Work Text:
present
[2008]
At this time of night, all the lights in the building got turned way down low. Someone hadn’t turned the hall speakers off, though. They were playing that old standard. Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow. Jack Rudolph didn't assume there’d be snow L.A. that night, or ever.
He shouldn’t even be around to notice the low lights or the tinny Christmas music filtering through the cavernous space of Studio 60. He had his own office. It was a nice one. Tasteful furnishings, as big as the set space here, private.
Hell, he had a house, too. It was a beautiful one. Tasteful furnishings, bigger than this whole floor and the one above that and the one above that, and empty. Lonely, if he were to get pedantic about it.
Yet, he was here, strolling the upper deck of Studio 60 on a Monday night, his suit jacket hanging in one hand and his tie in another.
The Christmas show was upon them. That was what Jack told himself when he had pressed the elevator button on half a whim. Someone from the network needed to check in on the sketches shaping up. The Christmas show got dangerous.
That was why Jack was in the doorway of Matt Albie’s office. And that was why, when he looked up from his hurried writing, Matt Albie did not look all that surprised to see him there.
Jack leaned against the doorway and Matt put his pen down.
“Jack, what did you want to be when you were a kid?” Matt asked as an opener. He tilted his head. “You had a childhood, right?”
“Yeah, Matty, I had a childhood.” The nickname slipped with surprising ease off of his tongue and it didn’t sound all that mocking.
Matt snorted, but asked again, “So, what did you want to be?”
“What did you want to be?” Jack parroted.
Matt kicked his legs up on his desk, his desk chair tilting back dangerously. “Astronaut. Turns out NASA doesn’t like overweight liberal assholes with poor eyesight. Who knew, right?”
Jack chuckled under his breath. He used to not do that, chuckle at Matt or Danny’s jokes. As if laughing at the jokes of a head writer and a leading producer on one of the biggest comedy shows in America gave them a point on the scoreboard. Now he stopped keeping a score at all.
Laughing at one of Matt’s jokes wasn’t going to let him off the hook, though. “So, what did you want to be, Jack?”
Because that was the thing about Matt, and about Danny, and about Jordan, the whole Studio 60 team, all the way down the bench. Once they got rolling on something, they didn’t let up until they got the answer they wanted. It used to drive Jack up the wall.
“Honestly,” Jack said, strolling over to Matt’s overflowing board of freshly baked, Christmas-themed sketch ideas. “I wanted to write comedy.”
Matt laughed so hard it echoed down into the studio. Jack swore he had to wipe an actual tear away. “Jesus, Jack, mind if I borrow that?”
Jack shrugged. “Be my guest.”
He heard the sound of a pen scratching against notebook paper. And then, “But seriously, what was your dream job as a kid? The one you wrote down and turned in for some kindergarten assignment.”
The subtext being, it couldn’t have been this, what you’re doing now.
There was a yellow index card tacked to the one o’clock slot, in take it or leave it territory. Jack pressed his finger to it. “This could be dangerous.”
“But it could also be fun.”
Jack didn’t have to see the grin on Matt’s face to hear it. He hadn’t even had to ask which sketch Jack was talking about.
There was a beat of silence immediately crushed by Simon and Tom tumbling through Matt’s door. Tom had a surprising amount of five o’clock shadow on his face and a spiral notebook not unlike Matt’s clutched in his hand. Simon looked as fresh as he had at noon that day, despite it nearing two o’clock in the morning.
God, these people were marvels. Super human.
Breathless, Tom managed to spit out, “The governor of Texas accused the governor of Vermont of starting a war on Christmas.”
Impossibly, Matt leaned even further back in his chair. “Well, I didn’t know Governor Bartlet had that kind of authority.”
“Check what we got. We’re thinking Alex can play Bartlet and –”
Jack lost whatever Tom said next. Simon came to stand beside him before the board, his eyes finding the exact card Jack had pointed to.
“You think we’re going to have a problem with that?” Simon asked, his voice steady but curious.
Jack noticed the first person plural. The “we.” It encompassed him when, for so many years, Jack occupied the “you.” The “you’re going to have a problem with that.”
Blame two o’clock in the morning, and the low lights in the studio, and the lonely house he didn’t rush to get back to for getting him reflecting on when exactly that change happened.
christmas
[1999]
“I’m telling you, it’s gonna be a problem!”
“It’s only going to be a problem if your network makes it a problem!”
Matt was fuming. Jack had thought delivering the cut himself would temper some of the storm, but instead he got to bear the brunt of the tirade.
“Have a Holly Jolly Y2K? You knew that wasn’t going to fly. You were just poking at us and now you’re mad the bear woke up.”
“At this rate, Jack, you’re gonna be telling me we can’t dare imply old Kris Kringle isn’t real because some of our viewers in our 18-24 bracket still don’t know it’s mommy and daddy leaving their presents.”
Jack pinched the bridge of his nose. “Just cut the sketch.”
As Jack was walking out the door, Matt called at his back, “You know, I think my Christmas wish will be for your heart to grow three sizes this year.”
Jack opened his mouth to retort, but Matt continued, “But I’m not gonna hold my breath.”
What Jack didn’t say was he had a Christmas wish of his own. He wished for some understanding. Just once, some understanding of the precarious position he was in. He never got to be the crusader. He never got to wield the sword of provocative comedy or wear the pride having such a weapon apparently granted you.
He was the castle walls. He was the last defense. He was everything unglamorous about the television kingdom.
He didn’t get to wish everyone a Holly Jolly Y2K because he knew from meticulously gathered focus group data that every other person would widen their eyes in alarm at such a greeting. It was exhausting to know that and exhausting to worry about it. Yet there he was.
Wes cut the sketch.
“I’m only going to say this once,” Matt said when they returned from the holiday. They had all survived Y2K unscathed. Jack would never admit to being nervous just as the clock struck midnight. From the way Matt kicked at the floor, Jack knew he had felt the same. “Maybe you were right.”
“I know I was right.”
Matt rolled his eyes, not at all discreetly. “Sometimes I’m going to be right, too, you know.”
The chairman of the National Broadcasting System should not have to dignify that with a response. And yet — “We’ll see.”
[present]
Someone leaked the sketch to the press.
It was a Thursday morning, the sketch only just made it past the table read, and someone had time to ring up the American news media machine.
This show had a leak bigger than the iceberg shredded into the Titanic and it shouldn’t be Jack’s, or even Jordan’s, job to fix it. They were left to grab the bucket and try to bail out the water anyway.
“Jack, I told you: I don’t mind taking this.”
Jordan had been saying some variation of that all morning. But she had a toddler with sticky fingers on her hip and Jack only had a half drunk bottle of scotch in his office that he shouldn’t be breaking into before noon. He was promising himself he’d be better about that.
But keeping promises with just yourself could be a herculean task, so this gave him something to do. That was it. He just needed something to do.
“So, the network isn’t going to ask Matt to pull the sketch?” The reporter had an ‘A’ name – Adam or Aaron or Acapulco.
“The network stands behind Matt Albie and Danny Tripp,” Jack said, watching the reporter scrawl out his quote verbatim. “If they think the sketch is funny enough to go, that’s good enough for us.”
“Do you think it’s funny?”
Jack raised an eyebrow. “What makes you think I’ve even heard it?”
Jack had heard it, at table. Simon had grinned through the whole thing and Tom couldn’t really hold it together to deliver the majority of his lines. It was a funny sketch, bound to kill at dress.
And no one had questioned that Jack was there, under the guise of checking up on things. No one had questioned that he stayed for the whole damn thing. Only Jordan nudged his shoulder once, when the read was over and everyone was just talking over each other, and reminded him they had a meeting to get to.
“But if you haven’t heard it, how do you know it’s good enough?”
Jack shrugged. “I trust Matt and Danny.”
It was only later in the afternoon, a half finger of scotch on the corner of his desk, that Jack realized he had said “I” and not “the network.”
christmas
[2000]
The joke was going to go.
Jack watched the man construct the cue card. He watched as it got handed off to a stagehand. He followed it as it got spirited to the stage floor and handed off to a cue card holder.
It reminded Jack of that silly little Schoolhouse Rock song, the story of the bill sitting on capitol hill. Oh how many steps a simple joke had to go through to make its way onto a cue card, onto the stage floor, and into the mouth of Harriet Hayes.
Jack’s hands were sweating, just a little. One hundred and fifty million people could be offended come Sunday morning. One hundred and fifty million.
Danny Tripp chose that moment to saddle up to him. He had his glasses pushed through his wild hair. His palms were probably not sweating. Matt and Danny never cared about offending one hundred and fifty million people. All they cared about was making the other hundred million people in this country laugh.
Maybe Danny’s hands were sweating, just a little.
But he was smiling somehow. “I knew you’d let it slide.”
Danny Tripp was acting a little too smug for Jack’s liking, though Jack had often figured smug to be Danny’s default.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“It’s fun, isn’t it?” Danny said, smirking. “Batting for the bad news bears once and awhile?”
Fun was waking up tomorrow morning and not hearing on the radio that Studio 60 had everyone of the Christian faith. Fun was eating an uninterrupted breakfast, free of any phone calls from members of the board demanding why he didn’t force Wes and his writers to cut the joke. Fun was good ratings. Fun was controversy free.
Then Harriet said the joke and it sounded like the whole room had filled with helium. The benches the audience sat on rattled. The floor shook, like an honest to god California earthquake.
That kind of laughter, it was contagious.
Jack laughed through the after party, where Tom got so drunk he threw his arms around Jack’s neck and he and Simon toasted with whiskey. Harriet squeezed his arms and thanked him, which Jack wasn’t sure how to accept. Matt never came around to talk to him, but they caught each other’s eyes across the room and Matt bobbed his head, perhaps a silent thanks of his own.
It was a tiny bit fun, to be on the side of this one hundred million.
He called it a Christmas present to himself, a night not to worry about the sky falling down on his head.
[present]
Conservative news and talk radio had been at it all day.
NBS has lost the plot. NBS can’t control their creators. NBS is bending to the will of the liberal propaganda machine. Jack Rudolph, chairman of NBS, is willing to let any sketch fly so long as Matt Albie and Danny Tripp put their names on it. Jack Rudolph no longer cares about family values. Jack Rudolph is running NBS into the ground. Jack Rudolph said, Jack Rudolph implied, Jack Rudolph believes. If he heard his own name one more time, he'd punch a hole through his wall to ceiling windows.
The previously half drunk bottle of scotch was gone. A new one had come to take its place.
“It’s all bullshit, Jack,” Jordan told him. Jack could hear her daughter chattering in the background. “These people claim to stand for the First Amendment, when what they actually want is censorship of anything they don't like. And they can’t stand it when someone actually refuses to give them their way.”
“Sounds a little like someone else I know.”
Jack swore he heard Jordan blow a raspberry through the phone. She blamed it on her daughter.
Wilson White never called. It became Jack's one consolation: at least that was his job secured for another day.
christmas
[2004]
He could always tell, when they really had to push for the audience to laugh.
It wasn’t an overtly offensive sketch — the network had made sure of that. The set was dressed up as Santa’s Workshop, Harriet and Tom playing elves and Alex making an overheated St. Nick. It had something to do with wanting toys made in China or outsourcing to China. No, it wasn’t overtly bad.
It just wasn’t overtly good either.
Jack hadn’t noticed Simon coming up beside him until he said, “It’s rough, man.”
He glanced sideways. Simon’s dressed for News 60, another segment that was going to be pushing for laughs tonight.
On stage, Tom’s voice was all but a whine. Jack sighed. “What do you want me to do?”
“You got a time machine?”
That wrestled a surprise laugh out of Jack. “What time do you want to go back to? The 80s?”
“See? You’re a funny guy,” Simon said, clapping on Jack on the shoulder. It always took Jack by surprise, how hot the studio could get. “That’s how I know that you know all this –” Simon waved his hand at the sketch limping to a finish “– this isn’t it. Some of the magic’s gone.”
Jack caught sight of Wes slumped in a chair by the monitor, not watching it. He had aged a century since Matt and Danny left. Time in television worked differently than other places. You get people around you who take more hours from you than you wanted to give them. There’s no way to get the hours back. Even Simon looked so much older than when he started out, as a kid from Yale Drama that made the investors happy.
But Wes would have hired him without any shiny credentials back then.
A time machine. It’d be a hell of a thing.
[present]
He didn’t go to dress.
It wasn’t as if he went every week the show was on — he had too many Friday night dinner parties that turned into Friday night cigars that turned into collapsing onto his bed very early Saturday morning. But he had made a habit of seeing every iteration of the Christmas show.
He didn’t have a good excuse for missing it either. His excuse for avoiding the studio used to be he wanted to avoid any of them ranting at him in righteous indignation. He never used that excuse anymore, though, and it wouldn’t have been convincing this time around anyway. No one at Studio 60 had anything to be indignant about. Jack Rudolph was back batting for the bad news bears.
The investors weren’t thrilled. The board was shooting off passive aggressive emails about affiliates and Christian activist groups. The words “Christian” and “activist” shoved together struck Jack as an oxymoron.
And Christ if that didn’t sound like something Matt Albie would write.
All the lights on the floor were off save the small glow of his desk lamp. Everyone else had gone home for the weekend and here he was. The scotch in his hand had gone untouched. He had grown distracted by the stars.
You could only truly see the stars in LA with a good telescope. Jack bought the best.
Whenever Jack got to feeling a bit like a fool, he looked through his telescope and up at the stars. They had a way of making the problems of NBS miniscule.
The knock at his door startled him away from the telescope.
Harriet Hayes was in his office.
“Hey, shouldn’t you be at dress?” Jack pushed his scotch on to the windowsill. Harriet had that kind of effect.
“Shouldn’t you have been at dress?” Harriet countered. “It ended about an hour ago. But I figured you’d still be up here.”
“There have been some things to handle,” Jack said, being vague where he usually wasn’t. He liked being the guy who pinpointed the problem, no running around it or hand waving it away. Maybe this problem got too personal.
Harriet hummed in acknowledgment as she strolled into the room. She pointed at the TV screen, “Where’s the remote to this?”
Jack found it for her without a word, watched as she slid a tape into the VCR and let it play. “I figured you probably hadn’t seen this, but I think you should.”
It was one of a hundred late night talk shows, one not run on NBS. Jack recognized the host as one of the old co-anchors of Sports Night. Across from the desk, Simon settled into the guest’s couch with ease.
“I heard you’re in a bit of hot water over at Studio 60.”
“Aren’t we always?” Simon said, drawing an easy laugh from the audience.
“They do realize if you cut every sketch because someone might get offended, you wouldn’t have a show right?”
“I think that’s the point, Danny.” That earned another great laugh. “And that not that it’ll matter to the likes of Fox News or any conservative news anchor not named Will McAvoy, but lay off Jack Rudolph. The man’s got hundreds of people yelling in his ear every day. He doesn’t need a bunch of lazy pundits acting like he’s running NBS into the ground just because he isn’t caving to the opinion of a handful of white women all sporting the same haircut.”
Jack sucked in a breath. That was dangerous. This was all so dangerous.
The audience on screen did not suck in a breath. They applauded.
“Jack Rudolph cares about Studio 60. He cares about keeping up the magic.”
Jack’s arms had started to squeeze a little too tight around his ribcage. He had to hold his heart in place. It had started beating too fast.
Harriet placed a hand on his elbow. Her blonde hair glowed bright as a star with the light of the television behind her. The applause that kept coming from the audience was thunderous.
“You’re on our team,” Harriet said, jostling his arm gently. “We’re on yours.”
The tape ran out, eventually. Jack felt much less like a fool.
christmas
[2007]
“It would be a ten second cameo appearance. Ten seconds, maximum.”
“Absolutely not.”
“It’s tradition! Wes used to do it.”
“And Wes was the showrunner of this program, ergo you or Danny have to fill the role.”
“One, I cannot believe you just used the word ergo in a sentence in the year 2007. Two, it wouldn’t pack the same punch if Danny or I did. And three, Danny’s just too old.”
“Too old? Danny Tripp is too old to play Santa Claus?”
“Yeah, I would like my offense noted in the record.”
“It’s tradition!”
“You keep using that word. It doesn’t mean what you think it means.”
Matt appreciated his Princess Bride reference. He then proceeded to harass Jack about appearing for the bows in a Santa Claus costume up until the cold open. Jack did not relent. He did crack one too many smiles, though, which he knew Matt counted as a series of smaller victories.
He smiled the widest when Matt appeared at the bows in a full Santa costume. Harriet kissed one of his rosy cheeks. He stayed in costume after the good nights and into the year end holiday party, where he slowly started stripping piece by piece. Danny ended up with the hat and Tom with the coat that drowned him and Simon with the beard that he wore around his neck like some badge of honor.
“Tradition!” Matt yelled, while somehow entirely sober, in Jack’s ear very late in the night. He clapped Jack so hard on the back, Jack jolted forward and nearly spilled his drink. “Present for you under the tree by the way.”
It was bundled up in gingerbread wrapping paper and had a tag on it that read “With love, the cast and crew of Studio 60.” Jack waited until he got home to open it.
It was a framed map of the stars on the night Jack started working at NBS.
[present]
All the lights in the studio were blaring. Downstairs, there was a wall of sound. They had got the band playing old Christmas standards, but as the clock ticked closed to showtime, the band was ripping through a rousing rendition of “All I Want For Christmas is You.”
Joy and laughter for everyone.
Jack had a cherry red hat in his hand. It had a bobble on the end. He had found himself in Danny’s office because it was the best place to quietly question all his life decisions up until that point. He was sure Danny used the office for the same purpose.
The man himself waltzed into the office, appearing far too bright and merry for a man producing a live television broadcast in less than seven minutes.
“It’s a Christmas miracle.”
Jack rolled his eyes. “Crazier things than this have happened in this studio.”
“You sure?”
Jack turned the hat over in his hand. It had a surprising heft. “And people have been let go for less.”
“Yeah, Howard Dean screamed once and then we wouldn’t let him be president.” Danny moved over to his desk and picked up a stack of papers that Jack wasn’t sure he actually needed. When he looked at Jack again, he had an expression on his face, an expression Jack had seen before. It was a Jordan face. A “we’re going to give them hell” face. “You don’t get to get rid of us that easy, Jack. If they ever try to show you the door, we walk right out with you.”
Jack swallowed. He wanted a drink. Conversely, he wanted to put on a Santa costume and make a ten second cameo on Studio 60.
“You sure you want to do this?” Danny asked.
“It’s tradition, isn’t it.”
“Jack Rudolph,” Danny said, as close to beaming as he ever got outside the presence of Jordan McDeere. “I could kiss you all over your face.”
“You know, you’ve said that to me once before.”
“You’re a marvel, Jack,” Danny said, clapping him on the shoulder as he walked out of his own office. “Never change.”
A little late for that, Jack thought, as he put on the hat. He had two hours to go, but he’d wear the hat for all one hundred and twenty minutes. The tip of the swung back and forth as he laughed through the sketch he didn’t make them cut.
Times, they really were a changin’. Let it snow in L.A.