Ryan pushes the hair out of his eyes and continues. “We should be far more concerned with what happens when the show airs and all of America sees Charles nervous sweat in high def.”
“I think you all underestimate the power of Dev’s charm offensive,” Maureen Scott says from her place at the front of the room. “He can coach anyone. Remember that time he convinced a Southern Baptist to do the naked mud bath?”
This isn’t quite the positive encouragement Maureen thinks it is. Dev is not especially proud of that moment. Besides, he’s already giving everything he has to this season. Maureen has him working twenty-four-hour days, staying in the guesthouse so he can coach Charlie before and after filming. He’s pretty sure he’s not getting paid overtime for literally living on set, but that’s the cost of making this show work. If he complains, there are hundreds of other film-school grads waiting in the wings for an opportunity like this.
“Let’s focus on the girls.” Maureen gestures to her iPad, where she’s pulled up the contestant profiles. “Daphne seems like the obvious candidate for either the winner or the next princess. She’s practically got singing birds shooting out her ass.”
Jules plunks herself down on the arm of Dev’s camp chair. “I like Angie for a possible next princess. In her initial interview, she talked about bisexual representation and—”
“You think our next princess is going to be biracial and bisexual?” Maureen crosses her arms. “It would never sell. Besides, we did a bisexual storyline on that one season of Ever After: Summer Quest.”
“Yet we’ve done thirty-seven seasons of hetero storylines,” Jules mutters, loud enough for only Dev to hear.
Maureen taps her manicured nails against the inside of her arm, considering. “I suppose we could use Angie’s sexuality as an obstacle. Have Charlie question her loyalty.…”
“As a bisexual woman, I’m going to vote hard no on that one.”
Maureen glares at Jules. “I don’t remember giving you a vote.”
Skylar attempts to redirect the meeting. “I also think we should be cautious of vilifying one of the few women of color this season. The whole confrontation with Megan already felt like baiting an angry-black-woman trope.”
“Tropes exist for a reason,” Maureen says as innocuously as possible in her usual high-pitched, saccharine voice. Skylar flinches in response, and the room goes painfully quiet.
Dev respects his boss, he really does, and he knows she didn’t mean that the way it came out. When Dev was studying television at USC, Maureen Scott was one of his idols. At forty, she was a single mother winning daytime Emmys for her work on soaps while struggling to date as a woman who was “too old” by LA standards. That was when she had an idea for a show. It was a quarter satire, a quarter reality competition, and one half good old-fashioned fairy-tale romance. She was laughed out of every pitch meeting until she found a network that would give her a little bit of money and a terrible Sunday time slot. From there, she built it into one of the most successful franchises in reality television. While other showrunners might cash in and disengage, Maureen is here in the trenches with them. It’s her show.
And yes, the image in front of the cameras hasn’t changed much over the years, and it definitely doesn’t reflect the image behind the cameras, but that’s not Maureen’s fault. She has the network and the advertisers to appease, and both are breathing down her neck about this season.
The thing Dev can’t figure out is why Maureen Scott would bring Charlie on the show in the first place. Sure, his face can sell magazine covers, but if they’re trying to revitalize the romantic realism of the show, why would Maureen bring in a man who isn’t here to find love?
But it’s not Dev’s place to question Maureen Scott.
Ryan is the one who speaks up. Maureen always listens to Ryan, which is how he managed to fail his way into a senior story producer job. “Forget Angie. I think Megan is our best bet for a villain. She’s already borderline, so it’ll only take a few nudges from her handler to get her to go full crazy.”