Chapter 2: The Judge Everyone Fears
Howard Brenner arrived at the Meridian Television Studios at nine in the morning, the way a storm arrives: everybody felt him before they saw him. The car door closed with a soft, expensive sound. His assistant carried his coffee and his schedule and, wisely, said nothing at all. In the lobby, the receptionist straightened her shoulders. In the hallway, two young production assistants stepped aside and pretended to study a clipboard with great interest.
Brenner was fifty-seven, silver-haired, sharp-suited, and famous in the particular way that makes strangers feel they already know you. Twenty years earlier he had produced records that everybody hummed, and he had never let anyone forget it.
"Tell me something true," he liked to say, "and I'll tell you whether it's worth hearing."
The trouble was that what Brenner called truth was often just impatience wearing a good suit. He had a row of catchphrases the audience quoted back at him: "Next," delivered with a wave of the hand. "That wasn't singing, that was noise with ambition." And his favourite, the one that made the crowd gasp and laugh at the same time: "I've heard better singing from a car alarm." Contestants cried. The cameras loved it. The clips travelled.
Priya Raman, the show's producer, met him at the door of the judges' room with a folder and a calm face. She was thirty-six, steady under pressure, and the only person in the building who did not flinch when Brenner raised his voice, mostly because she had learned that flinching only encouraged him.
"Morning, Howard," she said. "We have forty-two auditions today. The first block is at ten."
"Forty-two," Brenner said, taking his coffee. "Forty of them will be forgettable, one will be loud, and one will cry before she finishes. Remind me why we do this."
"Because the audience loves it," Priya said evenly. "And because, once or twice a season, somebody walks in who reminds us why the show exists."
Brenner snorted. "Once or twice a season. The rest of the time I am a very expensive disappointment machine."
Priya did not argue. She had learned that arguing with Brenner before ten in the morning was like arguing with weather. Instead she opened her folder. "Ratings," she said. "Down four points since the spring. The network wants a moment, Howard. Something real. Not another clip of you being cruel to a teenager."
"I am not cruel," Brenner said, offended in the way only a man who has never been on the receiving end can be. "I am honest. There is a difference, and the audience knows it."
"The audience," Priya said, "also knows when honesty turns into a habit. Be careful today. That's all I'm asking."
Brenner waved her off and went to his dressing room, where the mirror lights made him look, if anything, more certain of himself. He had built a career on knowing, within eight bars, whether a singer had something worth hearing, and he prided himself on never being wrong.
Down the hall, Marcus Webb, the show's host, was warming up his voice in the green room. Marcus was forty, warm the way a kitchen is warm, and he treated every contestant with the same respect. "Everybody out there is somebody's whole world," he often said to the crew. "Act like it."
At ten o'clock the lights came up, the band played the theme, and the first contestant walked out to polite applause. She was sixteen, shaking so hard the microphone trembled. She sang two lines, forgot the third, and burst into tears. Brenner leaned into his microphone. "Next," he said, with a wave of the hand, and the crowd laughed, uneasy.
Marcus stepped in smoothly, the way he always did, thanked the girl, and walked her off with a hand at her elbow and a kind word the microphones did not catch. The girl nodded, wiped her face, and managed a small smile. Brenner watched her go and felt nothing in particular. That was the problem, though he did not know it yet: he had stopped feeling much of anything in this chair, except boredom, and boredom had made him careless.
The morning wore on. A young man sang too loudly. A woman in a red dress sang beautifully and got three yeses. A boy with a guitar forgot his own song halfway through and finished it anyway, grinning, and Brenner, to his own surprise, gave him a yes for nerve. Priya, watching from the control room, made a note: the audience liked Brenner best when he was surprised. Surprise made him human.
Priya watched him from the control room doorway and thought about the ratings, and the folder on her desk with the audition list in it. Somewhere in that list was a name she had noticed that morning, a name that did not belong to an agent or a singing school. A janitor's name. She had let the process run fairly, the way she always did, and she had no idea what would happen when that name was called.
Chapter 3: A Daughter's Dare