The Next Best Thing

by Jennifer Weiner

“Yeah.” Anger was making a belated arrival, cutting through the cotton that had wrapped my limbs. It was unforgivably embarrassing, the network’s making me learn this way, in public, with half the bloggers in Hollywood finding out before I had.

  “Look,” said my agent, talking fast. “For a first time out, you had a great run. You got a show picked up and on the air. The reviews were solid. That’s an achievement. You grew so much, and you did a great job, and that’s what people are going to remember. Anyone we want to set a meeting with is going to be happy to sit down with us. I know you probably feel like shit—”

  “Not really,” I said, remembering Dave’s I love you.

  Shelly didn’t pause. “But this is a good thing. Seriously. Trust me. You’re going to be fine. Better than fine. Let’s set a lunch later this week. We’ll regroup and figure out our next move.”

  “Okay,” I said. We hung up, and I sat on the bench with my phone in my hand, watching the screen flash. The network called. Then the studio. I let all the executives talk to my voice mail. I’d be able to speak to them at some point, but first I wanted to try to ensure that my actors didn’t learn the bad news the way I had.

  I called them all: first Cady, then Pete, then Penny, then Taryn. I had a brief conversation with Pete and left messages for the rest of them, following up with texts. I am so sorry, I wrote. So grateful for your hard work, I said. Hope we’ll get to do it again someday soon. THANK YOU.

  When that was done, I put my phone into my purse and sat still, head tilted back, eyes shut, the sun warm in my hair. I tried to remember the good parts, the way my heart had swelled at the first meeting at the network, where someone had taped signs reading THE NEXT BEST THING to the conference-room doors. The time we’d all gone out for pizza the night before we shot our first episode, when Cady had picked bits of sausage and strings of cheese off her slice with her fingertips and sent her butterscotch budino back without taking a bite. Spending my days in the writers’ room, in the rollicking company of a half-dozen people who delighted in making one another laugh. I pictured Sam, tugging morosely at his shoulder-length locks, saying, “I haven’t gotten laid since my last haircut,” and Paul, without missing a beat, asking, “Who’s your barber?” I’d had friends. I’d had fun. I’d gotten to tell a story to the world, and if it hadn’t gone exactly the way I’d wanted, well, that was a story, too.

  My telephone rang with a number I didn’t recognize, and on a whim I decided to answer. “Hello?”

  “Ruth Saunders? This is Alice Michaels from ABS.” Ah. My old friend Lumpy Alice, the sleepy sack of potatoes in a dress. Vince Raymer’s old assistant, the one who’d gotten Dave stuck in the bathroom before getting promoted and becoming one of the cadre of executives who sometimes seemed bent on nothing less than the complete destruction of the show I’d dreamed of.

  I thought about playing dumb, pretending I had no idea why she was calling. But two wrongs wouldn’t make a right. I decided to make it easy on Alice, to spare her the awkwardness. Besides, if she hadn’t been too lazy to find out whether her building was wheelchair-friendly, maybe Dave and I would never have gotten together. Maybe I should write her a thank-you note. “If you’re calling to tell me we’re canceled, I already know.”

  Alice didn’t answer. Nor did she pause to say that she was sorry. “We’ll need you to turn in your keys and your ID by the end of the business day, and sign off on the last budget.”

  Oh, I thought, oh, you are so not getting a thank-you note. It was unbelievable. On a day when a bunch of funny, smart, talented writers and performers, not to mention cameramen and crew, wardrobe ladies, hair and makeup artists and the craft-service guys had all lost their jobs, this slow-moving, sullen mediocrity with no discernible wit or sense of humor had kept hers. She’d probably be getting a promotion. She was like a cockroach in a nuclear war, the thing you couldn’t crush and couldn’t kill. Showrunners would rise and fall, the tectonic plates would shift, California would slide into the ocean, and Lumpy Alice would outlive us all. She’d probably run a network someday. It was unfair, so unfair. Better to die on your feet than live on your knees, Big Dave had been fond of saying . . . and here I was, dead on my knees. I’d done everything they’d wanted. We’d been canceled anyhow.

  “You need my keys?” I asked Alice.

  “That’s correct.”

  I shut my eyes. Later, I thought, I would get my toenails painted bright red, and I’d drink iced coffee with sweetened condensed milk. I’d pick up something for dinner, chicken sausages or turkey burgers, and Dave would cook outside while I mashed potatoes and sautéed spinach in the kitchen. We’d eat by the pool, and I’d light citronella candles to keep the bugs at bay. Later, once the meal was finished and the dishes were cleared, we would swim together. On Saturday morning I’d go to the flea market on Melrose with my grandmother and her husband, and on Sunday afternoon, I’d go hiking in Runyon Canyon. I had enough money saved to survive for a year, maybe even two. I could pay my rent and my health insurance and my car loan, maybe even take an actual vacation, without touching my principal, the money from the insurance settlement, and what I’d put away while I’d been working. Maybe someday I’d make another television show, or maybe I’d be happier writing episodes of someone else’s and letting the actors and the executives and the ratings and reviews be their problem, not mine. Maybe I’d go back to helping kids with their college essays, only instead of helping just the ones whose parents could write me thousand-dollar checks, I’d also do it for kids who couldn’t afford my services.

  My call waiting beeped, and I looked down. SECURITY, said the screen. “Goodbye, Alice,” I said, and answered the second call. “Hello?”

  “Ruthie?” It took me a minute to place the voice. It belonged to Cliff, the middle-aged man in the white shirt and brown pants who stood in the security booth and lifted up the gate to let me onto the lot every morning, the one who called, “Hey, showrunner!” as I steered my Prius past his window. “It’s Cliff, from the gate. I saw Deadline. Is it true?”

  “True,” I said, amused by the idea that even the security guards kept up with industry news.

  “Aw, shit. Listen. I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am.”

  “Wow. Thank you. I appreciate that.”

  “I’ve worked here a long time. I’ve seen a lot of asshats. Pardon my French.”

  “Thank you,” I said, trying my best to keep my voice steady. “You know, it happens. And we had fun.”

  “That’s what really matters. You be good now,” he told me. “I bet I’ll see you again.” I’m not so sure, I thought as I hung up the phone and pulled my ID and office keys out of my bag, weighing them in my hand. A thought was slowly forming in the back of my mind, a radical idea, something that could get me in trouble . . . but something that could be amazing, provided I could pull it off.

  Somewhere, in the depths of my hard drive, I still had the version of the script I’d turned in to the network, the script before I’d rewritten it for a slimmed-down Cady and removed any references to Daphne’s size, before I’d added Pete’s character and Taryn’s character and the scene where the grandma gets so cruelly dumped. Somewhere, on my contact list, I still had phone numbers for Annie Tait, and Carter DeVries, my favorite of the three potential Daphnes. Before I could think twice or second-guess myself, I dialed Ginger’s number. Lucky for me, my most senior writer answered on the first ring.

  “You want to do what?” she asked, sounding dubious but not immediately dismissive.

  “The sets are still up.” I wasn’t actually positive that this was true, but it had to be too soon for anyone to have taken them down. Eventually, other set designers would come by to scavenge our walls and furniture, the same way we’d taken the bits of other shows’ sets—a wall here, a door there, a window reputed to be from Arnold’s bedroom on Diff’rent Strokes—but I didn’t think it had happened yet. “The props, the lights, the costumes . . .” Cady’s clothes wouldn’t fit Carter, but never mind.
“Everything’s still there. We’ll do it in one night. One take per scene. We’ll shoot it on flip-cams and find someone to edit it . . .”

  “Why not our guys?”

  “I don’t want to get them involved,” I said. “The fewer people, the better.”

  “I think,” said Ginger, “you should at least give everyone the option of being involved if they want.”

  “The option of committing professional suicide?” I asked, only half joking.

  Ginger sounded somber. “You know, you’re not the only one who noticed when there was a difference between what we wanted in the room and what happened on the air. You’re not the only one who’s been through this wringer. If you want a do-over, I think you owe people the option of deciding for themselves if they want to be part of it.”

  My face felt hot. I swallowed hard before I said, “Right. Of course. I’ll start making calls.”

  “Let me call the editors. You call the writers.”

  “What about the actors? No, you know what? Never mind. I’ll handle that part.” I found myself on my feet, arms swinging as I walked. I hadn’t felt so energized and excited since I’d gotten the green-light call, and even then, it had been enthusiasm tempered with pragmatism, excitement mixed with the realities of the situation. Now there were no constraints, no realities, no advertisers to impress or executives to appease, no critics, no ratings. No compromises. “If we actually do this, what’s the worst thing that could happen?”

  “We could get in trouble with the network,” Ginger said. “They still own the show and all the characters.”

  “They canceled us,” I pointed out. “What do they care? I say we go for it. We shoot it, we edit it, we put it up on YouTube. It’ll be like a thank-you note to the six people who were watching. And I’ll actually be able to see it the way it was meant to be.”

  Ginger didn’t answer. I waited, feeling dizzy with a combination of excitement and terror. “I bet my dad could do the lighting,” she finally said. “When’s this going down?”

  “Tonight,” I said. Word was out already, and if we waited any longer, the door would swing shut. Whether or not the network began dismantling our sets, the guards and the producers from other shows on the lot would know that we had no business being there unless we’d come to clear out our desks. I paced along the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street, my head filling with plans, figuring out what we’d need and who to call and whether it was even possible to pull this off. “And then come meet me in the writers’ room. Before we do anything else, I’ve got to see if my keys still work.”

  * * *

  Carter DeVries’s agent said it was either the dumbest or the gutsiest thing she’d ever heard. Then she refused to ask her client if she was interested. “It’s fine for you to go burn bridges, but Carter’s got a new one-woman thing she’s working on, and she’s up for a part on a new scripted reality show. I’m not going to jeopardize that.”

  “Is it Butterface?” The agent didn’t answer. I cringed, thinking of Carter, of whom Lanny had drawled, I wouldn’t fuck her, on some stupid joke of a reality show, competing to become pretty enough so that men who didn’t deserve her in the first place would find her desirable. “Just tell her to call me. If she thinks it’s crazy, she can tell me no.”

  “I’m not crazy,” the agent retorted, “whether she is or not. So no. I’m sorry. I feel for you. But I can’t let my client sign up for this.”

  Fine, I thought. There’s more than one way to skin a cat. I tracked down Carter on Facebook, and she didn’t think it was crazy. She thought it sounded amazing. She even agreed to bring her own wardrobe—the outfit Daphne wears to work at the restaurants in Boston and Miami, the casual clothes she’d wear in the apartment—and to see if she could recruit a friend to do hair and makeup.

  “I can’t pay you,” I said. Then I thought: If I’m putting my own career on the line, why not spend my own money? “You know what? I totally can pay you. I can pay you a thousand dollars.” I could offer everyone else whatever their rate would have been for one night’s work, and so what if that depleted my reserves? I had all this cash I’d been saving for a rainy day, and if this didn’t qualify, nothing ever would.

  “I’m there,” Carter said. “And by the way, I would have done this for free pizza and a bag of Skittles. This is going to be awesome!”

  So we had our Daphne. Penny Weaver had left for the Maldives, her manager coolly informed me, and I didn’t think Annie Tait would welcome my call. “Let me get Mom on the phone,” said Ginger, who’d joined me in the writers’ room, our war room, with a sack full of takeout from Chin Chin and her laptop. I’d printed out a dozen copies of the original pilot script, plus a contact list of all 186 people who’d had a hand in the show’s creation, and the two of us were working the phones.

  “Do you think she’ll do it?”

  Ginger pursed her lips and widened her eyes. “My mother? Are you kidding? I think she’s probably in her car circling the executive parking lot right now, just waiting for someone to remember she’s alive. So yes, I think she’ll do it.” She paused. “What about your grandma?”

  “Honestly? I think she’d rather watch than act.”

  “Give her a line,” Ginger advised, and I promised that I would.

  “Now. Who’s going to play Brad?” I asked, figuring that whoever we found would probably do a better job of learning his lines than Pete Paxton had.

  “I’ll bet Sam would be good.”

  “Sam the writer? Our Sam?”

  “He did that video,” she said. Her fingers rattled over the keyboard, and there was Sam, getting escorted out of a Lululemon store as he sang the praises of the cashier’s “Bikram booty,” which he rhymed with “spin-class cutie.”

  “You call him. I’ll get extras,” I said, and dialed my grandmother’s number, and said the words I suspected she lived to hear. “Grandma, I need your help.”

  “Name it,” she said.

  “Do you think you can get about twenty extras to come to the Radford lot tonight at nine o’clock? I need . . .” I glanced at my script and the notes I’d made. “All ages and ethnicities, for the restaurant scene, another six for the apartment building . . .”

  “Ruth Rachel Saunders, what are you up to?” she asked.

  I was smiling, grinning from ear to ear, as happy as I’d been at work since this process had begun. “We’re putting on a show.”

  “Well, then, you’ll need an audience,” she said. “Leave it to me.”

  I called Cliff, the security guard, and told him that there’d be people coming through the gates that night for what I described as a farewell party for The Next Best Thing. Then I called all the writers. “More pilot reshoots?” asked George. “You promised us we were done with all that.”

  “This is special,” I said. I explained to him, like I’d explained to everyone else, what the plan was, what we’d do and how we’d do it. “If you don’t want to be part of this, I completely understand.”

  “You can Alan Smithee me?” he asked—Hollywood code for leaving his name off the credits or giving him a pseudonym.

  “Whatever you want,” I said. “But we were a team. We were a team when we did this, and I want us to be a team if we’re going to try to do it right.”

  “Gotcha,” he said. “I’m in.”

  By six o’clock the pizzas and drinks I’d ordered had arrived, and Carter, and her friend Matt the makeup artist, who’d gone to work on our cast: Carter as Daphne, Leanna Fairfax as Nana Trudy, Sam King as Brad Dermansky and Sam’s girlfriend Debbie in Taryn Montaine’s part. We’d gotten the guy who’d played one of Nana’s boyfriend’s evil sons to double as Daphne’s soon-to-be-ex, Phil. My grandmother happily agreed to her one-line role; then she’d sit in the audience and take it all in. I’d wanted to call in a skeleton crew to handle the lights and the props and the cameras, knowing the kind of trouble people could get into with the network and their unions for doing what I’d planned o
n, but somehow, the word had gotten out.

  By the time I poked my head through the elephant doors and took a look at the stage, Reilly, my line producer, was sweeping the floor, and Abby, the prop master, was lining up vases and teapots and making sure Cady’s Rollerblades fit Carter. The actors were running their lines. George and Paul were fiddling with the lights. My plan had been to film with cell phones, and with the handheld digital camera Paul and Claire had bought after their daughter was born, and I felt my throat tighten when three of the four cameramen quietly arrived and took their spots behind their rigs.

  “You guys don’t have to do this,” I said.

  “Ah, there was nothing good on cable tonight,” said Matty, who tended to speak for the rest of them. “You gonna call Chad?”

  I shuddered at the thought. “I don’t think he’d be interested,” I said. I also didn’t think that Chad would work for anything less than his quote of $75,000, and while I could afford to spend some money on this insanity, I couldn’t afford that.

  “So you’re in charge?”

  “I guess so. What a cliché. Turns out what I really want to do is direct.” I looked at my phone, checking the time, as my grandmother led her friends into the bleachers and then rounded up the ones who’d be extras and started telling them where to sit or stand and what to do. It was just after nine o’clock. My plan was to begin the shoot at ten. I’d already called Dave and said I’d be spending the night at my grandmother’s, that she was having a minor surgical procedure performed early the next morning and had asked me to drive her and wait to bring her home.

  “She doesn’t want her husband?” Dave had asked.

  “It’s a girl thing,” I’d answered, suspecting that any intimation of the female anatomy—my grandmother’s in particular—would head off follow-up questions. It was the first lie of our relationship, but I felt okay about telling it. If Dave found out what I was doing, he’d either try to talk me out of it or drive down here to help. This was, I had decided, my show and mine alone. If I got in trouble, well, my show had been canceled already, but I couldn’t risk getting Dave in a bad spot with the network. “Come home when you can,” he said, and I felt my heart leap. Was his place where I lived now? “I miss you,” he said, and I told him that I’d see him soon.