Naked in Dangerous Places - Cash Peters [127]
Oh, so you do watch it, then.
… and each time you disgust me further. You are NO Basil Davidson.
Now, hang on! That's quite enough. And please don't bring Basil Davidson into this, unless you're also going to explain who he is.1
You suck, basically, is all I'm saying …
Wow.
Looking depressingly mortal for once, Fat Kid reached deep into his reserves of American gung-ho spirit and gave my leg a pat. “Hey, you know what? It's not over yet. We have a great show. It'll find its audience.”
“You think?”
I only wished I was half as sure as he was pretending to be.
To add to the general level of despondency, a couple other series with remarkably similar concepts to ours had sprouted up on other networks. I'm not one to point fingers, but in the same way that I'd taken the theme of Survivor and made it my own without first checking with CBS if that was okay, these other shows seemed to have taken my theme—guy dumped in the middle of nowhere, having to survive with nothing—given it a jazzy new title, and waltzed off with my viewers. More annoying still, audiences were flocking to watch them. Both shows had become ratings sensations in no time at all. It was very dispiriting.
On my way out the door that night, my mind swimming, I bumped into one of the editors, who said the same thing Fat Kid had said, more or less, all the while beaming a one-hundred-percent-confident smile that caused my floundering spirits to soar again.
“Dude, this shit is groundbreaking,” he said. “It's the best goddamned series the network has. They'd be idiots to shut us down. They're testing the waters, that's all. Remember, NBC almost canceled Seinfeld after two seasons. The original Jeopardy! was canceled. The Police Squad series—that was canceled after only one season. Hell, even Star Trek was canceled after only three seasons.”
“But it was canceled—right?”
“Er … my point is, that won't happen to us. These things take time to grow, and a network knows that. They're smart people. Someone there will have the vision and the courage to keep us going. It'll be fine, you'll see.”
Ironically, on the morning the decisive call came through, I was busy preparing a talk. A favor for a professor friend of mine. She'd asked me to give a short address to her art students at Woodbury University in Los Angeles. The subject: “What I Learned from Having My Own Travel Show on TV.”
I'd marked the date on my imaginary calendar six months previously, then completely forgotten about it until the week before it was due to happen, when I was at my laptop, deleting requests for money I routinely receive from Nigerian dignitaries, and found an e-mail.
“All systems are go for Wednesday,” my friend had written, adding that flyers had been posted all over campus with my face on them, so she was expecting a big turnout. “See U then. !”
Damn.
“P.S. There'll be cheese and crackers.”
Oooh.
Which explains why, on that particular Wednesday morning in May, having just returned from our final trip, to Barbados, and with work on season two all but wrapped up, I found myself sitting in the kitchen at home with a notepad, trying to figure out what on earth a guy of my years could reveal to a bunch of ADD-eenagers on the subject of “What I Learned from Having My Own Travel Show on TV” that might help them launch a career in the creative arts, and, you never know, maybe someday take them one step closer to ripping off a CBS reality show of their own and appearing in it.
My first thought was simply to amuse them by plucking a few travel stories from some of the locations we'd visited over the course of thirty-two shows, because there had been some incredible ones: Tokyo; Cambodia; Kenya; New Zealand; Romania; the Australian Outback; Savannah, Georgia—places I would return to in a heartbeat given half a chance, and, more important, if someone else was footing the bill. Then there were a few more I didn't warm to quite so much: Niagara Falls (a bit