Free Turn of the Century by Kurt Andersen Page A

a pilot order, period.) Now the network is going to hand them $50 million and eighty hours of prime time to execute his weird, untried idea.
    “Timothy,”
George says, smiling as big as he ever smiles. He is almost dizzy. Is this what crack feels like? “You buried the lead.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “He means that a firm thirty-nine-week commitment sounds absolutely fantastic as far as we’re concerned, Timothy,” Emily says. She’s grinning for real now, using adjectives, verbs, and adverbs. But shewon’t let the astonishing good turn make her irresponsible. “And you mentioned back-end guarantees? On the other shows?”
    “Business affairs, Emma Bovary, business affairs! Good-faith negotiation, et cetera, et ceterama.”
    Emma Bovary? Ridiculous as ever, but George is impressed by the erudition.
    “Harold will buy and air thirty-nine weeks of
Reality?
” Emily says to Featherstone. “One-point-six million a week?”
    “
D’accord
, darlin’.”
    “No speaking French. That’s why I defected from Canada.” Mose is in the room. Featherstone swivels his chair and bolts upright. George and Emily stand.
    “George! Emily.”
    “Superb,” Emily says, and George, dumbstruck, manages only a robust, “Hi!”
    “How are you?” Mose asks.
    Having already answered, Emily offers her cheek for a kiss.
    “Great!” George pipes up, suddenly as taut and overwrought as a teenager. He always notices the aroma of Harold Mose. Why hasn’t Ralph Lauren bottled this fragrance? Maybe he has. It must be the daily haircut plus fresh flowers plus cashmere plus BMW leather plus the executive-jet oxygen mix plus a dash of citrus. That is, Mose smells luscious. He smells rich.
    “Pellegrino?” It is Mose’s secretary, Dora, who looks uncannily like Queen Elizabeth II would, if the queen cut her hair very short, dyed it platinum, lost forty pounds, and wore Anne Klein suits. (The queen in Diana’s dreams.) Dora’s beautiful assistant, Lucy, has just set down the boss’s Pellegrino with Rose’s lime juice.
    “Your pilot was perfect for my attention span,” Mose says. “Have you considered making the actual show only fifteen minutes a week?” George and Emily grin. Featherstone chuckles. They have produced a fifteen-minute minipilot for the show—a five-minute newscast and ten minutes of behind-the-scenes fiction. “I expect that Timothy has, in every important respect, badly misrepresented the program to me,” Mose continues, not quite smiling, in his happy-gangster baritone. Are there Canadian gangsters? “So: is this a mutant news program that all people of substance and seriousness will despise, or a bizarre entertainmentprogram that half the audience won’t understand even if they watch it, which they won’t?” He plucks the lime slice from his drink and bites the flesh.
    “Well,” George says, “a lot of people in news are going to go nuts, that’s true, unquestionably. The op-ed pages and the journalism professors will kill us.”
    Featherstone glances anxiously at Mose. The chairman is expressionless.
    “Oh,
dear
,” Mose says, pulling the desiccated lime from his mouth. “Oh gosh, oh my. And the
down
side is?” It takes Featherstone a second to realize he should chuckle, and he does.
    “We figure it’ll be similar to the fallout from the
NARCS
New Year’s show,” George says, “times ten—a fuss that (a) makes people look at the show, like with the Donna and Rudy Giuliani thing on Fox or the Dan Rather nipple episode on the Farrellys’ show. And (b) as a marketing position, I think we could do worse than ‘The Groundbreaking Program the Media Elite Doesn’t Trust You to Watch.’ ”
    Finally Mose smiles. “Correct,” he says. “Exactly.”
    “When the noise clears,” Emily says, “this is smart, tough, good TV. First-class news. First-class drama.”
    “Dramedy,”
Featherstone amends, then turns to Mose. “It’s dramedy, Harold. That’s my top-line note. There’s got to