King Maybe (19 page)

19

Dead Eye

It was a quarter to three in the morning before I used the jerry-rigged password and phony email address Lilli and Anime had created to help me navigate my way into Hulu. And there it was, as promised: the first season of
Dead Eye
.

It raised many more questions than it answered.

The first one was how it had stayed on the air.

It's not all that unusual, in today's media climate, for a television series to be yanked even before it premieres if the network decides during production that the concept has gone irretrievably south. Some shows that made it onto the air have actually been canceled before the first segment was over, based on a combination of low audiences and sheer awfulness: a show called
Quarterlife
that made the leap from YouTube to boob tube and lasted thirty minutes, for example, or the title-tells-all
Secret Talents of the Stars
(George Takei likes to sing country songs! Imagine that!). These quick yanks were possible because there was lots of data available to the networks in real time, and even in these days of declining network viewership those weekly slots represented (and represent) far too much potential money to waste them on series that don't draw viewers or that achieve only derisory levels of quality.

So why had
Dead Eye
lasted two years? It didn't qualify on either account. As far as ratings went, Ping-Pong matches played in the dark would have gotten higher numbers than the first half of
Dead Eye's
first season earned, and in terms of quality the show was the kind of abandon-all-hope bad that makes you curse yourself for every precious moment of your life you crumpled up and tossed by watching it. Not only was the writing unintentionally hilarious and the acting—especially Tasha Dawn's—barely endurable, but even
technically
it was something that American television almost never is: amateurish. Hollywood has developed a supernatural ability to make silver, if not gold, out of used floor wax, but
Dead Eye
was so flat and grainy it looked like it was shot on an old eight-millimeter camera by someone who had run out of film and was using gift-wrap ribbon. Theoretically set in a largely empty America, stripped of people by the zombies' ravenous appetites for human rib roast, the first segment featured location scenes shot in front of roads that frequently buzzed with traffic and over which airplanes gaily sailed, leaving ruler-straight vapor trails across the sky. When they filmed indoors, it was even worse. The ranch set that contained the human herd—of which the heroine's beloved, the big handsome alive guy, was a member—was obviously shot on a sound stage, where the lighting gave everyone three or four shadows, suggesting that the earth had picked up a clutch of extra suns.

And perched in the center of it all, as eye-bruising as a walnut in an engagement ring, was Tasha Dawn's performance.

The camera, as they say, likes some actors and hates others. Tasha Dawn was the rarest kind of actor, one the camera ignores. In scene after scene, she barely registered. She often seemed out of focus even when she wasn't, and although she was pretty enough from some angles, she
needed
those angles, and in spite of the most basic rules of Hollywood camera geometry she didn't get them. Nor did she get the lighting she needed. As a result, most of the time she looked like a reasonably attractive but resolutely, almost statistically ordinary teenager who'd accidentally stepped into the light while taking a studio tour. And Casey had been right. Occasionally her eyes would dart to the camera and then zoom away, which violates the single most basic rule of film acting: that the characters don't know the camera is there.

Why weren't those moments cut? Or redone? The camera operator must have seen them. Directors watch videotape rushes now after practically every camera setup; why hadn't those terrified glances—because that's what they suggested to me, terror—been spotted and reshot right then?

Her voice was shrill, the unvarying, uninflected high G of an adolescent girl who had discovered that complaint would usually get her what she wanted and hadn't created a backup mode. In her most dramatic scenes, she sounded like someone who couldn't get the ice-cream flavor she wanted and thought it would materialize in the freezer if she was just sufficiently irritating.

Why hadn't she been given vocal coaching? It's simple enough to learn to bring the voice from the chest rather than the nose. Almost anyone can master it in a day or two.

I endured the premiere episode, watched the first three minutes of the second show, and skipped to the fifth, thinking that she
had
to get better, if only through practice. Anyone at the network, seeing that first show, would have ordered a full team onto the set: voice people, acting coach, a new cameraman, a human wrangler who did nothing but watch her and catch the worst moments so they could do a retake while everyone was still in place.

Why hadn't the
director
done that? One of a director's primary responsibilities is protecting the principal actors from their shortcomings. Who'd been watching out for Tasha Dawn? For that matter, where was the most powerful person on the set? Her
husband
?

And so back to the biggest mystery of all: How on earth had this soul-sapping piece of cheese lasted
two years
?

Anime, in what I was beginning to see as her permanent overaccomplishment mode, had also rounded up a clutch of stories about the show from both trade publications and consumer outlets. The reviews were scathing, most brutal when they were hilarious, and the main target was always Tasha Dawn. At the end of the first year, the wiseasses who handed out both the Razzies and the Golden Turkeys, which up until then had honored only the year's worst motion-picture actors, made an exception, creating a television category just for Tasha Dawn.

And then the ratings tide began to change a little, but in a somewhat unpleasant way. Teenage girls were tuning in. They started holding viewing parties, ten or twelve girls gathered around a screen, all over the country, watching the show. T-shirts bearing the words
tired of being dead
appeared all over the place and were worn by kids who wanted to demonstrate that their affection for the show was properly ironic.

Someone transcribed the pilot script and put it online, and it began to show up on high-school and junior-high-school stages. So many kids—both boys and girls—wanted to play Tasha's character that multiple students took the role in most productions, dividing up her lines among them. Interschool “Tasha teams” held unofficial “act-offs.”
Dead Eye
became a limited phenomenon, a little like
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
, but not as profitable. When the network startled the entire industry by renewing the series, the press release noted that the program's audience contained the highest percentage of teen viewers in the entire schedule. It was still coming in fourth or fifth in its time slot, but the microscopic audience was overwhelmingly under twenty, according to the renewal release, which must have been written by someone who had apparently never met a teenager. “The ‘teens' of today are the consumers of tomorrow,” the flack wrote, “and NBS is proud that this ‘cool' audience wants to ‘hang out' with us every week. We see it as the beginning of a happy and ‘hip' relationship.”

And in case anyone wondered how the star was taking all this, there were a few trade stories about meltdowns on the set and a little fever of speculation when she didn't show up for an event at the television critics' annual conference in Century City, a decision that I thought said quite a lot about her judgment, since she would have been barbecued alive during the Q&A session. The event went ahead as scheduled, but without her, and she was indeed hung out over the rotisserie in absentia.

The most vivid glimpse of what her life must have been like was provided in the hundreds of stories about the 2009 Comic-Con convention, the annual geek Bethlehem, at which Tasha Dawn's live appearance was promoted as one of the top attractions. I couldn't imagine what they'd told her she'd be doing there, but it couldn't have been the truth—that she'd be judging a contest in which thirty teens, girls and boys alike, many wearing designer zombie-chic clothes, did their imitation of what the stories described as her catchphrase: “I am so
tired
of being dead.”

She had sat there—all by herself—on the stage, with what must have felt like the whole world looking at her, as she listened to her own nasal voice and wooden line reading being mimicked, exaggerated, sent up,
mocked
, while a couple thousand kids in the audience rolled in the aisles. And then came the moment that got all the coverage; as Contestant 26 finished, Tasha Dawn's will broke, and she stood up so suddenly she knocked her chair over and ran from the stage in tears. After an awkward pause and a lot of murmuring in the audience, punctuated by a few unpleasant laughs, the hunk of Hollywood prime sirloin who played the handsome alive guy came out to say that Tasha had been overcome by the affection of her fans and couldn't come back out, and by the way, Contestant 22 had won the prize, which was a walk-on in the show. Later in the day, when she didn't show up for the autograph sessions, there was a mini-riot, if a bunch of middle-class white and Asian kids dressed in expensive costumes designed and sold by billion-dollar media corporations can be said to riot.

The following week she was a no-show on the set. By then, pictures of her fleeing the stage had gotten prime placement in
People
and
Entertainment Weekly
,
and the
National Scoop
plastered supermarket magazine racks all over the country with the headline
tasha: the tragedy behind the heartbreak
.

Mercifully, I hadn't been sent a link to the article, but I was pretty sure I knew what the tragedy was, and I doubted it was the one postulated in the tabloid.

It was fairly clear what, or rather who, was behind the show's renewal in spite of the ratings. However high the percentage of teenage viewers, the Nielsen comps had
Dead
Eye
in the bottom five except for those rare evenings in which the competition was preempted by presidential speeches and the like. As usual, it was entertainment journalism's reddest-toothed carnivore, Nikki Brink, who was then running the widely feared website Deadline in Hollywood, who broke the scoop. While the other trades were parroting the press release, Brink wrote:

 

Toldja: The real explanation behind the jaw-dropping news that NBS has picked up a new season of TV's most turgid show,
Dead Eye
, is simple: Farscope head man Jeremy Granger said, “Make it so.” As the chairman of one of this town's busiest production hubs, he made it clear to NBS execs that they would not be given a shot at any of the five highly anticipated new series Farscope is developing for the Fall if
Dead Eye
gets yanked. With most of NBS's series ratings hovering just above freezing, the net needs Granger's shows, and the price includes keeping
Dead Eye
alive, or as alive as it ever gets. Just a reminder for those who haven't been paying attention: Top-billed Tasha Dawn, who humiliates herself weekly on the show, is Mrs. Jeremy Granger. I gotta tell you, if my husband gave me a present like that, I'd back over him with the Rolls.

 

Indeed.

I found myself at the window again, but this time I was looking at my own reflection. I've known a lot of angry people, beginning with my own father and continuing through my career in the modern-day concrete-and-asphalt Sherwood Forest, with all the other outlaws. There are a great many angry crooks. Some of them—and I was willing to bet good money that the Slugger was one—gravitated to crime in the first place because it provides such a rich and varied number of ways to make a living by taking it out on the rest of the world. Why risk ulcers by stifling your anger when you can get paid for beating people to death?

Anger didn't always show. Some of the angriest crooks I'd met were those who on the surface were the most serene. The plausibles, who cozy up to people, befriend them, radiate love and caring at them, cultivate their trust, marry them, make love to them, pretend to be long-lost cousins, while methodically bleeding the marks' bank accounts dry and selling their real estate out from under them, are, beneath their charm, almost uniformly furious. I'd known a dozen of them on reasonably friendly terms, and there wasn't one I would have turned my back on.

The
Übermenschen
of anger, the truly globally angry, were of course politicians and, to a lesser extent, high-ranking military officers. Not all of them, of course; some of them (to give them the benefit of the doubt) actually wanted to serve their country, but others (many of them marked, like Cain, with the inverted facial U that Herbie used to call “Donald Trump Mouth”) wanted power, pure and simple. I believed that few of them sought it in order to feed the hungry and clothe the shivering. It wasn't that
complicated
; they were furious at the world, and they simply wanted to impose their wills on it, on the rest of us. Make us dance their way, spend their way, maybe kill a few of
those people
over there
to protect the national interest or the interests of major stockholders or the owners of patents on essential medications or our reputation as carriers of the Big Stick or our copyright on being the one and only Land of the Free, should some other country begin to get uppity and forget to tip its hat to us.

As embarrassed as I am to admit it, I sort of understood how people lived with this kind of anger. I could see how it would be obliterated in the blizzard of justification—
somebody's
got to make the hard decisions—and the symphony of sanctimony that always accompanies the application of all-out force.