Turn of the Century Read Online Free

numbers.” She means the instant overnight ratings, derived every night from a sample of TV viewers in big cities. “The nationals’ll drop.” One of the reasons George enjoys being in business with Emily (in addition to the fact that she’s an experienced show-runner, and has actually created and produced her own network entertainment series
—Girlie
, a 1996 Fox show about a hooker turned feminist lawyer) is her extreme economy of speech. Except when she gets excited, she speaks as though she’s being charged by the word, double for verbs.
    “Yeah,” he says, “the numbers are not what one would hope for.” Since
NARCS
went on the air in October, five months ago, its average rating has been 7.2, and its average share 14—which means, as every American knows, that the show is watched in about 7 million households, which, at ten o’clock on Saturday nights, amounts to 14 percent of the houses in which TVs are on. This past Saturday night the rating was 7 and the share 12, down .4 and 2 respectively, from last week’s rating and share. George and Emily vowed, the day the
NARCS
pilot was picked up by Mose for thirteen episodes the previous May, never to obsess over ratings, certainly not the weekly overnights. But of course they can’t help themselves. And their success has made them stew more.
    “
Dharma Minus Greg
only got a six, nine,” George says hopefully. “And we were up against the Rosie O’Donnell special with Tom Cruise, and all the septuplets and octuplets on NBC, and the big NBA game, at least in the West—”
    “And Ken Burns’s show about Des Moines in the fifties was on PBS. Stop. No excuses.”
    “Do we think doing ‘The Real Deal’ so early on was a strategic mistake? You know, maybe we raised the bar too high too soon.”
    “No. We got a
fourteen
, George. Ted Koppel said it transformed the face of television.”
    “It wasn’t praise.”
    “It wasn’t not. But you do have to top it for May sweeps.”
    “Emily,”
he says, mock sternly, fondly, as he might say
“Max”
to his son after a loud fart at the dinner table.
    Ordinarily, each forty-four-minute-long episode of
NARCS
is filmed and edited a few weeks before it airs. Eight weeks ago, on the first night of the year (and of the decade, the century, the millennium),they broadcast an episode of
NARCS
called “The Real Deal” live, from four locations in Queens, the Bronx, and Manhattan, and on three sets on their soundstage. Doing a dramatic show live is not an original stunt, but it is still rare, and none had ever been so … 
ambitious
is the word George and Emily used in interviews. The episode’s B-story was its unannounced climax, an actual bust of an actual Ecstasy dealer on Ludlow Street who had been celebrating the New Year for twenty-four hours straight. Actual New York police detectives made the arrest, but the
NARCS
stars were in the shots with them, physically handling and delivering scripted lines to the bewildered suspect, who was in handcuffs and bleeding from a small, telegenic cut on his forehead. The dealer’s actual girlfriend, a pale, very pretty young blonde wearing only underwear and an unbuttoned leather coat, stood sobbing in the doorway; one camera was isolated on her during nearly the whole arrest, and the director, with George’s encouragement from inside the motor-home control room on Houston Street, had cut to her repeatedly, including a long fade-out to the final commercial break.
    It was extremely cool television. That’s really all George was trying for. Didn’t the fact that they wrote the sensational cinema verité scene as the finale of the B-story, not even of the main story line, demonstrate their restraint? Editorial writers and legal scholars were unanimously appalled. Nearly everyone else was fascinated and amused and thrilled as well as a tiny bit appalled. The dealer, it turned out, had appeared briefly in
Rent
in 1998, and belonged to Actors’ Equity; his lawyer asked for