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her to return, I took another look at Susan. The first PA was making furious notes on her legal pad. On a weekly prime-time game show such as Food Freak, the head production assistant has a massive job and she supervises the junior staff to help get it all done. During the tapings, she works in the control booth, taking editing notes from the director, timing the show in progress, and keeping track of the game-score readouts on camera to make sure the guy working the scoreboards is accurate. During the preproduction period, before the actual taping takes place, the first PA organizes all the approved game material, putting together the scripts for upcoming shows. Seemingly unaffected by the stress and the incredible amount of work, Susan looked pretty happy. She was a veteran of many prior game series and her curly-headed halo seemed to bestow on her a serene calmness despite the workload.
    On folding chairs pulled close to Susan were her two assistants, the youngest members of the ensemble. Jackson Rush was the researcher, the guy who had to look up all the facts. Writers often wrote from their own memories, and that wasn’t really reliable, I’d been told. No matter what you know, it’s probably wrong half the time, Greta warned. That’s why Jackson worked so hard leading up to every tape day. He verified every item to be used on the air with a second independent source. His heavy-framed glasses sat at aconstant tilt to the level of his thick dark brows and he gave me a shy smile. Far slicker was Kenny Abernathy, Susan’s second PA. He was a tall, wiry, good-looking kid just out of Stanford. Kenny’s fine university education had earned him a job inputting game material into the show’s computer database. A warning, if ever there was one, as to the job market for philosophy majors.
    Greta Greene returned to her office. She took a chair between Jennifer and me and began the meeting.
    “We’ll be in the studio all this week, taping our final episode. I know you’ll all help Madeline in every way you can, since she’s playing catch-up while working so hard to feed us extra material.” Greta looked up at her writers and PA staff, her gaze making contact ever so quickly with Quentin. “And by the way, Madeline, I went over this week’s script with Artie and he absolutely loved the segment on pasta al pesto. I gave you credit for it, of course.”
    Arthur Herman was the show’s executive producer and creator. A busy man in his early seventies, he rarely stopped into the production meetings, but I’d seen him around the offices and had been introduced to him on one occasion.
    The group looked content. All but Quentin. He looked rabid. Or was that just a trace of foam from his latte?
    “Now, let me just briefly go over our preproduction checklist with Susan’s group before we look at new material,” Greta said, and then went into a series of consultations about contestant biography data that needed to be added to the upcoming show. As they talked, Jennifer excused herself and left the office. There were innumerable delays and lots of waitingaround in these meetings, so we often took our own rest room or phone call breaks when the getting was good.
    As we waited for Greta to get to our new material, I wondered how each one on the staff had ended up in this offbeat branch of entertainment. Whether one was on a brief holiday, playing behind the scenes on a real television stage, like me, or sweating out the pressures of keeping a hit show on the air, like Greta, I doubt anyone who works on game shows is doing what they had originally intended to do in life. Whose college counselor suggests a future in games? I looked around the room.
    A young guy like Kenny could probably go this way or that. Into feature films. Into prime-time dramas or sitcoms. He still had a few more years to find his place in Hollywood. But the others, those who were in their thirties and forties—my friend Greta, the two staff writers, Quentin