Page 26 of Making It Live!

"I'm not Fletch."

Ray looked at me a beat longer than was strictly comfortable, then put his headset back on."Yeah," he said, mostly to himself."You're definitely not Fletch."

The broadcast closed cleanly.Nelson delivered the outro, held for three on the graphic, and unclipped his mic.He stood, and didn't look at the control room.

But right before he turned to walk off set — right at the edge of the moment, in the space between the red light dying and the floor director calling clear — his hand went to his earpiece.Just for a second.Not to adjust it.Not to remove it.Just to touch it, the way you touch something that has left an impression you're not ready to examine.

I saw it on Monitor Three.

"It doesn't mean a thing," I whispered.

ChapterEleven

Nelson

By Friday, I had developed a routine.

It went like this: I arrived at work, reviewed the lineup Jimmy had left on my desk — always early, always clean, always with that infuriating absence of anything I could reasonably object to — and spent the next hour looking for flaws.I found them, occasionally.A sourcing question here, a timing issue there.Small things.Things a less competent producer would have let slide, and that I seized on with the precision of a man who needed to believe he was still in control of this broadcast.

Jimmy fixed every note I gave him.Quickly, without argument, with an efficiency that made the fixing feel less like compliance and more like he'd been expecting it.As if he'd left the flaws there on purpose, like bait, so I'd have something to correct and could go to bed that night believing I was still running the show.

I had no evidence of this, but the suspicion alone was maddening.

The show was better.That was the part I couldn't argue with, and I'd tried.In four nights, Jimmy had overhauled the editorial approach with the ruthless pragmatism of a man who'd spent years telling stories under conditions that made a cable newsroom look like a spa.The packages were sharper.The sourcing was deeper.The live interviews had an edge they'd been missing for months, because Jimmy booked guests who actually had something to say instead of the usual carousel of talking heads recycling the same three opinions in slightly different neckties.

The Vasquez interview had gone viral.Not cable-news viral, which meant your mother mentioned it at brunch.Actually viral.The clip had been viewed eleven million times on social media in three days, it had been cited in two congressional press conferences, and there was talk of a follow-up segment that could anchor an entire week of coverage.Bruce Coleman had sent me an email about it — a breathless, exclamation-point-riddled email I hadn't responded to, because I did not respond to exclamation points.

The show was better, and it was better because of Jimmy Goodman, and I was furious about this in a way I recognized was not entirely rational but couldn't seem to stop.

* * *

Friday's broadcast opened with a Senate floor vote on a defense-spending bill.Standard fare.I delivered the A-block on autopilot — not sloppily, never sloppily, but with the practiced ease of a man who could read a teleprompter, moderate a panel, and manage his own internal crisis simultaneously.

The crisis was this: Jimmy's voice was in my ear, and I had not gotten used to it.

I'd assumed I would.Four nights of hearing the same voice give the same kinds of directions — camera calls, timing cues, segment transitions — should have been enough to flatten it into background noise.That was how it had worked with every EP before him.Greg Fletcher's voice had been wallpaper.Liz Harmon's had been furniture.David Barr's had been slightly grating, like a chair that squeaked, but still fundamentally ignorable.

Jimmy's voice was not ignorable.

Jimmy's voice arrived in my earpiece the way it had always arrived in every room — with a specificity that demanded attention.He didn't just say "toss to the package."He said "toss to the package, you've got a clean four seconds on the turn."He didn't just say "we're tight on time."He said "tighten up the close, we're running hot."Every direction specific, confident, slightly clipped — the voice of a man used to giving orders in situations where imprecision could get people killed.

I found this deeply annoying.I also found it — and this was the part I refused to examine — effective.My delivery was sharper when Jimmy was in my ear, and the pacing was better.The rhythm of the broadcast had changed since he took over, and I could feel it in my body the way a musician feels a tempo shift — something had locked into place that hadn't been there before, and it was making me better.

I wanted to set something on fire.

The B-block package ran.I took a sip of water and watched the monitor, and this is when it happened.

I looked at the control room.

Not a glance.Not the inadvertent flick of the eyes that could happen to anyone during a three-second package transition.I looked.Deliberately.My gaze moved from the monitor to the glass wall, and through it I could see the blue-lit glow of the control room, the shapes of the crew at their stations, and in the center, in the EP chair, Jimmy.

He was leaning forward, one hand on his headset, the other making a quick note on a pad.The control room lights caught his auburn hair.He wore a dark blazer over a white shirt, and he was frowning slightly at one of the monitors — the concentrated frown I remembered from our days at Columbia, the one that meant he was three steps ahead of everyone in the room and annoyed they hadn't caught up yet.

I watched him for one second.Two.

Then I snapped my eyes back to the monitor and felt the heat rise in my chest like a flare.

What am I doing?