“Well, apparently the prepackage shoot was awful. They took him to the beach, and he almost fell off his white horse.”
Dev could admit that didn’t sound great. “Charles is an outsider. He probably just needs some time to adjust to the cameras and the lights. It can be overwhelming.”
Jules rolls her eyes. “Bringing in an outsider isn’t going to convince anyone these Instagram influencers came on this show for love.”
“They’re not Instagram influencers,” he insists. Another Jules Lu eye roll. “Most of them are not Instagram influencers. And of course they’re here for love.”
“And never to promote their line of funky festival headbands on Etsy,” she snaps. “The only people who actually come on this show for love are so brainwashed by the wedding industrial complex, and so convinced their self-worth is tied to matrimony, they literally convince themselves they’re in love with a person they’ve spent all of ten total hours with.”
“It’s so sad to see such cynicism in one so young.”
“And it’s so sad to see such blind idealism in one so old.” He throws an Oreo at her, even if she sort of has a point. About Charles Winshaw, not about love and marriage.
In the six years Dev has worked for Ever After, the new star has always been chosen from the crop of fan-favorite rejects of the previous season. Except recently, this pattern has caused some vocal critics within the Fairy-Tale Family to cast doubt on the show’s romantic realism. Instead of coming on the show to find love, some people were coming on the show to become the next star. So their showrunner, Maureen Scott, decided to bring in an outsider for the new season to shake things up.
Charles Winshaw—the enigmatic, millionaire tech genius with an inexplicable eight-pack—is good for ratings, regardless of whether he can stay mounted on a horse.
Dev pulls out a copy of People magazine from his shoulder bag. It’s the issue with their new star on the cover, the words Silicon Valley’s Most Eligible Bachelor! splashed across the front. Blond curls and a broad jaw and a chin dimple. A perfect Prince Charming.
As they turn away from the crafty table, the sun is beginning to dip behind the castle’s twin turrets, dappling everything on set in soft, orange light. Strands of twinkle lights shine from the trees like stars, and the air is fragrant from the bouquets of flowers, and it’s exactly like the fairy tales Dev imagined as a kid.
“It’s a shitstorm, Dev! A fucking shitstorm!” Skylar Jones shouts as they enter the Command Central tent. She’s already halfway through a roll of Tums, which is never a good sign this early in the night.
“Why is it a shitstorm, exactly?”
“Because this season is completely and epically fucked!”
“I’m very sorry to hear we’re somehow fucked before we’ve started.” Dev slots in his earpiece as Jules hands him a walkie-talkie from the charging station. “Is this about him almost falling off the horse?”
“I wish he had fallen off the horse,” Skylar seethes. “Maybe if he’d been trampled, we could’ve cast a Jonas Brother or a subpar Hemsworth.”
“I think all the Jonases and Hemsworths are married.”
“Oh, is that why we’re stuck with a constipated computer nerd?”
Dev knows better than to laugh at his boss. As a queer Black woman, Skylar Jones did not become the lead director of a reality television juggernaut by having chill. When she developed early female pattern baldness before forty from the stress of this job, she simply began shaving all her hair off.
“How can I help, Sky?”
“Tell me what you know about Charles Winshaw.”
“Uh… Charles Winshaw…” Dev closes his eyes, pictures the spreadsheets he compiled from network background checks and Google searches in preparation for this season, and rattles off facts rapid-fire. “Has the brains of Steve Wozniak and the body of a Marvel superhero. Graduated high school at sixteen when he won a coding contest and a full-ride scholarship to Stanford. Launched his tech startup, WinHan, with his dorm mate Josh Han before his twentieth birthday. Left his company at twenty-six and now runs the Winshaw Foundation as a twenty-seven-year-old millionaire. Has graced the cover of both Time and GQ but has been notoriously private until now, so little is known about his dating history. But—”