Kill the Mic

Everybody Shut Up. · Ep. 401 · Tue
10:00 Cold open · 10:08 Gong: breakups by payment request · 10:22 Hot Topic from the Wall
Sponsor QM-401 QuietMouth Lozenges · Vote: shared stool co-demo · Guest: none

JEN

Two minutes to air, Jen Kaminski stood on her mark by Camera 1 and looked down at the floor under her shoes.

It was parquet. The building had been a furniture store on the west side of Columbus for forty years before Dayspan bought it, and the network had painted the showroom black and hung lights from the ceiling and never gotten around to the floor. If you knew where to look you could still see the pale squares where the recliners used to sit. Out past the last row of folding seats, the loading dock still said SOFAS over the door, in letters the sun had mostly finished off.

"Two minutes," Lou said in her ear.

Big Lou was the stage manager. Her name was Louise, and she was five-foot-one, and nobody had called her anything but Big Lou since her first week on the crew. She was thirty-five, with a dark ponytail pulled through the back of a ball cap and a black fleece vest she wore in every season, and she had the kind of face the camera operators kept accidentally finding during the breaks. She kept sheets of colored stickers in the back pocket of her jeans, and whatever she put a sticker on, the crew did. Two years ago she'd held a commercial break for ninety extra seconds so a guest could finish crying in the hallway, and nobody from the network had ever once brought it up.

Jen checked herself on the floor monitor. Camera 1 had her from the waist up: thirty-eight, dark hair cut to her chin because anything longer had to be fought with every morning, the navy blazer wardrobe liked on her, and the small gap between her front teeth that a network consultant had once wanted fixed. She'd said no. Below the desk line, where Camera 1 never went, she had on her running shoes.

She looked out at the rows. A Tuesday crowd: retirees, a church group, a bachelorette party in matching pink sashes who had clearly started the day early. A man in the second row had brought a sign that said HI MOM and was holding it upside down.

Then she turned around and looked at the Wall, the way she did every morning.

The Wall was the entire back wall of the old showroom, floor to ceiling, and it was a screen. Anyone in the room or watching at home could post to it from their phone. Handles came up in yellow and posts came up in white, and they were already scrolling. hi from dayton. hi from chillicothe. my mom is watching from her bed at riverside methodist SAY HI TO DOT. Standards, two people in a back office whose whole job was keeping the network from getting sued, ran every post through a six-second delay so they could kill the bad ones before they hit the screen.

Everybody Shut Up. was a host and a panel at a desk talking over each other about whatever Ohio was annoyed about that morning, a comic working the aisle, two hundred people in folding seats, a gong, and the Wall. Jen was the host. On the rundown, the minute-by-minute schedule they printed for every show, she was Jen K., because graphics already had a Jen when she was hired, and at some point the K had become her name.

She looked up. Over the back of the floor, on a steel platform, was the control room, a glass box everyone called Glass. Everybody in Glass wore a headset, and whatever they said into it came out in the little earpiece in Jen's right ear. The audience never heard any of it. Jen heard all of it, every show: the director calling cameras, Kyle the booker on the phone, Lou counting down, and whoever was running the show that year.

This year it was Doug Fairley, the new executive producer, up there reading the rundown again. His second day. From the floor he was mostly a shape behind the glass, a tall man of about forty hunched over the board on his elbows. Plain blue shirt, a haircut from somewhere with a punch card. So far he hadn't tried to be her friend, which already put him ahead of the last one.

To understand the last one you had to understand Linda. Linda was a vice president at Dayspan, with an office on the sixth floor of the tower downtown, and at the studio everybody called her Linda from Six, or just Six. She watched the ratings minute by minute while the show was on. When she didn't like something, she texted the control room, and whoever was running the show usually did what she said. Producers came and went, and Linda could overrule any of them. The one person at the studio she never overruled was Jen, because Jen had been the face of the show for eleven years and the viewers would notice if she left.

So every EP worked out the same trick sooner or later. If he wanted something from Linda, he told her Jen wanted it. If Linda wanted something he didn't feel like fighting her on, he gave in and told the crew it had been Jen's idea. Either way, Jen's name did the work, and nobody asked Jen.

The last EP had worked it out on his first morning. He'd brought her a latte from the good place on High Street and asked about her mother, and by noon he'd told Linda that Jen thought the open ran long. Jen had never said that. She found out the next day, when the opening segment was four minutes shorter and there was a thank-you note from Linda taped to her dressing-room mirror.

Out in Westerville, her mother would be sitting down at the kitchen table about now, with the volume low and a spiral notebook open.

"Thirty," Lou said. Kyle had started talking over her countdown, and she cut him off without changing her voice. "Kyle, get off my channel."

The red light came on.

"Everybody shut up," Jen said.

Nobody did. Nobody ever did; that was the bit. Two hundred people yelled whatever they felt like for three seconds, the Wall went solid with it, the band hit a chord that was wrong on purpose, and Lou dropped her hand.

Every episode opened with a One True Thing: one honest sentence from the host, and Dayspan kept every one of them. They ran on the chyron, the strip of text along the bottom of the screen, and went up on the website, and the promo department had been known to dig one up from six years back and play it over a clip of you looking tired.

"One True Thing," Jen said. "My mother has kept a notebook of every typo this show has put on the screen since my first week. She's on volume four. She wants to be buried with it, and she wants me to read the best ones at the service."

The room laughed. On the Wall, a handle Jen knew very well posted page 1 of vol 5 starts today and got forty hearts in a few seconds. The chyron put up ONE TRUE THING: MOM'S NOTEBOOK, spelled correctly.

In her earpiece, Kyle said, "Linda's texting. She wants the open shorter."

Jen kept smiling at Camera 1 and waited for it. She knew exactly how this went. All Doug had to say was Tell her Jen's fine with it. The open would get shorter, Linda would be happy, Doug would get through his second day without a fight, and sometime next week somebody would mention to Jen how much she'd wanted a shorter open. Every EP before him had said some version of it. It was the easy way out, and it was sitting right there.

Doug didn't take a breath. "Tell Linda the open is the show."

That was all he said. He'd told the network no, on his second day, and he'd left Jen's name out of it.

She turned and said, "Denny," and Camera 2 swung up the aisle to find him, and for the next minute nobody was looking at her. She spent it staring at the back wall with her hands folded on the desk, going over it again.

Denny Salas did the warm-up before the show and the Gong during it. He was a big man, bald on top, in a shiny gray suit jacket, and he was sweating through it by the end of every segment. He'd had a sitcom pilot in development since 2019. He took the handheld mic up the aisle, and a spotlight that had once shown off dining sets followed him.

The Gong worked like this. Denny picked a topic, then went up and down the aisle handing the mic to people in the audience, and each of them got to make their case. If the room had heard enough, it yelled for the gong, Gong him! or Gong her!, and people at home could post it too. Every post pushed up a brass-colored meter on the left side of the Wall. When the meter hit the top, Lou decided. If she nodded, Denny hit the gong, and your turn was over, and you sat down.

"Hot Take Gong," he said. "Today's topic, sent in by about four hundred of you: is it ever okay to break up with somebody by payment request." He stopped in front of the bachelorette party. "True story. My ex. Six years ago. My phone buzzes, it's a request from her. Forty dollars. I open it. The memo line says, gas plus the last two years."

The bachelorette party screamed.

"With the praying-hands emoji," Denny said. "Which I felt was a lot. I paid it. I'm not an animal. But I want to say this to the city of Columbus. That was not a breakup. That was an invoice."

One of the bachelorettes, a woman with BRIDE'S SISTER across her sash, had her hand straight up. Denny held the mic out to her, and she stood.

"It's efficient," she said. "You get closure and gas money."

The room booed her, happily. She kept going. "My cousin did it to her husband. Forty-five dollars. He paid it, and then he paid the next one, and now they're back together, because she says he's so reliable, and honestly…"

"Gong her!" somebody yelled from Row C, and then half the room was yelling it, and the brass meter on the Wall shot up to the top and started flashing.

The gong hung on a stand stage left, a brass disc the size of a truck tire, and it had a union contract. A different contract. People had actually seen this one. Eight years ago Dayspan had tried to cut it in a budget meeting. The crew filed a grievance on its behalf, and when HR pointed out that only members could file a grievance, the stagehands held a vote and made the gong a member. The form had a line for a name and a line for a pronoun, so they voted on both. He was Earl. He/him. The contract they eventually got said nobody hit Earl without the stage manager's nod, nobody got rid of him without a vote of the crew, and his name went in the credits every episode, right after the band: EARL, GONG.

Lou looked at the flashing meter, took her time about it, and nodded. Denny swung, and Earl rang through the whole building, and the bride's sister sat down laughing with her sash over her face.

Hot Topic came off the Wall. Somebody posting as @brk_rm wanted to know whether it counted as stealing to eat a coworker's leftovers once they'd been in the fridge two weeks.

Marcy Tran sat at the end of the desk in red lipstick and a sharper blazer than anyone else on set. She wanted her own show on Fridays, and she did every Hot Topic like it was the audition.

"It's a rescue," Marcy said. "Two weeks? That food is asking for help. My first job out of school, I worked at an insurance office on Morse Road, and there was a woman in claims named Debbie Szal…"

"Kill it," Lou said in Jen's ear.

Marcy's mic went dead in the middle of the name. On the monitor her mouth kept moving. In the room you could still hear her, small and far off without the speakers behind her, and then she heard herself not being on the speakers, and stopped, and put both hands flat on the desk. The room cheered. They knew exactly what had happened.

Kill the mic was the oldest rule on Everybody Shut Up., older than the Wall. When somebody on the floor was about to say something they shouldn't, a last name, a home address, a word Standards would have to explain to the government, anybody in Glass could call it, and the sound engineer had about half a second to cut that mic. Lou called it most. On this show somebody was about to say something they shouldn't nearly every day, and the regulars had come to wait for it. Some of them came for it.

"Debbie," Jen said, "wherever you are, Marcy says hi."

The Wall agreed with Marcy anyway, loudly, in all caps, and somebody from Zanesville posted a picture of a Tupperware so far gone that Standards killed it on the delay and for six seconds the Wall showed nothing at all while two hundred people wondered what they'd missed.

They went to commercial.

The red light went off, the band stopped halfway through a bar, and Renee from makeup, a small woman with a canvas tool belt full of brushes, came at Jen with a powder brush like it was a medical emergency. Marcy pulled a sleeve of saltines from under the desk, propped her phone against it, and ate three of them while she watched Morning Sharp with the sound off. Chip Wexler was doing a cooking segment across town, in an apron, badly. She watched him crack an egg onto the counter instead of the bowl, and then she watched him laugh about it, and she was still watching when Lou came by with the stickers. Denny came down out of the aisle dripping, drank half a water bottle with DENNY written on masking tape around it, and handed the rest to a stagehand, who threw it away without being asked. Lou walked the length of the desk slapping fresh stickers onto everyone's rundown: yellow on the sponsor, green on the vote, and a pink one on Marcy's that just said NO.

Brandon, the kid the lozenge company had sent to babysit their segment, stood at the edge of the set, mouthing his cue cards to himself.

In Jen's earpiece, Glass never stopped talking, commercial or not. Kyle was reading Linda's newest text out loud to nobody. The director wanted to know who had moved his coffee. And under all of it, level and unhurried, was Doug.

"Camera three, you're soft," he said. On the monitor by Jen's knee, the picture from Camera 3 had gone a little blurry. It sharpened.

"Lou, how long do we have on the sponsor?" The sponsor was QuietMouth, who had paid for a segment in the next block and would want every second of it.

"Three-forty," Lou said.

"Kyle," Doug said, "don't read me Linda. I don't need Linda read to me." Kyle stopped reading.

Jen found she was listening to him more than she was listening to Renee.

The Wall filled the break with people saying hi to their grandkids. Then, just before they came back from commercial, Camera 3 pulled all the way back for a wide shot of the room, the few seconds of crowd they always ran between segments, and for about two seconds, up in the corner of the frame, you could see the Glass window, and behind it Doug with his headset on and a pen in his mouth.

The Wall noticed.

who is the guy in the window, posted @sofa_king_tired.

WINDOW GUY

window guy is new?? he looks like he does taxes

he looks like he would help you move and not make it weird

i would let window guy do my taxes

In under a minute it was four hundred posts, and the Wall had to shrink the font. Jen watched Denny read them. She watched him have an idea. Denny's ideas showed up on his face a full second before they showed up anywhere else. It was the only warning Lou ever got.

"Denny," Lou said, over the speaker that carried her voice to the whole floor. "No."

Denny turned the handheld mic over in his hands and smiled up at the Wall.

In Jen's ear, Doug said, "Is this a thing that happens?"

"It is now," Lou said, on the headset this time, so only Glass and Jen could hear. "Ten seconds."

The red light came back on.

"All right," Denny said, back at center. "Shouldn't Vote. I think you've all met Window Guy."

The Wall went solid yellow with handles.

"Window Guy's real name is Doug Fairley, and he's our brand-new executive producer. Day two, folks. Day two." Denny pointed up at Glass, and Camera 3 found the window and held on it until Doug, very slowly, lifted one hand. "Our friends at QuietMouth Lozenges need two people on one stool for today's demo. Should those two people be Jen K. and Window Guy? Phones out. Studio and home. Yes or no. Sixty percent and it's binding."

That was the Shouldn't Vote. Once a show, the Wall voted on something that shouldn't happen, and if sixty percent said yes, it happened. It was supposedly in a contract somewhere, and in eleven years Jen had never seen the contract or met anyone who had. Staff weren't exempt. The Shouldn't Vote had once put a camera operator in a hula skirt for a week, and one bad spring it had put the regional ad-sales manager in a dunk tank in the parking lot.

The Wall split down the middle, YES on one side and NO on the other, and handles started pouring into both columns. The YES side filled faster. Somebody named @sofa_king_tired posted put him on the stool eleven times in a row. The numbers climbed, wobbled, and stopped.

"Sixty-two," Lou said, into the floor mic so everyone could hear.

Up in Glass, Doug took off his headset, looked at it, and put it back on. "Director has the show," he said. It meant he was handing the control room over, because in about a minute he was going to be on television. The director said it back, very happily.

"Come on down, Doug," Jen said. "The people have spoken."

He came down the metal stairs from Glass and across the floor, stepping over the cable runs. At the bottom he ducked under a light that everyone else walked under. Brandon, in a tucked-in polo, who could not have been older than twenty-four, was waiting by the stool with a stack of cue cards. The stool was a leftover from the furniture-store days, a tall wooden thing with a paper tag still hanging off the underside that said FLOOR SAMPLE. Props had tried to take the tag off once. Lou had put it back.

Doug sat first.

Jen noticed that. If he'd waited for her, she'd have ended up perched on the front edge while he decided where to put himself, and the cameras would have gotten a nice long shot of her waiting. He just sat, took the back half, and left her the front. She sat. The stool was not built for two adults. Her hip was against his, and there was nothing either of them could do about it on live television. Up close he looked younger than she'd guessed from the floor, with gray just starting at his temples and big, careful hands that he kept flat on his knees. He smelled like the coffee from the Glass warmer, and he had a thin scar through one eyebrow.

Camera 2 rolled in until it was close enough that Jen could see the two of them on the monitor by her knee, and how little room there was. Two hundred people leaned forward in their folding seats. Somebody in the bachelorette party said oh my God loud enough for the floor mics to catch it. Brandon got the lozenge tin out of his pocket on the second try.

Brandon held up the tin: pastel lozenges, for when you've already said too much on live TV. Jen opened it. Doug took one and she took one. They tasted like chalk and peppermint. Behind them the Wall started raining cartoon lozenges, and Brandon, who had clearly been promised this, looked like he might cry.

Doug's knee was against hers. She waited for him to move it. He didn't. She didn't either. She read the card.

"QuietMouth," she said. "For when you've already said too much."

Down the desk, Marcy leaned into her mic. "This is either advertising or a hostage situation."

"Both," Jen said. "We meant to say that."

It was the show's catchphrase. They said it whenever something went wrong on air, and something went wrong most days. The chyron put it up under both their names: WE MEANT TO SAY THAY.

"T, H, A, Y," Marcy read off the monitor, into a live mic, to help.

Somebody in Glass fixed it. It became WE MEANT TO SAY THATY.

"Oh, that's worse," Marcy said. The Wall saw it before anyone on set did and went completely feral.

Doug laughed. It was short and surprised and it went out on air, and she watched him hear it go out. Brandon flipped to his next card, which said SMILE LIKE YOU MEAN THE PRODUCT. Doug read it and then looked at her, completely deadpan, and Jen came closer to losing it on camera than she had in about a year.

---

The sponsor block ended and they went to break. Doug got up off the stool the second the red light went off, said "Thanks" to the floor, and went back up the stairs to Glass. Jen stayed where she was until Lou waved her off. Without the lights on her, the studio was suddenly cold, the way it always was, and she could smell the burned coffee on the Glass warmer from across the room.

After the break the Wall was still full of him. WINDOW GUY had turned into a running count in the corner of the screen, and someone had made a crude drawing of Doug on the stool with a lozenge in his cheek. Standards let it through. It wasn't technically anything. Up in Glass, Doug had his back to the window now.

The last segment was Crew Mail. It was supposed to be letters from viewers. It was mostly Kyle's handwriting. Today's was real. A man in Grove City wanted everyone to know that his wife had left him for a man she met in the comments on a Hot Topic, that he was honestly fine with it, and that he would like a shout-out.

"Shout-out to Grove City," Jen said.

The Wall had been quiet for almost a minute. It lit up.

thats me. hi everybody, posted @GroveCityGreg.

greg we talked about this, posted someone called @karen_not_that_karen.

hi greg, posted a third handle, and then, no hard feelings man.

The room made a sound Jen had heard only once before, at a Christmas show, when Santa's beard caught on the gong. In her ear, Glass came apart. "Is that the wife?" "That's the wife." "Who's the third one?" "Kill the Wall." "We can't kill the Wall, the Wall is the segment." Then Doug, level, over all of them: "Lou, give Jen thirty seconds and take us out at the bottom of it. Director, stay wide. Nobody puts a handle on the chyron."

Jen sorted it out the way she'd learned to, years ago, with a live camera on her. She had thirty seconds to fix this, and then they were going to commercial whether she had or not. The cameras would stay pulled back on the whole room, and nobody's handle was going on the bottom of the screen. Greg would at least get that.

greg is the best guy i know, posted @karen_not_that_karen. that was always the problem.

Standards killed the next one on the delay, and for six seconds the Wall was blank while two hundred people leaned forward in their folding chairs.

"Greg," Jen said to Camera 1, "you seem like a good man. We're going to give you some privacy now. First time for everything."

"Respect the hustle," Marcy said, to no one, and it went out anyway.

From the edge of the floor, Lou held up one finger and spun it in a slow circle. Wrap it up.

"That's our show," Jen said to Camera 1. "We meant to say that."

The band played the audience out, and the Wall went white with goodbyes. In her ear, under the music, Doug said, "Clear. Good show."

Nobody up in Glass had said that to her in two years. Then the red light went off for good.

The rows emptied toward the doors in a slow, happy shuffle. The bachelorette party tried to take a picture with the gong, and Lou said, "Don't touch him," without looking up from her clipboard, and they didn't. On the Wall the posts slowed down and stopped, and the screen dimmed to the Dayspan logo turning slowly on a black field. Two stagehands started coiling cable in long loops over their elbows. Somebody propped the dock door open, and a bar of plain gray daylight fell across the parquet.

Glass was up a flight of metal stairs that rang under every step. It was one narrow room with a sloped window over the floor, a board of switches nobody but Lou fully understood, three chairs that didn't match, and a mini fridge with a sign on it that said THIS IS NOT YOUR FRIDGE in Lou's handwriting. Kyle's desk was in the back corner under a blizzard of sticky notes. Kyle himself, thirty-two, in the same gray hoodie as yesterday, with a good face he kept hidden under a week of not shaving and hair that needed cutting, was standing at the printer with his phone in one hand, apologizing to the printer, which had jammed.

Jen read Linda's text over his shoulder.

MAKE FAIRLY LOOK SENOIR. AND KEEP THE BEEKEPER OFF THE SHEET IF KYLE TRIES HIM AGAIN.

"She spelled Fairley like the adverb," Jen said.

"She spelled a lot of things," Kyle said. "Senior's got the O in front of the I."

Jen's phone buzzed in her back pocket. She went back down the stairs and out to the hallway by the loading dock to take it. It was the old stockroom corridor, cinder block painted the same seafoam green the store had used forty years ago, and a metal sign still screwed to the wall at eye level said ALL SALES FINAL. The dock door was open a foot. She could hear trucks on the road out front.

"Volume four, page thirty-one," her mother said, instead of hello. "T-H-A-Y, then T-H-A-T-Y. Two in a row. I've never had two in a row."

"I'm glad we could do that for you," Jen said.

"Are you all right?" her mother said. "You looked like you sat on something during the lozenge thing."

"I sat on a stool, Mom. It was a vote."

"I know it was a vote. I voted. I voted yes twice, because the first one didn't go through."

Jen closed her eyes. "Mom. Everybody can see your handle."

"Nobody knows it's me."

"Your handle is VolumeFour."

Her mother let that go by. It was how she won most arguments. After a moment she said, "Who's the new one? He laughed like he forgot he was on TV."

"He's the new EP," Jen said.

"Hm," her mother said. She could make one syllable last a week. "Sunday. Market. You're driving."

"I know. Love you."

Jen hung up and stood there for a second with her shoulder against the seafoam cinder block and the dock air coming in cool around her ankles. Then she went to find Doug.

He was in the back hallway behind Glass, under a fluorescent tube that ticked, next to a vending machine that only took exact change. He had his headset around his neck and was eating a granola bar in big bites.

"You told Kyle to tell Linda the open is the show," Jen said.

Doug looked at the granola bar. "Was that wrong? Nobody's walked me through how it works with her yet."

"She's the network. She calls the EP." Jen leaned her shoulder on the vending machine. "And the EP tells her I want things. Then I find out what I wanted."

Doug folded the wrapper into a square, then a smaller square. "My last job, the anchor wanted a fog machine for the weather. Every day. I said yes to him for two years. I'm trying not to be that guy again."

"What happened to the fog?"

"Set off the sprinklers during a tornado warning," Doug said. "He did the whole segment wet." He put the wrapper in his pocket. "Best ratings we ever had."

She almost laughed, and didn't give it to him. "For the record," Jen said, "I'd like one year where nobody tells Linda what I want."

Doug looked at her for a second. Then he nodded, once, like he was writing it down somewhere.

"Okay," he said.

Kyle came around the corner holding a printout, still warm; Jen could smell the toner from where she stood. "Hey. Doug. Sorry. Can you initial this?"

It was the rundown for later in the week. Near the bottom, in Kyle's handwriting, it said Guest: John / colony health (HOLD), with three question marks after it.

"Who's John?" Doug said.

"Beekeeper," Jen said. "Honestly, I don't know how he got on the first time. He just keeps turning up."

"I must have booked him," Kyle said. "It's my handwriting." He didn't sound sure. "Linda wants him off."

"Linda always wants him off," Jen said. "Two springs ago the Wall voted him off the show. Halfway through his segment."

Doug looked at her. "And?"

"And three weeks later he was back on the rundown," Jen said. "In Kyle's handwriting."

Kyle frowned down at the printout, at his own handwriting.

Doug read the line again. Then he took the pen out of Kyle's shirt pocket and initialed it. "I'm not cutting a guest because Six gets nervous about bees."

Kyle took the page back, looked at the initials twice, and went back up the ringing stairs to his printer.

"Linda's going to call you about that," Jen said.

"Probably." Doug fished the folded wrapper back out of his pocket and folded it once more. It was about the size of a stamp now. "Is she going to call you?"

"No," Jen said. "She's going to call you and tell you what I think."

"What do you think?"

The fluorescent tube ticked over their heads. Somewhere out on the floor a stagehand dropped a coil of cable, and the smack of it came all the way down the hall.

She took long enough that he noticed.

"Ask me Friday," she said.