Chapter 44 : Jenna's Crisis
The screaming was audible from the main talent corridor.
Not the performance-scream of a person in distress for effect — the specific register of someone who had received actual bad news and was processing it at the volume of a person who had spent years projecting to the back row. Albert was passing the corridor on his way back from craft services when the sound moved from ambient to directional, and he followed the direction to Jenna Maroney's dressing room.
The door was open. Inside: Jenna, phone pressed to one ear and hand pressed to her forehead in the universal posture of a person being told something they didn't want to hear. "No, I understand what you're saying, I just don't accept it. That's different from not understanding it." She listened. "NO, that is not the same thing."
Albert stopped in the doorway.
Jenna saw him. She held the phone away from her ear, which translated the tinny voice on the other end from unintelligible to very quiet. "My publicist is quitting," she said. "In the middle of a crisis. In real time."
"What crisis?"
"The Post is running a story that I'm feuding with Danielle Mayfair." She said the name with the controlled precision of someone who had been practicing not letting the name produce an expression. "She's a twenty-two-year-old from a CW pilot who will be famous for approximately four months before the network cancels her and she does that thing where she releases a statement about personal growth and then does Dancing with the Stars." A beat. "We are not feuding. We have exchanged approximately six words."
"What words?"
Jenna looked at him. "I may have told a journalist that her performance at the Upfronts was 'technically adequate.'"
"In what context?"
"They asked me what I thought of it." She put the phone back to her ear. "Hold on." She held it toward Albert. "Gary, tell him. Tell him what they're running."
Gary, from the phone: They have three sources saying Jenna called Danielle Mayfair 'technically adequate' and then said she hoped she 'found her level soon,' and they're framing it as a senior actress threatened by new talent.
Albert took the phone. "What's the publication date?"
Tomorrow's print, tonight's web.
"How long until web goes live?"
Four hours.
Albert handed the phone back to Jenna, who took it with the expression of someone extending trust she hadn't fully decided to extend. He went to the dressing room couch — moving a stack of Jenna's scripts to the table — and sat.
He'd watched this exact story beat in the show: Jenna's intermittent clashes with whoever was perceived as newer and shinier, the tabloid framing that painted her as the jealous veteran, the cycles of bad press that fed her anxiety about relevance. The show had handled it as recurring comedy. In reality, with the TGS profile elevated from Albert's contributions, the story had more surface area than it would have had in a lower-profile version of the show.
"The story runs either way," Albert said, when Jenna ended the call. "Gary's right that you can't kill it. But you can change what it says."
Jenna sat at her vanity without looking at the mirror. "How."
"Mayfair is twenty-two and on a CW pilot that's going to be cancelled. In four months, probably less." This was 60% meta-knowledge and 40% standard entertainment industry pattern, which made it reliable enough to act on. "The Post wants the veteran-versus-ingénue story. If you give them the mentor story instead, the story becomes about you as an established figure generously investing in new talent."
Jenna looked at him with the expression she'd worn in the talent corridor four months ago when he'd explained self-aware pathos — the expression of someone recalibrating what they thought the conversation was.
"I call Mayfair's publicist," Albert continued. "Or Gary does, with your approval. We reach out for a photo opportunity. Jenna Maroney, TGS veteran, mentoring a rising young talent she 'has her eye on.' The Post gets the story they want, which is Jenna and Mayfair in the same frame, but the framing shifts. Mentor is a better story than feud for everyone involved."
"She'll never agree to—"
"Her publicist wants the story to go away as much as you do. The CW pilot is in its first season and any press that makes their lead look like someone getting bullied by a network vet is bad for them too." Albert looked at his watch. "Four hours. Do you want to call or should Gary?"
Jenna stared at him.
"You're doing it again," she said. "The thing where you appear and tell me what's actually happening."
"Someone has to."
She picked up her phone and called Gary.
The mentor angle ran on the Post's website at 8:45 PM, which was forty-five minutes before the original story would have gone live. Gary had gotten a Jenna quote — I've had my eye on Danielle's work and I think she has a real voice, television needs more of that — and a photo from Jenna's publicist archive of the two of them at an industry event eight months ago where they had been standing near each other by spatial proximity rather than intention, but that distinction was invisible in print.
The original story died for lack of new oxygen.
Jenna found Albert in the writers' room the following afternoon and announced, to the room at large, with the delivery of a person making a formal declaration: "Albert saved my entire career."
Frank looked up from his script. "Again?"
"For the first time formally." Jenna set a hand briefly on Albert's shoulder. "The mentoring pivot was elegant. Gary is now afraid of you."
"Gary is afraid of everyone," Pete said.
"He's more afraid of Albert." Jenna picked up the coffee she'd come in to get, which she'd apparently forgotten was the reason she'd come in. "You're on the list now. The good list."
"Tracy has the list," Albert said.
"I have my own list." She went out.
Liz was at the whiteboard. She was looking at it rather than writing on it, which was her processing position. She looked at Albert, then at the door Jenna had left through, then at Pete.
"He's becoming the fixer," she said.
Pete nodded. "Better him than me."
Albert looked at the script on his desk and felt, underneath the productive satisfaction of the Mayfair situation resolved, the specific awareness of a person who had been building a case for his own indispensability and had just produced another brick. Good. That was the plan. That was exactly the plan.
He had three weeks and four days before the HR review.
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