The fourth of my contestants left the makeshift studio we’d set up in the hotel conference room. I ticked off the name Cecilia James, closed my eyes, and allowed myself a quick, wistful dream about the hotel pillows. All the cast and crew on Season Eleven of Marry Me,
Juliet had just done two weeks of mandatory hotel quarantine before on-set filming started tonight. I’d been hoping to use the time to sleep. It had been a foolish, naïve hope – there was always another fire to put out when you were running a show, especially when you were running it on your own – but there was still something to be said about doing your job from a luxurious hotel bed.
‘Who’s next, Murray?’ Saurav, the camera operator, asked me.
I opened my eyes. The right one immediately started twitching. I pressed two fingers into the muscle beside it. ‘The ringer. The supervillain. The one we don’t know anything about.’
‘How did that even happen?’ Indigo the gaffer adjusted one of the lights. ‘I thought you had this whole season mapped out. I’s dotted. T’s crossed. The works.’
‘Fucking Greg. As usual.’
It hadn’t been easy, talking Fucking Greg into letting me do this season, but I’d done it. I’d presented him with proposal after proposal and report after report on the audience reaction to Brett not picking Mary-Ellen, and eventually he’d cracked. ‘All right, fine,’ he’d growled. ‘You can have your woke season – if you promise me the fairytale. And it better rate its tits off, O’Connell, or you’re done.’
I should have expected something like this. Signing off on a million documents on our season plans and then deciding at the last minute to throw in some top-of-his-head wildcard was classic Greg…
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