Turn of the Century by Kurt Andersen

making it up as he goes along. “Everything vetted, nothing confidential. Just enough to give an authentic insider’s feel. Not transparency. More like translucency.”
    “Clever,” Mose says.
    “Multiplatform it,” Featherstone says, winking, verging on meaninglessness. Then he chants, pumping one arm, “Convergence, convergence, convergence.”
    “It’s Lizzie’s idea,” George says. “My wife.”
    “I know Lizzie,” Mose says. He doesn’t wear a watch, so he checks Featherstone’s and looks up at George and Emily. “I need to be at Teterboro by seven-thirty if I’m going to have a nightcap in
Seattle
tonight.” Here the overenunciation is clearly derogatory, the way James Mason might have said
Cucamonga
or
tuna casserole
.
    Emily leans toward Mose. “Timothy told you about
My People, Your People
? Our other … dramedy?”
    Featherstone nods quickly.
    “He called it ‘a twenty-first-century
Upstairs, Downstairs
meets
thirtysomething
.’ ” Mose pauses like a pro. “Haven’t we seen that? Wasn’t that
The Jetsons
?”
    “Romantic comedy,” Emily says.
    “The guy is the commissioner of the NBA,” George explains. “His wife is an architect, he’s white, she’s black, the kids are punky Vietnamese twins, her assistant’s a gay guy. The housekeeper is Bosnian.”
    “Very Norman Lear,” Mose says.
    “Right,” Featherstone says enthusiastically, “exactly.…” And then, getting Mose’s drift, he catches himself and repeats,
“Right,”
this time with a sneer, barely missing a beat.
    “No, no,” George says, “
anti
-P.C., quirky, a little dark. We’ll spend as much time on the assistants’ lives as we do on the leads’.”
    “It’s about class. Complicated class differences,” Emily says.
    “Which nobody else is doing,” George adds.
    “Correct, but maybe for good reason,” Mose says. “You want to do
A Very Upstairs, Downstairs Millennium
—Roseanne as Seinfeld’s nanny, the guy from
Cabaret
as Bebe Neuwirth’s secretary.
Married with Staff
. Oh, for all I know it’ll be the breakout smash hit. I’m just a birthday-card salesman. Picking pilots is Timothy’s job. But you know, when we call this the New Network for the New Century, I want us to
mean
it.” Mose is now an American citizen, but he has spent most of his life and made most of his fortune in real estate in Canada. He also has stakes in East Asian telephone companies and owns the world’s third-largest greeting-card company—it is, George has heard him say more than once, “the Hallmark of the Pacific Rim.” Before he conjured MBC into existence, Mose Media Holdings’ only media holding was his half interest in the Winter Channel, the faintly conservative sports-weather-and-holiday-themed channel carried on cable systems in Canada, the upper Midwest, and the Great Plains. Mose also operates two hundred movie theaters in Saskatchewan and Alberta, which, like greeting cards, apparently qualify as “media” under the loose modern definition.
    “That was my big note on this too,” Featherstone pipes in. “I mean, raise the stakes, guys!
Raise the frigging stakes
.”
    At this moment, George wouldn’t be unhappy if Featherstone died.
    “It seems to me you guys have an awful lot on your plate, with
NARCS
and this new monster of yours, your—”
    “Reality,”
George says.
    “Correct.
Reality
,” Mose says, and pauses. “You know, I don’t know about
Reality
.…”
    George and Emily exchange a panicky glance. He’s already changed his mind? They are suddenly zero for two?
    “It’s so … arty. Like a scriptwriter’s idea of a newsmagazine.”
    “Fantastic note,” Featherstone says.
    George and Emily exchange another fast glance.
    “You have a problem with
Reality
, Harold?” George asks, wanting the end to come quickly now that he knows he’s doomed.
    “Now you may absolutely hate this,” Mose says, “but what about
Real Time?
Is that a horrible name for this show?”
    It’s