The Next Best Thing

by Jennifer Weiner

  I @-signed Cady, who, I noted, had not yet shared the news with her three hundred thousand followers, although so far that afternoon she’d found time to send out four pictures of herself posing in the mirror, one hand in her rumpled hair, wearing a sequined minidress, her mouth in a Betty Boop pout. I didn’t understand why so many people would want these breathless, minute-by-minute updates of the minutiae of Cady’s life, especially because it had been years since she’d been on TV . . . but clearly, plenty of them did. They welcomed her tweets about “Just got up! Coffee, please!” and “I am in a BAD MOOD,” her Spotify playlists and the links she posted from gossip websites, prefaced by smug declarations like “Knew that,” and “Toldja,” and “Not surprised,” and her endless series of self-portraits, typically snapped in bathroom mirrors.

  I hit refresh, waiting to see if I’d been retweeted, if Cady had replied, if I’d gained any new followers, if anyone on the Internet had noticed my good news. So far, nothing.

  Worry about it later, I told myself as my phone started ringing, flashing the name PETE on its screen.

  “Hey, Pete!”

  “Yuh?” he said, sounding confused and like he’d just woken up. It was four o’clock in the afternoon. This was troubling but not entirely surprising. Plenty of the television people I’d known back on Bunk Eight kept strange hours.

  “Pete? Hey, it’s Ruth.” No answer. “You called me back?” Still nothing. Pete Paxton hadn’t appeared in the pilot, but he’d been cast, pending a pickup, and would appear in a few scenes we’d add to the pilot later, after Chauncey had decided that the show needed more male energy. “Write a part for a guy,” he’d said, via Loud Lloyd, and I’d said, “Absolutely.”

  So, in between the college applicants and the senior singles, praying that the request meant that we were, in fact, getting the nod, I’d written the part of a handsome, salt-of-the-earth sort of guy, the hunky neighbor who lived down the hall. I’d decided to make him a construction worker, because what’s more manly than that? I’d named him Brad Dermansky and given him tattoos and a clingy ex-girlfriend, and I’d decided that when they met, he’d think of Daphne as a little sister, not the kind of girl he’d ever date. They’d be friends, and then her wit and smarts would wear him down, until he realized that she was all he’d ever wanted, that he was hopelessly in love.

  For the first season, I figured, I could do will-they-or-won’t-they, Moonlighting style. Brad and Daphne could date in the middle of Season Two and break up over a misunderstanding in Season Three. In Season Four I’d give Daphne a new boyfriend and Brad a new girlfriend, and Daphne would get engaged, and I’d write an episode where she’d be walking down the aisle, about to say her vows, and the officiant would ask if anyone had any objections, and Brad, unable to stand it a moment longer, would spring up from his folding chair in the back of the synagogue (or the church, depending on how Jewish Daphne could be) and declare his love in a scene that would leave not a dry eye in the house and possibly win him his second Emmy. They’d be engaged by Season Five, which would end with their nuptials, and which would bring the show to its hundredth episode, at which point The Next Best Thing would be eligible for syndication, and I’d be able to do whatever I wanted for the rest of my life.

  “Hey, Ruthie,” Pete slurred.

  “Hi there, Pete. We got picked up!”

  There was a long pause, followed by a rustling sound. I could hear giggling of the female variety in the background, which meant that Pete had company. “Oh. Oh, hey. That’s . . . um. Wait, who is this? Is this Ruth?”

  I took a deep breath. “Ruth Saunders. Executive producer. Brown hair, hats? Thing on my face?”

  “Oh. Ruthie!”

  “There you go.” Like the character he’d be playing, Pete was lovely to look at, but unlikely to win the Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions anytime soon.

  Pete yawned and then cleared his throat noisily. “Wow. Cool. Um.”

  I knew better than to ask, but I couldn’t help myself. “Were you asleep?”

  “Kinda.”

  “Up late watching that Real Housewives marathon?” That was what I’d been doing the night before . . . that, and pacing the length of my living room, hitting refresh on Deadline Hollywood once per lap. I should have told him I was out partying at a club (after, of course, I learned the name of the right club to mention). Maybe that’s what it would take to earn his respect, or at least get him to see me as a peer, instead of a scolding old lady with a Boston accent. Although maybe scolding old lady could work for me. Maybe Pete would be more likely to take my notes if he didn’t see me as an equal.

  No answer. “Pete. Pete! Are you there?”

  He managed a mumbled assent.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Oh, yeah! Fine! You bet!”

  I wondered if he was on drugs, or if this was just the way most twenty-four-year-old male actors sounded. “Well, listen. Congratulations, and I’ll see you soon!”

  “Uh-huh.” Pause. “Ruth-bo-Booth.”

  “Right. That’s me.”

  “Boston.”

  “There you go.” I could almost hear the pieces clicking together—Ruth-bo-Booth, Ruth from Boston.

  “That’s awesome. Your first show!”

  “Thanks.”

  “No, thank you,” said Pete. “I’ll see you soon.”

  “You bet.”

  I hung up the phone and saw that my email was blinking. “Potential Writers” read the memo line of the email that Tariq’s assistant had sent me. There was an attachment, which, when opened, yielded more than three hundred names and five dozen scripts, hundreds and hundreds of pages of work. “You’ll need to hire a staff in the next two weeks,” the note said.

  “Oof,” I murmured as my phone rang again, with Pocket’s picture flashing. Dave. I grabbed it, punching the green button, lifting the phone to my ear.

  “Hey, you!”

  “Ruthie! Congratulations!” From the echo, I could tell that he’d put me on speakerphone.

  “Way to go, sister!” called Big Dave.

  “We’re so happy for you.”

  “Don’t forget about us when you’re big,” Big Dave cautioned. “You still have to take our calls.”

  Tears were running down my cheeks. I wiped them away. “I can never thank you guys enough. Thank you for believing in me. Thank you for thinking I could do this. I want to take you to dinner.”

  “We’ll put that on the books,” said Little Dave. “How are you? Did you tell your grandmother yet?”

  “Remember when Bunk Eight got green-lit?” Big Dave asked his partner. “My mother hung up on me.”

  “She did?” I asked.

  “Yep. She kept saying, ‘Oh, I can’t believe it, oh, I can’t believe it,’ and then she hung up.” He paused. “We have a difficult relationship.”

  “I know.” He’d told me, and many, many therapists, all about it.

  “How about your parents, Dave?” I asked.

  “They were pleased,” he said.

  Big Dave snorted. “They gave him a golf clap.” To me, he said, “Sidney and Sandra are not what you’d call demonstrative.”

  “But they were happy for you, right?”

  “They were,” said Little Dave.

  Big Dave snorted again. “Bitch, please,” he said. “They’re still waiting for you to quit playing and go home and take the LSATs.”

  “Can we focus?” asked Little Dave. “This is about Ruthie.”

  “We’re thrilled,” said Big Dave. “We couldn’t be prouder.”

  “Seriously, Ruthie,” said Little Dave—my Dave. “Anything we can do, just let us know.”

  Anything, I thought to myself, and imagined what my version of anything would be: Dave and I in the water, his arms strong around me, his voice in my ear, saying Ruthie, you’re the one I always wanted, you’re the one I love.

  * * *

  Thanks to my experience with The Girls’ Room and the Daves, I knew the rules of putting togeth
er a writers’ room, or at least the most important one: Don’t hire yourself. You wanted people whose strengths and skills and senses of humor would complement your own, not echo them. In my case, that meant no broken girls—well, maybe just one. Or two. Maybe two. It could be my own form of affirmative action. I would not hire anyone who’d been stuffed in a locker . . . although, given the way most comedy writers tended to be refugees from the Island of Misfit Toys, formerly fat girls and currently gay guys, people who looked like Ewoks and ate like Wookies, wouldn’t that eliminate ninety percent of the pool?

  “I liked this one!” Grandma said brightly on Saturday morning as we made our way down Los Feliz Boulevard. On the East Coast, word was that nobody in Los Angeles ever walked anywhere, that it was all cars and underground parking structures and valets, but my grandmother had been a walker all her life, and a new city wasn’t going to stop her. She had her recycled shopping bags slung over her shoulder and her shopping list tucked in her purse. We were off to the farmers’ market, where she would gather supplies for the coming week, and then we’d have brunch.

  She reached into her bag and handed me the first script she’d read. I saw that she’d purchased gold stars somewhere and had affixed one to the script’s title page.

  “Thanks!” I said, hoping that she’d be more discerning than I was.

  “These were good, too,” she said, passing me scripts two, three, and four. She’d spent the previous evening in her armchair, with an afghan on her lap, classical music playing softly, flipping through the pages with a red pen in her hand, sometimes clucking her tongue, sometimes laughing out loud, with a mug of tea at her elbow and a plastic binder labeled WEDDING on her lap, practically buried beneath hundreds of pages of sitcom. I felt a pang of guilt at the sight of it. I’d promised that I’d help her plan the menu, find a band, taste cakes, and narrow down the guest list, but so far, I hadn’t done a thing. Next week, I told myself, and had gone back to my reading, with the increasing awareness that I was in trouble. Most of what I’d read had been good, and some of it had been great. A few of the scripts had been written on spec, for demonstration purposes only, to show that a writer could build and populate a world, but others had been written and developed under studio deals. They’d been contenders once. These shows, about divorced guys moving back in with their parents, and teenage girls in fat camps and senior citizens discovering they had superpowers, had once had the same chance as The Next Best Thing of actually getting cast and shot and making it onto TV. Reading them was like spending hours each day in a graveyard, visiting with the restless corpses of characters who’d never lived out their brief, imaginary lives. It was also depressing, because some of those scripts, maybe even most of them, were at least as good as what I’d written.

  I bought an iced Thai coffee, made with condensed sweetened milk, and, while Grandma poked at bunches of basil and cilantro and quizzed the vendors on the diet of their chickens, I sat on a bench, flipping through my script stack. It was another gorgeous Los Angeles morning, the sky clear blue, a light, dry breeze swaying the fronds of the palm trees, the day a total contrast to my mood, which was depressed and heading quickly toward terrified. As an icy droplet made its way down my spine, and another curled from behind my ear to run down my neck, I plucked my phone out of my bag and called Little Dave.

  “Did you ever read a script called Scared White Girl? By . . .” I flipped back to the title page. “Nancy Johnson?”

  “Nope.” He sounded cheerful and distracted. Probably there was a game on—Dave was a big Red Sox fan. Maybe he had friends over. I pictured his movie-screen-size TV broadcasting the game in an image crisp enough to see the stubble on the players’ faces, aproned caterers in the kitchen, whipping up platters of sliders and wings. Shazia would be in the office, one hip perched on Dave’s sleek white desk, her long black hair loose, telephone pressed to her ear, her tanned legs and painted toes bare. “Why? Is it any good? And where are you, by the way?”

  “Farmers’ market on Vermont. And the script’s kind of amazing. I can’t believe . . .” I paused.

  “Oh, boy, here we go,” he said. “Somebody’s circling the drain.”

  “What?”

  “You’ve been reading scripts all week, right? And, oh, about ten minutes ago, you started losing your mind because you can’t see how your script’s any better than the thirty-seven spec scripts you just read, and your show’s going to bomb?”

  I tugged my hair over my cheek. “More or less.”

  “Here’s the truth, Ruthie. Nobody knows anything. William Goldman said that. He wrote The Princess Bride. Nobody knows anything. Repeat.”

  “Nobody knows anything,” I said through numb lips. “But how can that be true? The network’s already spent”—I looked to make sure that Grandma was busy inspecting a basket of beets, so she wouldn’t hear and collapse on the spot—“two million dollars to shoot my pilot.” I’d known that figure since I’d signed off on the budget, but it still astounded and scared me, and I tried not to think about it any more than I’d gaze directly into the sun. “How can they not know if they’re going to spend that kind of money?”

  “Nobody. Knows. Anything,” Dave said again. “Those scripts you’re reading might be perfectly fine, and have gotten passed over for reasons that have nothing to do with quality.”

  “Nothing to do with quality?” My stomach lurched. I got to my feet and dumped my iced coffee, only half-empty, into the trash. At these prices, the fees studios paid for scripts, not to mention the actual cost of shooting something, shouldn’t the question of which scripts got picked up have everything to do with quality?

  “For example, say you pitch a sitcom about a gynecologist who hates kids.” I nodded mutely. I’d read just such a show that morning. “Now, it could be that it’s a smart, well-written script, but maybe the network has one already, or maybe it’s got a show about a child psychologist who hates kids, and Jenna Elfman’s attached.”

  “Ah.”

  “Or,” Dave continued, “you turned in your show about vampire cop partners who can’t get along right after another network picked up a show about werewolf private detectives.”

  “Got it,” I said. Grandma waved at me, beckoning me over. I tucked the phone under my chin, lifted her brimming bags over my shoulder—I could smell dill and leeks, and see a bouquet of sunflowers—and smiled as she introduced me to the farmer, a man about my age with weathered hands and an Amish-style beard.

  “This is Ruthie, my granddaughter. She’s the creator and showrunner of The Next Best Thing.”

  I covered the mouthpiece, narrowing my eyes at her. “We haven’t premiered yet,” I told the farmer.

  Grandma ignored me. “I inspired the character of Daphne’s grandmother,” she said. “Be sure to watch for it!” She gave him a wave, and I followed her down the street.

  “Hello? Dave, are you still there?”

  “What was that?” he asked, sounding amused.

  “That, evidently, was our PR department.” We waited at a red light. A bus went by with a poster for Walk-up, a new sitcom, on its side. Grandma pointed at the bus and then at me. “Soon it’s going to be you on that bus,” she stage-whispered.

  “Better on it than under it,” I whispered back as Dave continued.

  “Sometimes it’s just a question of what resonates with whoever’s calling the shots. Max Dubrov—you never knew him, he used to run comedy at Paragon—he had this thing about teachers. Any show with a teacher, any show that had anything to do a teacher, he’d just toss it.”

  “Why? Was his mother a teacher or something?” Men in comedy, I had learned, tended to have mother issues.

  “No clue,” Dave said. One network head had it in for a certain type of long-legged brunette who reminded him of his first ex-wife; another had been burned so badly by a show starring three children that he hadn’t green-lit a single project involving an actor under eighteen in six years.

  We crossed Vermont Avenue and stopped i
n the vestibule of a French café. The hostess walked us to a table on the sidewalk that was shaded by an umbrella. “Coffee?” she asked.

  “Orange juice,” I whispered, settling the bags underneath the table. Grandma pointed at the phone, eyebrows raised.

  “Work,” I whispered. She nodded, reached into her purse, pulled out a script, a red pen, and a coil of gold star stickers, and began to read as Dave talked about the question of trends.

  “One year, something dark and edgy does well, so it’s I want comedies about cancer! I want to do a show about a support group for men with erectile dysfunction! I want a show about two kids switched at birth who meet their biological families right before they start high school!” Dave said. “Then, when all those dark, edgy, ironic shows fail—and most of them will, because they’re derivative copycats—the executives decide they want family comedies, with moms and dads and two cute kids . . .”

  “Where Dad’s a stay-at-home goofball, and the mom’s a type-A stress-muffin, and one of the kids is a hot girl or guy, so you can appeal to the thirteen-to-eighteens, and everyone talks to the camera.”

  “Right,” said Dave. The waitress put a menu in my hands. I pointed at the brioche French toast. She nodded and took the menu away and noticed Grandma’s script.

  “Are you a writer?” she asked.

  “Oh, no, my granddaughter Ruthie is,” Grandma announced, loudly enough for all the patrons at the other outdoor tables to hear. “Her show was just picked up by ABS. She’s staffing her writers’ room.”

  I cringed, praying that the waitress wouldn’t have a brother or a boyfriend or a dad who was a screenwriter or, even worse, a script of her own tucked into her locker in the restaurant’s back room. I thought about the stack of pages, two feet high, waiting for me back home, and realized again how lucky I was that all the variables—the whims of the executives, the desires of the viewers, and the availability of the actors—had aligned, for one brief moment, in my favor.

  Dave’s voice softened. “If you’re worried that the people you’ll be meeting with are going to resent you because they think their script should have been picked up, that they should have been the one doing the hiring, I’m not going to say you’re wrong. But everyone knows the deal out here, and how much of it is luck. And honestly, writing for someone else’s show isn’t like a prison sentence.”