Naked in Dangerous Places - Cash Peters [78]
“Mr. Peters's series, …”
I read while it was still peeling out of the paper-feeder,
which began in June, is described as a series of visits to unusual destinations where he is deposited with no money and no resources and is forced to fend for himself. It's a perfectly pleasant little show.…
A-ha!
… as long as you accept immediately that it has nothing to do with its own premise.
Wha???
I reread the article several times, struggling to squeeze at least some goodwill out of it. But all I could find was: “A perfectly pleasant little show.” Hmm. That's sort of complimentary, isn't it? If you isolate it and take great care not to read the rest.
The critic had given over much of her allotted column inches to one of our early episodes, where I was in Romania looking for the castle of Vlad the Impaler, the fifteenth-century warlord on whom Bram Stoker later based his Dracula character. I thought it was a really good show, actually. One of our better ones. And so did everyone at the office. Evidently, we were all wrong.
Mind you, as I said earlier, this had been my biggest fear. Ever since Vanuatu, in fact. To succeed, the show needed to fly under the radar, by attracting mainly the Dimwit Demographic (incorporating ADD sufferers and the easily pleased), not—I stress, not—intelligent, analytical, and cultured people like the TV critic for the New York Times, who were bound to start asking difficult questions and pulling the premise apart.
One of my close friends is a professor of medieval studies. She'd watched the show and enjoyed it, she told me, before going on to nitpick at the concept the way only an academic can. “It's just not believable,” she kept saying. “If you have a camera crew with you, you're not marooned, are you?”
“Well, no, not strictly, but…”
“Of course people are going to give you food and a bed—they're being filmed.”
“Not necessarily. Some of them say no to me. In Greece, for example, the lesbians wouldn't let me stay in their hotel room, so I ended up sleeping on a bench.”
“But did you really sleep on the bench, or was it just for the cameras?”
“Er …”
“Precisely. It's. Just. Not. Believable.” This is how she speaks when she's stressing a point, in one-word sentences.
“But we're not making a survival show,” I pleaded for the fifty-thousandth time. “It's entertainment.”
“I don't care,” my friend insisted. “You're claiming you're all washed up in these places, but you're not. You. Need. To. Change. The premise. Or the title. Or something.”
Damn.
And that wasn't all. It was about now that I started receiving e-mails from curious viewers.
Hi,
I was wondering, how long does it take to film one of the shows?
You're supposedly in the location for a day and a half, correct?
But how long do you really stay there?
And those people that you meet on the streets … do you really meet them and they show you around and let you stay in their homes? Or are they picked out beforehand by someone else that works for the show?
—MARGARET
Mr. Peters,
I watch your show with interest.
One thing I would like to know. When you sleep in people's homes … do you stay there for the whole night or do you leave when the cameras leave?
—Lisa, Connecticut
You see?? There you go, Lisa, thinking too much! Asking too many questions.
Does nobody take anything on trust any more?
These initial grunts of incredulity didn't die down, either; they grew louder and wouldn't stop, signaling that our balance sheet of credibility on this show had slipped into the red, as viewers, not content to still their minds and just enjoy the series for what it was, continued to employ a near-forensic dedication to detail, analyzing my every move. The more they saw the Bewilderbeest stumble across the breadth of whole islands on foot in a single day; or, though he didn't speak the native language,