‘I told you that there would be consequences if he spoke to you like that again,’ he said, ‘and I meant it.’
On the surface, Murray and I had never been such model employees.
Marry Me, Julietproduction meetings had never been so short, because we agreed with everything Tony said. We still made suggestions, of course – it would have been a dead giveaway that something was up if we didn’t – but they were all ‘yes, ands’, taking Tony’s worst impulses and making them bigger, broader, more spectacular – and much, much worse.
‘Can I ask you a question?’ Suzette asked me, catching me alone in the women’s bathroom.
‘Of course,’ I said, fixing my lipstick.
She bit her lip.
I raised an eyebrow at her in the mirror.
‘This season is going to be a trainwreck, right?’ she said eventually. ‘Like an absolute, complete, total and utter trainwreck.’
‘Yes.’ I cappedBlood of My Enemiesand put it back in my bag.
The words came out of her so fast it was like an explosion. ‘Then why are you and Murray going along with it?’
She put her hand on the paper towel dispenser and leaned on it heavily, as if her knees were about to buckle. ‘You pitch for more socially responsible storytelling all the time. You fought Tony on this idea. And now you’re – what, just leaning into it?’
I did not particularly want to gaslight Suzette. She was a promising producer with real talent. Tony hadn’t picked up on how strange it was that Murray and I were suddenly on board with all of his worst ideas, but she had. And I was not a liar.
But the more people knew about our strategy of extremely malicious compliance, the more likely it was that it would blow up in our faces.
So I said, ‘You know what people do to trainwrecks, Suzette? They watch them.’
‘We’re going to get destroyed. Everyone will be talking about what a regressive, misogynist, problematic show this is. We’re going to get more complaints than any other show in the history of time.’
Exactly. And the network was going to need a scapegoat.
‘Hate-watching is still watching,’ I said. ‘And if people are talking about us, at least we’re in the conversation.’
Murray and I reconvened at his place later that night. ‘That was a good line to run,’ he said, when I told him what had happened. ‘I don’t like keeping Suzette in the dark either – or her thinking that we both suddenly love hating women – but we can’t give the game away now. Loose lips sink ships.’
‘That’s what I thought. We can sit her down later and explain why we did this, but if she slipped and it got back to Tony…’
‘It’s kind of ironic, isn’t it?’ Murray said. ‘How furious he would be if he found out our master plan to bring him down was to… agree with him?’
I snorted. He grinned.
‘Come on.’ He opened the whiteboard app on his tablet. ‘Let’s work out how we can plus him up some more in the next episode.’
We took a quick break a couple of hours later for dinner. ‘What’s the likelihood, do you think,’ I asked, scraping half the container of pad thai onto my plate and then swapping with him for the green curry, ‘that what I said to Suzette actually turns out to be true?’
‘Which bit?’ Murray took some roti out of the bag then passed it to me. ‘About how people love trainwrecks?’
‘There’s a chance Tony gets rewarded for this, not fired. You know Fucking Greg already leans conservative. He might look at the ratings and say fuck the outrage.’
‘He might. That was always a risk.’
‘If that happens, where do we draw the line? Sacrificing one season’s worth of women to Tony’s misogyny is one thing. If Greg loves this, and demands more, more, more…’
‘Then we’ll re-evaluate.’
Murray reached across the table and touched the back of my hand lightly, with just one finger. ‘We got headhunted off the back ofAdjudication Station. If this awful season turns into some enormous success, we can find new jobs. We’ve got good reputations. Someone will want us.’
‘Both of us?’
