thick, animal-skinned wheel and gave a final pout to the cameras. It was obvious he was loving this. Indeed, his expression suggested a kind of furtive sexual pleasure. The car’s engine blarped and wheezed. Then Crowther winked—oh, the smugness—before disappearing behind a slab of green as the door hissed back into place, locking automatically. A caption appeared over it: “CROWTHER—‘Icon is past, Talent Machine future.’” The car made a noise like a dinosaur being slaughtered inside a volcano, then flattened itself against the pavement. In the next instant, only dust and vapor remained.
Len spent the rest of the day in the hospital. “An allergic reaction to something,” said his assistant, vaguely. I suspected it had more to do with him not wanting to become the proud owner of thirty new assholes, courtesy of Sir Harold Killoch. As for Stacey, she went home before lunch. No one else dared to come to work, leaving me alone in the office. I didn’t even have my little green pills for comfort: they weren’t in my bag, which meant I must have left them in the bathroom at home—again.
Of all the days to forget…
So I just sat there and tortured myself by searching for “Icon” and “cancellation” in Google News. We were the biggest story of the day, that was for sure—and I suppose there was a perverse reassurance to be found in that. I mean, at least people cared. But the fact we’d lost the number-one slot to Bet You Can’t Juggle That!— the appeal of which mostly derived from the likelihood of a fatal accident each week—was surely the end, as far as the show was concerned. Sir Harold might have put up with a thirty percent viewership decline for a while, but he’d made it clear that on no account whatsoever would he tolerate a number-two position.
This was about pride, not economics.
“I don’t believe in ‘managed decline,’” ShowBiz had quoted him saying just a few days earlier. “If an asset isn’t performing for Big Corp, I believe in elimination. And y’know what? I’m pretty sure Len Braithwaite and his team wouldn’t have it any other way. I mean, these are the guys who’ve been doing exactly the same thing to their contestants every week for the past twelve years! They even invented a name for it: ‘elimination night.’ So I think it’s perfectly reasonable for me to say to them, ‘Look, if you can’t hold on to your audience—well, then I’m afraid you’ll have to face an elimination night of your own.’”
I wondered if the very first episode of season thirteen had been our elimination night, or if this was a humiliation yet to come. Not that it really mattered at this point. There were another six prerecorded shows left to air—two per week, for the next three weeks—so even if the cancellation order came later than expected, it was still pretty much a certainty that we’d never make it to Greenlit Studios.
Essentially, my job was over. It was just a question of turning up every day until the inevitable happened. Meanwhile… all I had in the bank was five hundred dollars. Five hundred lousy bucks. That wouldn’t even pay for a one-way ticket to Honolulu, never mind a year of meals, rent, and beachside mai tais at the Hua-Kuwali Hotel.
I was so depressed by all this, I almost forgot to check the actual reviews of our first night with the new judges. The ratings had been so bad, it seemed irrelevant what the critics had to say. But curiosity eventually got the better of me, so I tapped “Icon” and “reviews” into Google, and then… yes, I laughed. I sat there at my desk, alone in the global headquarters of Zero Management, and I laughed my ass off.
The reviews were… well, see for yourself. Tripp Snuggins in the New York Chronicle:
Joey Lovecraft has all the makings of an unlikely new American sweetheart. Sure, the White House might once have declared war on him as a toxic substance in his own right—with none other than President Reagan nicknaming him “Joey Dumbass” for that illadvised parachute jump over Manhattan—but as season thirteen’s natural protagonist, he brings wit and warmth and humanity to the circus; a welcome relief from Mr. Crowther’s well-worn horrible-isms.
There was more like this. A lot more. And while Joey was overwhelmingly the critics’ favorite, he wasn’t the only recipient of praise. The Dallas Morning Bugle said Bibi “lent a new sense of occasion to the proceedings,” while the Los