Easy to Like (17 page)

“See you at the office, boss,” Hazel
said and closed the door.

AFTER A THIRD ATTEMPT
to call
Soledad failed he tried Lucy. It was early morning in Los Angeles and her not
answering suggested she and Ascension were travelling. Hazel could not be raised
at any of her phone numbers and did not respond to his text.

He went to an afternoon screening of
The Centuri Protocol.
Sure enough, Elliot was
credited as a producer. He was in for points. Given box office reports, this was
going to be a significant chunk of change.

It wasn't a drama in the old sense,
with story and character; it was rather a purely visceral entertainment
experience. It played not on the eyes and the ears and the mind but rather the
kidneys. It was a new kind of loud for Elliot. He supposed maybe that
was
what it was like to be inside an explosion, or to
be incinerated. The actress Virginia Whalen, who also had a turn in Elliot's
The Nevada Girl
, was raped, noisily, by an angry
metaloreptilian alien.

Elliot left before the end and walked
to Lai Wah Heen Chinese Restaurant for Christmas dinner.

THE BUREACRACY
of the
institution was virulent. Elliot's desk, which he'd once feared was suspiciously
empty, was now so cluttered as to be impossible to navigate. The credenza at his
back was a dumping ground. Both were off limits to Stella, as Elliot claimed,
falsely, that there was order in the teetering stacks.

Sorting the potentially worthy
proposals and show pitches from the piles would have taken him days. Instead he
called for fresh copies of those he could remember and took them home. Too many
distractions at the office to give them the attention they deserved, he said. He
knew that somewhere in his office were another half dozen or so worthy projects
of which he could not remember the working title and which, therefore, would not
move forward. This seemed arbitrary, but Elliot reassured himself with the
thought that if the titles or concepts weren't catchy enough to have lodged
themselves in his head, they probably wouldn't do so in the ever-shortening
attention span of the viewing public.

Consideration of the population's
generalized ADD helped him recall the audience profile Hazel had worked up at
his request, the “everybody” he was going to make the CBC serve “every way.” He
was able to find this fat document amidst the mess because she'd enclosed it in
a memorable shiny red binder.

Once home, with a second glass of
decent Bourgeuil, Hazel's survey was the first thing he reached for.

Canadians, he saw, liked to think they
were more liberal and more cosmopolitan than they were. Their tastes in all
things, from coffee (they liked it weak and milky and sweet; the double-double
was their brew) to potatoes (they liked them in a variety of plain preparations,
and often) were described, kindly, as simple; less generously, as pedestrian.
Elliot flipped through the pages. Easily embarrassed, they couldn't stand to see
even a nipple on display. Though they went to church less and less often, more
of them than seemed sensible remained “believers.” Cahill had this right. The
exception was the burgeoning evangelical population, who, if their numbers
continued to grow as they had, would soon be a powerful minority. These people
worshipped a lot, and hard.

He paged ahead to “Economics.” Contrary
to what the citizenry imagined, the gap between the wealthiest members and the
less fortunate was widening. And in numbers, the poor and destitute were large
for an industrialized society. The treatment of the Native population was a
horror show, an apartheid system where the townships were so remote they could
forever be ignored.

Backwards a dozen pages to “Health and
Welfare”: Canadians were overweight, but not in the gross manner of their
southern cousins. A quarter of adults were depressed enough to seek treatment,
usually in the form of medication.

“Demographics”: once of English, Irish,
Scottish, and French extraction, they were more and more of Asian stock.

“Education”: Most of them couldn't read
and comprehend a newspaper.

“Self-Image”: They felt a connection to
the land, to the wilderness, but few of them ever went. They were small-town
people living in cities.

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: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: Spray

Loschem will not provide Rubigan on
credit. Cash sale.

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: Re. Spray

Why not?

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: Re. Re. Spray

Late payment last year.

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: oidium & other
fungus

Inclined not spray this year, get a lot of
air in the canopy.

From: [email protected]