Easy to Like

by Edward Riche

  The most puzzling aspect of the national personality was its self-satisfaction. This was strange, because it was twinned with a persistent self-doubt. Despite evidence placing them forever in the middle of every scale, they held that they were better in most things than other peoples. They thought their health-care system a model, for example; ditto for their tolerance and peacefulness. They were proud to be polite. At the same time, they never felt themselves good enough, as individuals, to meet international standards.

  So it was that, despite holding the view that they were culturally distinct and wanting such reflected in public policy, they overwhelmingly liked their television and films made in Los Angeles. The pages relating to entertainment consumption were the gravest of the portrait as applied to the business at hand, and here Hazel could not resist an editorial comment. A handwritten note paperclipped to the top of a page read, While it is generally the case that Canadians prefer American television to their own, there are notable exceptions. Programs that are demonstrative in their “Canadianness,” that are jingoistic — especially those critical or mocking of the United States — have been successful. I don’t entirely understand this unless those programs are a symptom of low national self-esteem. This may be a protest against the more common practice of adoring all things from the United States and, in the neediest way, seeking the approbation of Americans. This is a cycle of abuse that I think we can change with a new approach to programming. Much to talk about in this regard.

  Elliot sighed. One thing one should never do in entertainment, he knew (having watched Lucy cock it up), was make shows to service an agenda. Hazel was implying that television programming might heal the nation’s self-image. Could Elliot accept that entertainment’s function as a brief diversion from life’s worries was as worthy as art’s project to challenge and engage? Alas, he could not. So what was the shame in giving the crowd what they wanted? He had done just that speaking to his fellow VPs, and they’d loved it. He put aside the binder.

  The trick to it, he saw, was knowing what the people wanted before they themselves did. This was the first time Elliot had been in the position of making that call. His part back in Hollywood had always been that of an unconditional advocate, a zealot for the cause of the story he thought should be told — the one he had written. Over the next few days and nights he would, instead, judge the appeals. He reached for a bound document, a show called The Wonderfuls. It was supposed to be “warm and wry,” it was set in Winnipeg, family fare; a showbiz dad was finally retiring from a life on the road as a popular illusionist. During his first look at the pitch, Elliot remembered, he was taken with a funny subplot of an ongoing, not entirely good-natured, competition between the father and a retired psychic — based clearly on the Amazing Kreskin — living down the block. Did the show have what it took to capture the imagination of the nation? Knowing that was not a science or an art but pure divination. “Fade in,” Elliot read.

  Elliot locked himself in the apartment. He did not shave, ordered in, worked naked for a time. He made coffee at three a.m., drank whisky in the morning. He did not answer the phone (it rang twelve times in four days). He programmed his email to issue an out-of-office reply.

  Imagining an entire fall television season — a suite of dramas and comedies and information programs and reality shows — was, it turned out, something akin to a fever dream. He lost himself in the process, fitfully moving from script to script, scribbling notes that he later found incomprehensible, sketching diagrams and schema, flow charts inside calendars stitched with arrows. To each of the programming week’s days he assigned characteristics and traits — Monday was “clammy and grim”; Thursday was “hopeful”; Friday, “giddy.”

  Early in the process he imagined an ideal viewer, a composite Canadian, a young professional woman he dubbed Geraldine. But he realized that programming for such a specific niche would cut the CBC off from more than half its potential viewers, a violation of the mandate and a patently dimwitted business decision where advertising was concerned. So instead he considered a family, the Canadian version: 2.3 children, three-quarters of a pet, English-with-a-dash-of-Slav dad (stressed weekend binge drinker, slightly overweight), Irish-French-Métis mom (stressed and coping with depression, slightly overweight). Tim Hortons. KD. Canadian Tire. New Toyota Camry, old Ford Escort. Hockey Night in Canada. Florida vacation. But this didn’t work either, because when he started factoring in the children, he realized the generational divide was too great. It wasn’t just that his family were all ordering different things from the menu; they were all going to different restaurants.

  But what about people in an office? He got to work on a prototypical workforce. It had to consist of people of various ages — though none of them so young as to get all their programming via their laptops and phones. Some of them would use the new media, of course, but not to the exclusion of the old. The group should represent a range of incomes, gender, ethnicities. It would be a modest collection: not three codgers in a rural post office, not a bank tower in downtown Toronto.

  A weather office? A group of meteorologists, the clerical support and the bosses, the janitor! What could be more Canadian? A weather office, formerly government employees, now privatized — their hours and workload were heavier than before and they had less job security; some were forced to move to the new location to keep their jobs when their former office was closed due to cutbacks. Thus, some of them were outsiders. Their incomes were in the middle of the range, but they didn’t make enough to get ahead. Elliot saw them all . . . the janitor who nobody in the office but the boss (an old pal) knew was a disgraced lawyer, a disbarred jailbird. Two of the metereologists were, like Rainblatt and Hazel, secret smokers, and Gerry — this janitor, he’d call him Gerry — allowed this pair to sneak puffs in the basement . . . There they fell in love. Frank and Betty and George and Kulvinder and Linda were all there . . . working away, looking at satellite images, worrying about the bills, not getting enough sex or sleep, commuting forty-two minutes to work . . . and they’d go home exhausted and drop on the couch and turn on the tube.

  Elliot was going to be each and every one of them. He was going to inhabit the skins he’d drawn. What did they watch? What would they watch that they would talk about the next day at work? And what of Alice, the obese receptionist, with legs the size of barrels, whose life was an utter mystery to her colleagues, whose husband, Fred, had never once come to the office Christmas party, who kept a picture of her pet Lhasa Apso on her desk, who never talked about what she’d done last night or over the weekend? What did Alice watch?

  Yes, what? The shows, Elliot knew, must have the capacity to take one away, out of oneself, out of the day. They must provide easy, unambiguous answers, deliver truths and never pose difficult questions. They would be an invariable habit, a ritual . . . devotional? Television would be their god! No. No, it probably wouldn’t be God. And definitely shouldn’t. Or should it? No. Elliot was tired.

  He did not bother to go to his room, thinking it was his obligation at this point to lie on the couch and fall asleep with the set on. Women’s curling. The Scotties Tournament of Hearts already. Jesus, how long had he been back in Canada?

  The next day he called Hazel to tell her the draft schedule was complete. He wanted to celebrate and booked them a table at a restaurant, Canoe, which someone had told him was good. There, over a meal, he would tell her all.

  From: bonorg@locuracanyon.com

  To: matou@aol.com

  Subject: Spray

  Loschem will not provide Rubigan on credit. Cash sale.

  From: matou@aol.com

  To: bonorg@locuracanyon.com

  Subject: Re. Spray

  Why not?

  From: bonorg@locuracanyon.com

  To: matou@aol.com

  Subject: Re. Re. Spray

  Late payment last year.

  From: matou@aol.com

  To: wstuckel@locuracanyon.com

  Subject: oidium & other fungus
/>   Inclined not spray this year, get a lot of air in the canopy.

  From: wstuckel@locuracanyon.com

  To: matou@aol.com

  Subject: Re. oidium & other fungus

  Suicide

  The restaurant’s location — or rather, its situation — came as a surprise to Elliot. It was on the fifty-fourth floor of an office tower in the financial district. Given the restaurant’s name, he expected wilfully kitschy Canadiana, a room dressed like the set of Forest Rangers, smoked bison jowls and beaver cheese on the menu. But this was a modern spot. The expansive view out the windows on the south and west sides of the establishment, above downtown and far out over Lake Ontario, was spectacular. The patrons were dolled up and ebullient, having a blast. The whole place was, appropriate to Elliot’s mood, flying.

  A gracious young woman unburdened Elliot of his coat. Hazel was already seated. Elliot spotted her immediately, as her chair was pushed away from their table, into the traffic lanes of the wait staff. She appeared to have taken this position to better examine a metre-high floral arrangement at the room’s centre. So engrossed in the flowers was she that she did not see Elliot enter.

  This allowed Elliot to study Hazel unobserved as he was escorted toward her. The grey skunk stripe in her hair gave away her years, but the deep crow’s feet pointed to positively girlish eyes. Her dress, while conservative, always came with a funky, rebellious accent — a saucy belt, an almost too loud piece of vintage jewellery. Her legs, emerging from a short skirt and curled to one side of the chair, were long. She often showed arms with noticeable musculature, hard biceps the shape of an egg, and ropey triceps. But then everybody went to gyms these days.

  Hazel noticed Elliot only when he placed his file folder on the table.

  “Oh,” she said, “you really did mean this to be business?”

  “Was I unclear?” Elliot accepted the window seat offered by the waiter.

  “No.” Hazel moved gingerly from her chair, on the aisle side of the table, to the seat opposite Elliot. She still seemed distracted by the flowers.

  “It’s gauche, I know, bringing papers to dinner but . . . to be perfectly candid I can scarcely contain my enthusiasm. Next fall is going to be a fantastic season of television.”

  “A first.”

  “Anything to drink before you order?” queried the waiter.

  “A double gin martini, please,” said Elliot, “not too dry, olives.”

  “Could you half-and-half cranberry juice and club soda?” asked Hazel. The waiter nodded and left.

  “It’s a radical shakeup. Some of the returning news and current affairs shows aren’t going to like it,” Elliot said. “Wanna hear the week?”

  “Please,” said Hazel.

  “Monday. Blue Monday. Back to the grind. The first day of the rest of your life.”

  “I think you’re misreading that expression. I think ‘the first day of the rest of your life’ is a statement of optimism.”

  “No, no, no. Really, you think?”

  “Confident.”

  “You’re sure it’s not a situation like with that song ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “People missed that it was meant to be read ironically. People took that at face value.”

  “I sure did.”

  Elliot shook his head. “One of most plaintive things I ever heard. I’d hear that on the radio and I tell you . . . the darkest sort of thoughts. At least we can agree that Monday is no one’s favourite day.”

  “Well . . .”

  “You like Mondays, Hazel?”

  “I find my work fulfilling.”

  “Most people don’t.”

  “Most people? You sure?”

  “Confident. So Monday is the day for comedy.”

  “You want to move it from Tuesday?”

  “What’s Tuesday? It’s serious, Tuesday. It’s acceptance. It’s not funny. If Monday is the first day of the rest of your life, then Tuesday, well, Tuesday is all the rest of the rest of your life. Stick with Monday for a second. Comedy. 501 Pennsylvania Avenue?”

  “I know it well,” Hazel beamed. “I love that project.”

  Elliot held up his hand. “Not exactly as presented.”

  “The writing, I thought, was sharp.”

  “Rather too. Dialogue in the pilot script drew attention to itself and not the characters.”

  “I’m surprised you chose it.”

  “This all comes from that demographic profile you gave me, Hazel. Of the many things I took from it was the Canadian obsession with America. With 501 we throw the regulators a bone while doing what’s essentially an American sitcom. A comedy set at the Canadian Embassy in Washington: it’s perfect.”

  “I thought maybe The Border served that purpose.”

  The Border was a broad half-hour comedy about a unit of Canadian Border Services. They were predictable misfits, always running afoul but finally getting the better of their over-equipped, trigger-happy, paranoid American counterparts down the road.

  “No, I like 501 Pennsylvania more than The Border. I’m thinking of Kulvinder Singh.”

  “Who?”

  “I imagined a bunch of people working in a weather office as the audience,” said Elliot. “Kulvinder Singh is one of them. He’s a New Canadian. To him border security is a serious matter. Since 9/11 he’s had trouble crossing into the States despite the fact that he’s Sikh. And horror stories dating back to the partition of India are family lore.”

  “You’ve lost me, Elliot. This Sikh guy you’ve imagined?”

  “Kulvinder Singh.”

  “Right. He’s not going to find abuses of power at the border funny.”

  “Exactly. In defence of The Border, his kids could find the whole thing hilarious. They might eat up the show precisely because it so obviously transgresses a feeling held by their parents. But this is the CBC, young people don’t watch it.”

  “You’ve imagined this Kulvinder Singh’s family too?”

  “Not yet,” said Elliot. A shimmering martini was set before him. Hazel took a sip from her juice and turned back to the floral arrangement. “Is there something about the flowers, Hazel?”

  “Oh, heavens, no. Don’t think me rude, Elliot, but the windows . . .” Hazel glanced at the view and then made a gesture of pushing it back with the flattened palm of her hand. “My vertigo.”

  “Of course. You mentioned that before. I’m sorry — I had no idea when I booked it. Do you want to change tables, or go somewhere else?”

  “No, no, no. I’ve heard only good things about this place. It’s not that serious, just a tingle.”

  “I’m sure they would understand.”

  “No. This is wonderful.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “501 Pennsylvania Avenue is a very — what, ‘barbed’? — satire,” Hazel said, making it clear she wished not to discuss her phobia. “The character of the ambassador — I mean, he’s venal, he’s almost criminal — and you know I love him, he’s funny. The embassy staff are so jaded. His wife, she’s screwing half of Washington. In the past it would have been considered too much for CBC.”

  “I said it would have to be changed. Number one, satire is not on. Critics love it, real people turn it off. 501 Pennsylvania as currently imagined is too scathing, too ironic.” Elliot tasted his martini. It was delicious. “Do you realize what portion of our audience is on antidepressants? The medication makes their world literal; they take it to see and accept things only as they are. The inability to comprehend irony is a side effect of the drugs.”

  “So change it to . . . ?”

  “Lighten it up, make it a broader comedy. The ambassador, make him a hapless but well-meaning goof. Give him and the wife some kids. The chief of staff — do you remember a show called Benson?”

  “The creative team behind 501 — they’re pretty attached to the satirical aspect of the show, I mean, for them that’s the whole point. I don’t know if . . .”
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  “Hazel, I have some experience on the creative side of this business and I think I can say with some confidence that if we say, ‘Make it Happy Days or we’re going with The Border instead of your show,’ then they’ll change it.”

  “I know that Jeremy McManis is going to want to discuss it.”

  “Who’s Jeremy McManis?”

  “Creative Head responsible for the project.”

  “Oh, right, I’d forgotten all about him.” Elliot snapped his fingers. “I’ll get Jeremy to read the writers the riot act, that’ll be much easier. Next —”

  “What time slot are you thinking about?” Hazel sipped a bird’s portion from her glass of juice.

  “Nine o’clock.”

  “Okay . . . and . . . what I’m getting at is the news. Are you going to leave it at ten o’clock?”

  “I am.”

  “You don’t know how relieved Leo Karek is going to be. He’s been phoning me at home. Having not heard anything, he assumed the worst.”

  “It’s not that I didn’t think about it. I mean, it’s stupid to be blowing that slot on news. But in the end, given our limited dough, I thought we might as well stick with fewer of the better shows. And I’ve figured out another way to address the news-in-prime-time problem.”

  “Oh?” Hazel sounded worried.

  “Yep. If you’re going to have news in prime-time, then make it prime-time news. These guys are always starting with the grimmest shit, the biggest disaster. ‘It bleeds, it leads.’ Or worse, ‘the deepening crisis in Ottawa.’” Elliot made a gesture of hanging himself. “What about the entertaining human-interest stuff? Let it lead for a change.”

  “They will resist that.”

  Elliot waved off Hazel’s caution.

  “The last half-hour can still be a wrist-slasher. It’s not like it’s been trenchant analysis in a long time — everyone knows it’s showbiz. They’re the worst sort of ratings whores in News.” Elliot waited for a rise but Hazel said nothing. He continued. “Another thing we need: national weather. How can we have a national news broadcast and not have a national weather forecast? There should be a short hit at the top of the hour. And we need some weather celebs too, a team with, like . . . a goofy, affable guy, a hot babe . . .”