What I Learned When I Almost Died - Chris Licht [9]
I suppose I could be vice president of programming for the All-Reality Network, if there was one, and make huge piles of cash dreaming up Dancing with Convicts or Who Wants to Marry a Refugee? I could do that, but I would never want to. Getting up at 4 A.M. to do MJ each day, I don’t have to hold my nose.
But most of us, if we’re honest, are more than our noble ideals. Like most, I nurse ambitions, large ones. I like being a player on a big stage. It’s why I love New York City and did not like Allentown, Pennsylvania. I like to be at the core of news and sporting events and sophisticated gatherings, going places and doing things others can’t. Doing MJ puts me at the center of the big conversation. It’s a super-relevant existence.
I lived the show. I gave 100 percent, which means I was always shy a few percentage points to give to family. In retrospect, I know my obsession came at Jenny’s expense. She didn’t have all of me when I was at home. She almost never had a weekend with me that was not carved up by the BlackBerry, always the BlackBerry.
As our newborn was being taken to be circumcised, I was on the phone doing MJ work, obviously not fully in the moment of fresh fatherhood. Why did I even have it on? I skipped the wedding of one of my best friends because it was Sweeps Week. That failure is one of my all-time regrets, but it was an easy call at the time.
A mere three days after Andrew’s birth, I went back to work. The 2008 Democratic National Convention was under way in Denver and I was disappointed I couldn’t go because of the baby, so I worked double shifts at 30 Rock to help the coverage from there. The next week, I was off to the Republican convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, leaving Jenny alone in the first days of motherhood.
There were other problems, deeper and more wrenching. This part is not easy.
Anyone who meets me probably concludes I am not the retiring type but rather someone who is worldly, comfortable with command, comfortable around powerful people, and skilled in a television studio. All of that is true. But much of the time these past years, my stomach was an emotionally ensnarled place, a big knot.
I was not entirely sure where I stood at work. And I feared that my golden existence at the nexus of substantive and exciting things might end.
Doing a long, live, and barely scripted show every weekday doesn’t leave a lot of time for politeness and praise from the talent, Mika and Joe. Snap, do this now. Snap, don’t do that again. Snap, go away. There are eruptions of anger, and people stay mad for a while, and there are screwups.
Though Mika found me “a damn good producer,” I constantly craved reassurance. She thought I was headed for a meltdown, because I was racked with so much worry about whether she and Joe were happy and about whether there was anything else I needed to be racked with worry about. That’s why I worked so much, believing that is what I had to do to make sure everything was all right, and that I was in Joe and Mika’s good graces. That angst is common among executive producers, but knowing this was no help to me.
While I was pretty sure Joe considered me indispensable, I was nervous, looking over my shoulder, trying to shield myself and see where I stood in the firmament of NBC. To a degree, Joe says, all ambitious guys do that because we want to keep moving up. We gauge our position in the footrace. But sometimes Joe couldn’t tell if my proffered opinion about something reflected my true feeling or a safe one. Often, I covered my ass, out of fear.
If you love what you do, as I did, the thought