laughing, at which point he clamped his mouth shut. Alice yawned. Tariq rubbed his head wistfully. “Could we maybe do girl-with-her-butt-stuck-in-a-doggie-door once? Like, for sweeps?”

“No,” I said, a little too sharply.

“We had another thought,” said Joan. The room got quiet. Joan hadn’t said much so far—she had, in fact, spent most of the meeting tapping away at her BlackBerry, causing me to wonder if she’d already given up on
The Next Best Thing.
I leaned forward, waiting.

“We’ve been tossing around the idea of Daphne having a friend.”

“Hmm.” It was the perfect noncommittal noise, a sound that said,
I’m listening,
but not necessarily
I agree
. I’d learned it from the Daves.

“Right now, her world feels a little small,” Joan said. “There’s Nana, and Brad, and the restaurant crew, but they’re more frenemies. We’re thinking she could use an ally.”

We’re thinking the show could use more eye candy,
I translated, and gave another one of the Daves’ famous
Hmm
s.

“We’ve got someone in mind,” Lloyd boomed.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

Marcia pushed a button. A familiar face flashed on the big screen. I jolted upright, rising halfway out of my chair, my toes curling in my shoes. “No.” The word burst out of my mouth before I had a chance to think about it.

“You have a problem with Taryn Montaine?” Joan asked.

My hands had flown off the table and were waving around in the air like spastic birds. I made myself fold them in my lap and forced myself to sit. “No, it’s . . . it’s not that, exactly, it’s just . . . I mean, I’m not sure . . .” Deep breath. Calm down. Focus. Speak their language. “Given Cady’s appearance,” I said carefully, “I’m not sure we want another pretty, skinny blonde.”

“Taryn Montaine is not just another blonde,” said Tariq. He looked indignant, like I’d insulted his country of origin or his mom. “She’s hilarious.”

She’s an idiot,
I thought. “You know I worked with her on
The Girls’ Room.
” Joan nodded. Tariq nodded. Alice, my lumpy friend, favored us with another yawn. “She was . . . well. I hope I’m not telling tales out of school here, but she could be difficult.”

“Difficult in what way?” asked Tariq, who probably thought I was just jealous, and was not entirely wrong.

“She had trouble with pronunciation. She couldn’t say
nuclear.
”

“Neither could two of our presidents,” said Tariq.

“We had to rewrite the scripts so all the stage directions said either ‘sexy’ or ‘angry.’ Those were the two adjectives she knew.”

“Think of her as seasoning,” said Joan. “A little goes a long way.”

“People love her,” said Tariq. “We’re lucky she agreed to this.”

“Wait. She already agreed?”

Down at the other end of the table, I saw Lisa and Joan exchange a guilty look. “We’d talked about adding a best friend,” Joan reminded me . . . and it was true that, weeks ago, we’d had a five-minute, extremely general conversation about the possibility, at some point, down the road, of adding a confidante for Daphne, a Shirley to her Laverne.

“I thought it was weird that Daphne didn’t have friends.” This was Yawning Alice’s contribution. Another country heard from. “I mean, what kind of girl has no friends?” She gave me what would have been a pointed look had her mushy features, her double chins and lopsided eyes, been capable of doing pointed.

“According to our research,” Marcia said, hitting another button, putting another graph on the screen, “fifty-two percent of women under forty-five said they’d be ‘very likely’ or ‘somewhat likely’ to tune in to a show where Taryn Montaine had a role.”

I wanted to groan out loud, to throw things, to bang my head against the table like Don Music on
Sesame Street
bashing his skull against his piano keys . . . but why bother? Again, the decision had been made without me . . . now I’d just have to figure out how to fit yet another character I’d never imagined or wanted into the pilot.

“I’ll let you all hash this out once I’m gone,” said Marcia. “Meanwhile, we need to have a conversation about the speech.”

I sat up straight. The speech. The big grandmother-to-granddaughter speech that came at Minute Fourteen. The speech that was the heart and soul of that first episode and, really, the entire show: the speech told you everything you needed to know about the two characters, the obstacles the two of them would face and, hopefully, conquer.

“We got the highest number of tune-outs during those
thirty-eight seconds,” Marcia reported, using a laser pointer to indicate the problem area.

I didn’t answer. I’d never been good at hiding my emotions, and at that moment what I was feeling was that any asshole who’d tune out during that part of the show wasn’t someone I wanted as a viewer in the first place. Of course I knew better than to say that. I’d take viewers wherever I could find them: teens, tweens, bored housewives, single moms, hermits, pyramid schemers under house arrest, even prisoners with viewing privileges, especially if they were between the demographically desirable ages of eighteen to thirty-four and there were Nielsen boxes in jail.

“We can take a look at it,” Tariq said in a placating tone. “I’m sure there are places we can trim.”

“Look,” I said, trying to backtrack. “Nobody had a problem with the speech in the script. We’ve all read it, what? At least a dozen times? I realize that it’s one of the quieter moments in the story, but I don’t think we should change it. We’re going to tell stories that have quiet moments every week. That’s the nature of the show.”