“Mostly the quality of the writing. And related to that, the character development. When one of those movies doesn’t work, it’s usually because it’s horribly written and/or the script hasn’t done the work of convincing you the couple is attracted to each other, so then you don’t care if obstacles get in their way and keep them apart. Another of my pet peeves is that the female characters used to all be sort of cutesy, like having flour on their nose after they baked cookies and not knowing it. And now they’re all a mess, like waking up really hungover and getting fired. I want to create characters who aren’t flawless but also aren’t ridiculous or incompetent at life.” After a second, I added, “Wow, was that two rants in a row? I swear I’m actually not a total asshole.”
“You actually don’t seem like a total asshole.”
“I think I’ll leave at the end of next season, thirteen months from now.” Oddly, I hadn’t told this to anyone else yet, including Viv, Henrietta, or my agent. “And then I will have been here exactly ten years. But who knows if I’ll really be able to cut the cord?”
“I’m glad you’re here now, tonight.” Noah pointed at my computer screen. “To save me from myself.” After a pause, he said, “I have to ask—” and he leaned forward and tapped the piece of paper with the two lists of words.
“The first column is words the network censor has allowed in sketches,” I said. “The second column is words the network censor said were offensive and had to be changed. It’s almost like there’s a double standard for terms related to men’s sexuality and terms related to women’s, huh?”
“That’s crazy. Even pink? And wet?”
Hearing Noah say pink and wet together—I felt an unprecedented sympathy for the censor, who, as it happened, was currently a woman in her fifties named Janice. Aloud, I said, “It’s all contextual, of course. Obviously, you can have somebody say ‘That’s a nice pink sweater.’ The problem with the standards rules is that they aren’t even rules. It’s just at the discretion of one person.”
“Do you think getting censored has ever forced you to find a workaround that’s better than what you originally had?”
“For sure,” I said. “But I still don’t like the hypocrisy.”
After a companionable silence, he said, “If I never sang ‘Making Love in July’ again, I’d be okay with that. I wrote it when I was eighteen, and I’m grateful, if it’s possible to feel grateful to a song, because it opened so many doors for me. But the chord repetitions are simplistic and, yeah, it is kind of cheesy. The reason I still perform it isn’t for my own enjoyment.” We made eye contact, and he said, “Obviously, we live in a world where fans have ways to be very vocal when they think they’ve been shortchanged.”
So this was behind all his questions about my favorite musicians—he felt defensive about the Cheesemonger idea I’d pitched. His declaration that sketches worked better when the host was making fun of himself notwithstanding, perhaps he was as vain and touchy as anyone else.
“I haven’t written the Cheesemonger sketch yet,” I said. “My instinct is that it could be fun, but you’re under no obligation to do it if you think it’s dumb or insulting or you just don’t want to.”
“I have to see how it turns out, right?”
I tried to think of a gracious way to convey that if it was likely he’d push to cut the sketch, I’d prefer not to spend any of the next ten hours writing it.
“Random question,” he said, “but are there any male singer-songwriters you like?”
“Oh, sure. Jason Isbell. Neil Young. And you, of course.”
“Of course. Which would you say are your three favorites of my songs?” In this moment, surprisingly enough, he didn’t sound vain. If I hadn’t known better, hadn’t known that charming people was part of his job description and that he dated twenty-two-year-old models, I might even have thought he was flirting.
“It’s hard to choose,” I said. “Something I really admire is the level of quality you’ve operated at for so long.”
“Nice try. Just three.”
“Okay, well—” I held up my right fist then extended my thumb. “One, ‘Making Love in July.’ Then, hmm—” Frantically, I searched in my mind. He was ubiquitous enough that even though I didn’t like his music, I surely knew at least three of his song titles, but it was difficult to summon them on command. Then a title came from nowhere, and, releasing my index finger, I exclaimed, “?‘Best Laid Plans!’?” What had he said was the name of his song with Amy Ray on backup? Or had I already revealed my ignorance? I then recalled a collaboration he’d done with the mononymic pop singer Fran?oise. “Oh, and ‘Sepia.’?” I wasn’t sure if “Sepia” counted more as Noah’s song or Fran?oise’s, but I did sort of like it. Plus, I was now triumphantly holding up three fingers.
“It’s an amazing coincidence,” he said, “given what a fan you are, because those are my three most popular songs. In fact, those are probably the songs that someone who’s never really listened to my music would be familiar with. Wouldn’t it be wild if you wrote an entire sketch about how cheesy my music is, but you’d barely ever listened to it?”
“If by wild you mean egregiously irresponsible, then yes,” I said. “But since I’m the president of the Manhattan chapter of your fan club, that suggestion is deeply wounding.”
He was grinning and shaking his head, and I was grinning, too, and I said, “You know how I said I’m not a big asshole? Maybe I am a big asshole.”
“Impossible.”
“When the fan club meets, it’s in a church basement and we hang a life-sized poster of you on the wall and gaze at it.”
“Oh, really?” he said, and he then did something very confusing. He turned toward me, cupped my chin with his hand, and looked intently into my eyes. “Like this?” he said. “Is this what you do?”
Was the gesture brotherly? Or flirtatious? Or just strange?
It seemed he was wondering the same because he quickly dropped his hand and said, “Sorry. I feel like it’s weird I just did that.”
Because of how surprised I was, I overcompensated. In a merry voice, I said, “Around here, you have to try much harder to be weird. If you peed in a pickle jar and left it on my desk, that would be a start. Anyway, seriously, you’ll meet with Nigel and Elliot and the producers after the table read, and I’m sure they’ll let you have the final say on the Cheesemonger sketch.”
“No, I trust the process,” he said. “I’ve always been under the impression that when—” But I didn’t learn what he’d always been under the impression about because this was the moment we were interrupted. Autumn DiCanio, who was head of TNO’s talent department, appeared in the doorway, along with one of her assistants. Most of Autumn’s assistants were pretty, long-haired blondes just out of college—this also described Autumn herself, except she was forty—and because I had trouble telling the assistants apart, I wasn’t sure of this one’s name.
“Noah!” Autumn said warmly. “We’ve been looking everywhere for you! How’re you doing?”
It occurred to me for the first time that it was rather odd this revision had just happened in my office, that Noah had found his way to me solo. Hosts were regularly in the office during the wee hours, especially as the week went on, but they were almost always chaperoned by Autumn or a member of her staff, or writers visited the host in his or her eighth-floor dressing room, supplicant-style.