‘They have! I’m right! You rigged it.’
‘Sorry there’s only instant coffee in here,’ I said, spooning it from the jar into our mugs, adding an extra spoonful of coffee to mine and two sugars to hers.
‘Murray,why? You’re the best producer in the country. You don’t need to rig a season to get people to do what you want.’
I put the coffee down in front of her and sat back down.
‘You’ve just made life a million times harder for yourself,’ she said. ‘You’ve taken all the flexibility out. You’re stuck with a Romeo and a winner who don’t have any chemistry, and you’ve closed off a bunch of other narrative possibilities. And boy-Dylan is exactly the type to fall head over heels for someone, and—’
‘I have to get it right!’
‘Get what right?’
‘This season,’ I said. ‘If Fucking Greg is ever going to let us cast diversely again – if he’s ever going to shut up about the heartland audience – I have to get this season right. I have to deliver the most dopamine and serotonin-filled feel-good hit you’ve ever seen. It’s got to be a fairytale. And the only way I can guarantee a fairytale is to write it in advance.’
‘That’s not true,’ Lily said. ‘Not with the way you can work people.’
‘I couldn’t work Brett, when it came down to it,’ I said. ‘This season has stakes. This season matters. I can’t risk it not going to plan. So yes, I rigged it.’
There were three reasons the season mattered.
Firstly, there was the reason I’d told Fucking Greg. The reason Lily and I had both told Fucking Greg, over and over again. When you only told stories about white people falling in love, you were communicating that only white people deserved love. This story mattered.
I did not think of myself as a good person. I manipulated people for a living, after all, and I liked doing it.
But you didn’t have to be a saint to believe in basic principles of social inclusion. If I could tell a genuinely heartwarming love story about two likeable and charming people of colour on a show as big asMarry Me, Juliet, that would be a thing I could point to that did something positive in the world. Maybe eventothe world. It was probably a very white saviour thing of me to think (Lily had certainly laughed at me and called me that, more than once), but that was why I’d got into reality TV in the first place, thirteen years ago.The size of the platform we had meant that the stories we told could have real reach, real impact.
Secondly, there was the reason Fucking Greg had given me. If I didn’t deliver a ratings bonanza fairytale for the ages, I’d lose my job.
Then there was the third reason.
Lily.
It was always Lily, in the end.
We’d been working towards this for years. Not just this season – we’d been working towards systemic change in the franchise – but this was what I’d got fixated on, after Jeff had died.
If I could just dooneperfect diversely cast season. If I could lay it at her feet and sayI made you this, I know you’re in so much pain and you need space and I respect that, but this is for you, please remember how much I love you,then it would…
I’d never been able to finish the thought. I was a pro at leaving a silence at the end of an unfinished sentence to make someone finish it, but I couldn’t make that trick work on myself.
I just knew I had to make this season work. For her. I couldn’t bring Jeff back, but I could give her this thing that she wanted, and then maybe she’d be on the way to being all right again.
Although I’d never anticipated that she’d behere.
And I still had no real idea, I reflected, standing next to the cameras and watching Lily terrorise an assortment of the other Juliets at the Episode Two Last Chance Party, why she was doing this.
I believed she wanted to help me. I believed she wanted to reinvent herself. I even believed, cautiously, that this wasn’t some kind of extreme emotional reaction to Jeff’s death, given she was clearly in firm and precise control of everything she was doing.
But you didn’t do something like this – so big, so dramatic, so incredibly public and irreversibly life-altering – without a major fucking reason. You didn’t take the nuclear option without deep, profound cause. Not if you were a Machiavellian twelve-dimension-chess-playing mastermind like Lily Ong.
And she wasn’t the only problem I had to solve. Not even close.
We’d elected to send Juliet-Dylan on the Episode Three single date, in an effort to light a fire under her and Romeo-Dylan. I pulled a lot of tricks out of my bag to try and generate some sparks.
One of our tried-and-true date formats was the messy date. We used it whenever we needed to communicate that two people were sexually attracted to each other, because it was an excuse for them to touch each other. Sometimes we did it with paint, sometimes with massage oil, but this time, we did it with food: cookies, specifically, which had the added benefit of being coded very domestic and wholesome and couple-y.
We set the Dylans up in a makeshift kitchen in a tent by the lake. We laid out a bunch of ingredients and baking equipment, along with a laminated recipe, and I made it very,veryclear to them that I expected it to descend into a playful food fight.
