Chapter 42 : The Evaluation
Hank Hooper walked through 30 Rock like a man on a very pleasant stroll.
Not the stroll of someone unfamiliar with the building — the stroll of someone who had been in buildings like this one for forty years and had developed a methodology for walking through them that looked like ease and was actually a thorough inspection conducted at the pace of a Tuesday afternoon. He asked questions of the people he passed. The questions sounded simple: What do you work on? How long have you been here? Do you like it? They were not simple. The follow-up he chose told you which answer he was actually processing.
Albert watched him from the production floor's second-level observation area, through the glass rail. Hooper was on the main floor with Jack beside him and two Kabletown executives behind him and a PA from NBC's communications team who had been assigned to look competent and was performing competence at the edge of her capability.
Jack was doing what Jack did in situations where someone else was nominally in charge: walking slightly behind and to the left, at the position of a man who knew where every door in this building led and was choosing to demonstrate that by not leading. His expression was the professional one — readable only by people who had been in enough meetings with him to know the difference between I'm fine with this and I've prepared for this and it doesn't concern me the way they think it concerns me.
"That's a lot of eye contact," Liz said, beside Albert at the rail.
"He's doing assessments."
"I know he's doing assessments. I've read the Kabletown acquisition methodology documentation. I read it three times last night and then I stress-ate a wheel of brie." She was watching Hooper's progress through the lobby. "Jack keeps saying 'Hank' like they're old friends."
"They might be."
"Jack says everything like that about people who are useful to him." She glanced at Albert. "Present company not excluded."
Albert took that without comment.
The tour reached TGS at 2:15 PM.
Albert was at his desk — the new desk, three months settled, the stickers now background rather than foreground — when Kenneth appeared at the writers' room door. "Mr. Hooper's group is coming down the corridor," Kenneth said, with the tone he used when he meant you might want to be doing something that looks composed.
Albert was already reading a script.
Liz arranged herself at the whiteboard with a marker, which was the position she used when she wanted to demonstrate active engagement. Pete appeared from wherever Pete had been. Frank, conspicuously, was eating chips and did not adjust this.
Hooper came through the writers' room door with the energy of a man arriving at a place he'd heard good things about. He was shorter than he'd seemed from the observation rail — shorter, rounder, with the kind of face that suggested he had grandchildren and could name all of them. The folksy affect was consistent up close and also, up close, more evidently a performance. Not insincere — performed in the way that a person's genuine characteristics became performed when they'd been deploying those characteristics professionally for decades. He was warm. He was also, Albert clocked from the way his eyes moved across the room in the first three seconds, running a rapid inventory.
Jack made the introduction. "Hank, this is Liz Lemon, TGS's head writer and showrunner. Pete Hornberger, line producer."
Hooper shook Liz's hand. "I've been hearing impressive things about this room," he said. The Philadelphia accent was slight but present — not the caricature of it, the actual thing, which was softer and less distinguishable than people expected. "Your sweeps numbers this year were something. Fourteen-point improvement in the target demo." He said it the way someone said a figure they'd actually read rather than been briefed on in a pre-tour packet. "That doesn't happen by accident."
Liz said the correct things about the staff and the process and the fundamentals of TGS's creative approach. Hooper listened in the way that people listened when they were already three moves ahead of the conversation and were letting it catch up. He was looking at the room while she talked — the whiteboard, the desk arrangement, the script stacks, the coffee cups.
Then he looked at Albert.
Not toward Albert, at Albert. The specific look of a person who had been given a name before the tour and had been waiting to locate the face.
"You're the writer Jack mentioned," Hooper said. Not a question.
Albert set down the script. "Albert Myers."
Hooper crossed the room. The two Kabletown executives and the NBC PA stayed near the door. Jack's expression didn't change. The hand Hooper extended was the kind of hand that had shaken ten thousand hands and had developed its own musculature for it. Albert shook it.
"Jack says you have good instincts," Hooper said. He was holding the handshake at the beat past functional — not long enough to be a power move, just long enough to be deliberate. Looking at Albert with the eye contact he'd been deploying all morning, which was real rather than performed, the kind that came from a person who had learned that most people flinched from sustained eye contact and that the information in the flinch was useful. "I value instincts. They're what I look for. Numbers lie. People's instincts usually don't."
"Numbers don't lie," Albert said. "They just don't tell you why."
Hooper's expression shifted. Not dramatically — something in the vicinity of genuine interest rather than assessed interest. "That's a true thing," he said. He released Albert's hand. "We should talk sometime."
He turned back to the room, said something warm about the production setup that was also a question about which sketches had contributed most to the ratings improvement, and Liz answered it with the specificity of someone who knew her numbers and the diplomacy of someone who had decided to let Albert's sketches speak for themselves rather than name them.
Hooper listened. He didn't look at Albert again during the rest of the room visit, which was its own kind of attention — the attention of someone who had filed something and didn't need to revisit the filing to keep it current.
The tour group moved on at 2:31 PM.
Liz waited until the sound of Hooper's group had fully passed the corridor junction before she spoke.
"Great," she said. Not sarcastically — the specific flat register of someone absorbing an unwelcome development. "Now you're on their radar."
"I was already on Jack's radar. He mentioned me to Hooper."
"Jack mentioning you to Hooper is different from Hooper flagging you during an evaluation tour." She put down the marker she'd been holding since the room visit began. "Jack mentioning you means Jack is protecting a resource. Hooper flagging you means Kabletown is identifying a resource they don't control."
Albert thought about this. The distinction was real and Liz had identified it faster than he had, which was worth noting in the Liz section of the Palace under Institutional Intelligence — Calibration.
"He seemed folksy," Frank said, from the chip bag.
"Folksy people who run acquisition companies are the ones you watch," Liz said. "They have the full range of corporate ruthlessness and an affect that makes you think you're having a chat." She looked at Albert. "I've met three of them. They're always more prepared than Jack, which is saying something, and they always act like they're less prepared than you."
Albert thought about the handshake. The four-second eye contact. The Numbers lie, instincts usually don't. The way Hooper had found Albert's response to the numbers-lie line genuinely interesting rather than noting it as a data point — or rather, noting it as a data point while also being genuinely interested. The both-and of a person who ran a large operation and had not lost the capability for actual curiosity.
"He's going to request our HR files," Pete said, from his position near the window. He'd been quiet through the room visit and had clearly been running his own assessment. "Standard Kabletown post-acquisition protocol includes documentation review for all staff above a certain productivity threshold."
Albert looked at Pete.
Pete looked back. "I read the same filing Toofer read. I just waited until I had something to say about it."
Albert thought about Devon's documentation request from three months ago. The burner phones, the Vasquez contact, the CUNY transcript, the conditional clearance. That file was still open, flagged for review, a tool Devon could pick up whenever he found it useful. Now Kabletown was going to request something similar, from a completely different institutional angle, with no prior context about Albert and no existing leverage — which was either better or worse than Devon's situation depending on what they found.
He picked up his notepad.
"How long before the request goes to HR?" he said to Pete.
"Based on their acquisition timeline?" Pete checked his clipboard. "Ten days. Two weeks at most."
Albert wrote: Kabletown HR — 10-14 days. Below it: Same gaps. Different questioner.
The documentation he'd assembled for Devon's inquiry was still on file with NBC HR — the Vasquez confirmation, the CUNY transcript, the burner reference numbers. The file had been reviewed once and passed conditionally. A second review from a different institutional hand, looking at the same documents without Devon's pre-formed agenda, might produce a different result.
Or it might produce the same result: conditionally acceptable, technically complete, just thin enough to remain open.
He looked at the window where Hooper's group had disappeared down the executive corridor.
Hooper had shaken his hand and said we should talk sometime with the tone of a man who intended sometime to have a specific date attached to it.
Albert closed his notepad and went back to the script that still needed the third act fixed before the pitch session.
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