We tried changing her hair. Switched her styling from buttoned-up/sexy to masculine/sleek to (and this was pure desperation) flouncy/bohemian. God help us, we gave her a motorcycle. Then we decided we’d been focusing too much on her appearance. We had drunk the network Kool-Aid, we scolded ourselves. We had to get back to what made the show great—the writing! Depth of character, that was the ticket. What Marietta needed was a meaty backstory. And so we spent a full week in fevered discussion of her tragic early life—her abusive mother, her subsequent drug use, her beloved high school bestie, carried away by opioid addiction. We rolled this out in a Very Special B Story. Which the audience hated. The next week, we tried changing her hair again. The failure was relentless. With every episode, every Marietta scene, the audience cringed, and—worse. They laughed. They didn’t even know why they were laughing, they confided to one another in their social feeds and forums, festooning their posts with tearful, hee-hawing emojis. She was just so bad. No one could explain it. They didn’t want to explain it. It was a mysterious, ineffable phenomenon that at this point they almost enjoyed.
It was my job to get all this across to Liz (who barely used the internet, who dismissed any conversation taking place on social media as “not real,” who still referred to Google as “The Google”) in my helpful, non-confrontational, just-asking kind of way. And to do it without using words like “cringe,” or “laugh,” or “hate her.” But how do you kill a character who is a joke, without making her death feel like the biggest joke of all? I also took care not to say “joke.” But lately it was the word that rang in my ears each weekday morning ever since we started breaking Episode Nine.
Because the thing was, Liz was under it. We were all under it. We were a month away from prep and Marietta Dies, Finally (as I called it in my head) was the penultimate episode and we didn’t even have an outline yet—just a few scattered beats on a terrifyingly white whiteboard. Liz wanted to give her a big send off, to devote the entire episode to Marietta. Marietta, she’d announced, would be the A story.
Bad idea, I thought at once. Leaving audience antipathy aside, Marietta was the supporting-est of supporting characters, she’d only just been introduced midway through last season, she wasn’t worthy. “Great idea,” I said. The other people in the room gulped their agreement.
Liz looked around at us—her beloved, supportive team. Besides me there was Ellen, Riva, and two men in their twenties, one black and straight and one white and gay, both named Bruce. Bruces aside, we were a roomful of crones compared to most, because that’s how Liz liked it. Every time I looked at the Bruces I remembered she once told me that a woman-led writers room can only tolerate two men at a time, and those two men must always be young, timid, junior to all the women, and ideally neither straight nor white, otherwise they take over. You couldn’t mess with that balance, she said.
She knew this from dire experience. On her last show, she’d installed her usual two, one of whom she had assumed was gay but who it turned out was not. Then she made the mistake of allowing a third into the room—an intern who was also straight—and one morning she arrived to find all three with their feet up on the table, firing a mini basketball into a toy net they’d secured above the whiteboard. And the Act Three she’d spent the previous day breaking was erased and replaced by, as one of them described it, “something a little more spicy.”
And, the hitherto-timid young man who made this announcement? Liz told me that as he spoke, he’d been sitting there idly combing his beard with a plastic fork.
But our current, timid Bruces mostly stayed in line, as was their job. As was all of our jobs in this business—be there for the showrunner. Support the showrunner. Help make the showrunner’s occasionally dubious, defective vision somehow take flight. I knew this better than anyone, having worked with Liz the longest without getting fired even once. (Liz was notorious for firing you on Friday then calling you up Monday morning to ask where the hell you were.) In short, I was considered the Liz-whisperer, so the room took its cue from me in that moment—nodding and gulping in agreement after I told Liz what a great idea it was to devote an entire episode to one of the most reviled characters on the network.
“But,” I continued, nodding vigorously to convey to Liz how much I agreed with her, “it occurs to me the last time we gave over an episode to Marietta it didn’t go over so well.”
“That was a B story,” said Liz. “And this is different. This is her farewell.”
“Right, yes,” I said, nodding harder.
“It’s just that I feel like Marietta never got her due, not really,” explained Liz.
“No, no, she hasn’t really,” I murmured, we all murmured.
“If it was up to me,” Liz went on, “I’d give her another season, really dig into that backstory, give her a brand new arc—like maybe the abusive mother shows up.”
We all nodded some more because Liz had been saying this ever since the Very Special B Story, after which the network had made it clear that a Season Three order of our female-forward spy-fi kick-ass odyssey was heavily contingent on whether or not we persisted in trying to jam this repellent character down the throats of our devoted yet increasingly exasperated viewers.
“She has so much potential that hasn’t even been realized,” insisted Liz. “We haven’t even begun to explore the possibilities. So that’s why having to do this makes me so sad.”
I looked up at Liz, grimacing. I didn’t want her to be sad. I’d been working for her for so long, was so psychologically and financially dependant on her good will and approval, that I couldn’t tell the difference between Liz’s happiness and my own anymore. If giving an entire episode over to Marietta was what it would take to dispose of her—if that’s how we make Liz feel less sad and our show less cancelled—we would all just have to get on board. And I would have to get the room on board, convince them that together we could make Marietta Dies, Praise Jesus and Pass the Biscuits an episode of television worthy of the splendid, nuanced, endlessly fascinating character Liz seemed to be carrying around in her head. This was the job.
But that was when I noticed Liz had sprung a leak.
I glanced around to see if anyone else had noticed. Everyone had noticed. I could tell, because they were all studiously looking away. Riva was staring into her laptop as if at some urgent anti-virus notification. The Bruces had both picked up their phones. And Ellen was looking at me, eyebrows up.
“Liz,” I said. She turned to me and widened her eyes—her go-to “I welcome your input” expression. I pointed at my neck. Then I pointed at her neck. Her neck was actually spurting, which alarmed me, slightly.
I’d seen people leak, but never spurt. My mom had issues with leaking all her life—especially during menopause, as with a lot of women. But my mom would merely teem for the most part, or sometimes drip discreetly when she’d been standing at the stove awhile, not even knowing she was doing it half the time, gradually soaking her clothes, leaving damp spots on the floor here and there. It was hard to say where the leaks were coming from at any given time because she’d only feel the moisture after it pooled, and cooled. With Mom it seemed to come from mostly her lower back and upper arms—never her buttocks, which of course is always the fear when it comes to leaks. In her later years she lived in dread of leaving a puddle on the seat of someone’s chair, having them think the worst.