Chapter 3?

Jane was waiting for Polly in the lobby, which was a bad sign. She flashed a relieved smile at Polly. "They didn't even seem mad that I was late," she said. She glanced around and then leaned toward Polly. "I told them I wanted to wait for you and they said that was fine."

Polly nodded, her expression neutral. If they'd been that interested in Jane, they would have swooped down on her like vampires and had her mesmerized by now so that Polly's guidance would have been rendered moot. Jane's meeting was over and it hadn't even started. She would be lucky to get 5 minutes before she was booted out of the building. Politely, of course No reason to burn bridges, just in case Jane turned out to be a huge star after all.

Jane's expression was focused. She knew exactly what she was going in there to pitch. Polly mentally shrugged. No reason to say anything that would psych Jane out. There was a reason she'd been called in, after all. Besides, Jane's talent was like a crate of old dynamite; it was the tiniest spark away from exploding. If Jane was allowed into it, who knew what would actually happen in the room?

"Jane." A good-looking white guy with features slightly too bland to allow him to be an actor strode across the lobby toward Jane, with as genuine a smile as a career in entertainment would allow. "Tom Goodman," he said, shaking Jane's hand. He had dark brown hair and eyes, and a slim frame that saw a gym at least 3 times a week. He was short for a man but tall for Hollywood. Jane was half-an-inch taller and Polly saw the flash of resentment as he registered that. Jane didn't notice either his height or his resentment and tossed him her open, fresh-off-the-turnip truck grin. His own tight smile relaxed slightly.

"Jane," Jane said, and then flushed. "I mean, you knew that already."

Tom laughed and placed his hand on her back to guide her toward the elevators. "It's nice to meet you in person. I'm so sorry to have kept you waiting, you know, it's crazy around here today."

Polly followed, refraining from rolling her eyes as the lie wafted oilily in the air. She followed the two into the elevator and settled herself behind them. Tom was so focused on Jane that he hadn't really fully registered Polly's presence, which was fine with her. As the elevator rose, Tom chatted amiably about the weather, the traffic, etc. His energy was nervous but Polly sensed a genuine interest in developing Jane's talent. He hid his anxiety well, and for Jane's sake. It was obvious to Polly that Tom knew that Jane's chances today were slim to none. However, like Polly, he refrained from mentioning her chances, on the breath of a hope that slim would win out.

"Is there anything I should know before I go in there?" Jane asked.

Tom shrugged and said the thing that everyone said that couldn't possibly be considered helpful but at the same time was the only advice that was worth a damn. "Just be yourself." He laughed as Jane groaned and patted her shoulder. "You got this," he added, as the elevator doors opened.

He and the receptionist exchanged nods and he led Jane and Polly past the receptionist's desk and down a long hallway. Tom tugged open two doors made of wood so dark they looked almost black. He indicated that Jane should enter and he turned to close the doors again. Polly sidled in, still without really entering Tom's radar.

The conference room was a typical big-dick-compensation, red-Porche of a room. Floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides of the room looked out over the city, with vistas of green and brown hills dotted with homes. Behind the hills, mountains hovered protectively in the distance. Smog or fog, or both, gave them a blue-ish hue. The room even had that new car smell, probably due to a combination of the chemicals in the carpet cleaner and the leather chairs that lined the conference table.

In the chairs, sat about a dozen middle-aged frat boys, one woman, and one black man. The front two chairs of the conference table were empty. Polly took a spot standing near the croissant station at the back of the room as Tom led Jane toward the paunchy older man standing at the head of the table. The man, framed by the view of the city, looked and felt like its God.

The air in the room was not encouraging. As she approached, the paunchy older man looked Jane up and down in a manner that both assessed and dismissed her immediately.

Jane, too focused on her mission to register his look, just flashed him her middle-America, homegrown, kewpie-doll dimples at him. He smiled back, genuinely. Any mortal would have. Everyone in the room seemed to take his cue, and the air in the room warmed perceptively.

Tom approached the older man and they shook hands. "Douglass, this is Jane Johnson, Jane, this is Douglass Laste, CEO of NBC," he said, turning and stepping aside to allow Douglass to shake hands with Jane.

Jane let out a pent up breath, and said said, "Wow, it's nice to meet you. You've greenlit every show I've ever loved." Her enthusiasm might have seemed sycophantic if her genuine excitement hadn't echoed in the bones of every person in the room.

Polly wasn't sure if it was a possible for a man hardened by 40-plus years in show business to blush but if it was, he did. "Well, young lady," he said, his voice betraying none of the self-consciousness he might be feeling, "Thank you very much. We're all very interested to hear what you have to say today."

Jane bounced a little out of nerves as Tom took his seat in the empty chair at the front right of the long table, while Douglass sat in the empty seat at the front left. This left Jane framed in front of the San Fernando Valley. With her smaller frame, she should have seemed less important, but the charisma that kicked up with her nerves made her seem bigger.

She glanced slightly at Tom before addressing the group. "I'm not sure exactly how much you know about the project we're proposing," she said. "So, I'll just start at the beginning. We're looking to create a multi-cam sitcom about my life."

A murmur ran around the room. "Multi-cams are over," the token woman said. She had glossy black hair and long white fingers tips with blood-red fingernails that Polly could see as the woman twirled a pen in one hand. Assent sussurated around the table.

"Yes!" Jane hopped on this answer, and pointed at the woman, indicating a connection based on mutual agreement. "But it doesn't have to be. Most multi-cam shows suck either because they're dumbed-down, generic messes. "Or," she added, pacing a bit in front of the window, "because they were created as multi-cam shows for budget reasons but they would have done much better as single-cam shows. The advantages to shooting multi-cam over the past decade have all been approached from a budget standpoint, but people ignore the things that made multi-cams magic from the beginning."

"And what are those things?" A random white guy asked.

Jane grinned at him. "I'm so glad you asked! So, the obvious thing is the connection between the audience and the performers, right? There's nothing like a live performance, for either party. But laugh tracks break that connection because an audience is pumped up to laugh, even if what they're watching isn't that funny. And then later, editors, kill any decision the audience at home gets to make as to whether a joke is funny or not by adding in canned or exaggerated laughter to even the lamest statements. It breaks focus and trust on the part of the audience that a real audience used to generate for the viewer at home. I suggest that we do a multi-cam show without mic'ing the audience and editing out any laughter from them."

The room erupted in outrage. "You can't do that!" Polly heard one white man exclaim amongst otherwise indistinguishable mutterings.

Jane held up a hand, laughing, and the room quieted, more out of curiosity than anything else. "I know, I know. It's just a thought, but I think it would be worth experimenting with. At the very least, we should put faith back into the audience to allow them to tell us if it's funny or not. The great thing about working live is that if a joke doesn't work, doing another take is not just a chance to force the audience to have the correct reaction this time, but to actually re-write based on their reaction. It forces us to be on our toes so that by the time it makes it to a home audience, the jokes have been vetted. Some of the funniest moments of television history were unplanned -- that's what performing live, and in front of a live audience, gets you."

Less outrage this time, but the room was definitely unsettled. Polly, who'd heard Jane's opinions on what would make a great multi-cam show too many times was more interested in the reactions Jane was getting from the room. Yes, nobody in the room was on board, but every last one of them was invested in the conversation. Polly wondered if these people were all so out of touch that Jane's thoughts were actually revolutionary. Nothing she was saying was outside of conventional thought on the subject. Maybe what was so shocking was that somebody was saying it out loud in a room like this.

The one black man in the room spoke up. "Live performances feel magical in the moment," he said, "But that rarely translates to film, if ever. That's one of the reasons for the laugh track in the first place."

"Yes!" Jane shouted. She reached out toward the man. "Exactly!" She flung up her arms. "That's why you still need for the show to be good. You need the characters to be multi-dimensional, you need the stories to be compelling. A lot of bad sitcoms rely on the fact that no one and nothing ever changes. That's another reason that single-cam sitcoms work better -- because you get to see the characters grow and change throughout the season. When you tune into a multi-cam sitcom, week after week, you know that you're basically going to be getting the same show that you got last week -- that's why people don't tune in. They don't feel like they're missing out on anything.

"The limitation of working in front of a live audience is that they need context. They need to walk in and know who the characters are, what the setting is without any previous familiarity. You can't get too weird because the people who are unfamiliar with the show won't understand what's happening. That's why you get stock characters in stock situations with stock jokes and stock storylines."

"Exactly." This was Snow White again, her long fingernails flicking her pen. "So how do you get around that?"

Jane sighed. "By not using that as an excuse. You don't need to write a pilot episode every week in order for people to get that they're looking at people dealing with the issues of being human. Again, we have to trust the audience more here. A sitcom is basically a funny play, but if you walk into a play you've never seen before, you don't expect to see something you've seen before. It's okay that you don't know these people and what came before this span of time that you're watching them or what will happen after You can still be invested."

"Alright," Douglass said, leaning forward. "But all of this is format. What is your show actually about."

Jane let out an excited breath and then drew in a deeper one. "Okay. Again, I don't know how familiar you all are with my stand-up but essentially, I talk about what it was like growing up in over 20 foster homes. I've lived with every social class, every ethnicity, been raised in every religion. And at the end of it all, I've Frankensteined together a mother, a father, and multiple siblings along with all kinds of nieces, nephews, aunts, uncles, grandparents, etc. So, not only would we be able to explore what a family is, which is a definition that changes constantly these days, but also, even though I'm white, we can still cast diversely and explore all kinds of different aspects of what 'American' life is." She used finger quotes to emphasize this last part.

"Also, like, yes, on the road, I can talk about my life for an hour at a time but in New York or LA or any other larger city, I'm generally relegated to 5 minutes, 10, or 20 if I'm lucky. So I'm accustomed to focusing on specific aspects of my life and relationships in shorter amounts of time. And if I'm able to get an audience invested in who I am in 5 minutes -- and to be real, in a 5-minute set, if it takes me that long to get the audience invested, that was a bad set -- then being able to focus on one story at a time is actually not that difficult of an adjustment to make."

Jane's pitch over, she let out a quick laugh and then curtsied awkwardly. A gentle laugh travelled around the room.

"I guess that answers whether or not you can make these subjects funny," Tom said with a grin, to more answering laughter.

"Exactly," Jane said. "There are so many things that we can talk about, and if we hire diverse writers, then these stories can be told by the people who are the most invested in telling them and portrayed by the people who are the most invested in portraying them not just correctly, but in a way that offers hope. The best comedy comes from pain, and we have a huge legacy of that to mine from."

Silent white guilt made a trip around the room, but was mostly shrugged off. "So, what is an example of a sensitive subject that you would be able to broach with humor?" A white man asked.

Jane, aware that she'd lost the room a bit, but undaunted,



































"Even if nothing else comes out of this meeting, at least I get to say that I met you," she added.


The only people who have a chance to make anything weird and different work are people who are passionate about that thing.