Reality Matters_ 19 Writers Come Clean About the Shows We Can't Stop Watching - Anna David [42]
Months later, you get a call from the friend of a friend. It’s the summer you turn twenty-eight, and you’re living on an island, alone with the cats, doing boat carpentry. The magazine that employed you went under and you decided to pull the rip cord on your life and relocate. The friend of a friend says that the show, the Survivor killer, got into trouble with their game engineering. Contestants went rogue on season one—hoarded cash, skipped stopovers, and took cabs instead of trains. Now, as they’re trying to fix everything in the edit, the show’s executive producer has decided to hire a team of game designers to avoid these problems in the future. Since no one has done this kind of thing before, apparently your eighth-grade summer class in game design sounds like the RAND Institute to these LA people. Are you willing to come out to the coast? You can make four times what you are making on the band saw setting bungs into screw holes. You might even get a trip around the world out of it. The Izod professor, the one inside you, says Hells yes.
The show operates out of the former offices of a defunct dot-com in Marina del Rey; what’s weird is that nobody has changed the furniture, and a pipe-dream mood haunts the space. There’s a fairway teacup from an amusement park ride in the front office. All the desks are planks in a long room, and at the back lurk the dark caves of editing consoles, where the season one triage is taking place. The executive producer is this older Dutch fellow whose skin is eroding in the Southern California glare. Often, he has a Band-Aid across his face, which nobody mentions. He used to run Cops, and people treat him like a god because Cops is “syndicated as fuck.” His much younger, beautiful wife transits the office like a visiting dignitary. She came up with the idea for the show, has executive producer credit, but does nothing except get looked at.
As part of the preproduction team for season two, you spend your days coming up with gimmicks. Already, the trip route has been decided, so you are given countries and it’s your job to research and pitch possible activities—mystery caves, little statuary-finding missions, canopy zip-lines. Everybody loves zip-lines, they make great TV, but they have this problem: the race stops. No team can pass another team. It’s what’s called the accordion effect. When you bring this up in the meeting, the executive producer looks at you and says, “Who the hell are you?” You tell him and he says, “Well, then, let’s just have them make sandwiches!” You can’t tell if he’s joking or brainstorming or what. Notes are taken. What’s clear is that the show isn’t really about gaming—it’s about conflict engineering, ways of getting people to reveal themselves. Soon enough, you’re calling McMurdo Station, on Antarctica, to see how long human skin can be exposed to the chill. Would it be possible for people to make igloos in jeans? The woman at McMurdo says, “Who the hell is this? Where are you calling from?”
“I’m from TV,” you say, like it’s an answer, like it’s a place.
In the entire city of Los Angeles, you have one friend and she sits across from you every day. Katie drives a pickup with a surfboard in the back. Often, she comes to work wet, having surfed already. She wears this knee-length cardigan that she clutches to herself like she’s a refugee. When you ask her if she ever considered modeling, she says, “Shut up.” After renting a convertible Jeep for a month—and getting the worst sunburn