Twenty Years Later(11)
“Run this track with me and then I’ll consider this terrible offer you’ve negotiated.”
Ten days had passed since Avery went face to face with Mosley Germaine and David Hillary on the beach. Since then, hard negotiating had taken place.
“It’s a good deal, Avery. They offered, we countered, and now they’ve come back somewhere in the middle. It shows their commitment to you.”
“They did not come back in the middle. They barely budged.” Avery bent at the waist to stretch her hamstrings. “Mack Carter was making eight million dollars a year hosting American Events, and my ratings are better than his.”
“Mack hosted the show for years. Hell, he practically created it. There was no American Events before Mack Carter. At least not the American Events that we all know today. And he certainly didn’t make eight million during his second year as host.”
“Ratings and revenue trump years of service, and you know it, Dwight. This is a lowball offer that would lock me in during what should be the most productive years of my career.”
“You’re young. You have decades of prime years in front of you. Avery, listen to me carefully. We can’t demand Mack Carter money. He was an anomaly. Networks don’t base offers on outliers, they base them on averages. This is in line with other newsmagazine show hosts.”
“My average ratings are higher than any of my competitors.”
Avery straightened and then bent sideways, reaching her arm across the side of her face to stretch her obliques.
“The show supported Mack’s salary for many years,” she said. “Today, ad revenue is higher with me hosting. Twelve percent higher, in fact, but they want to pay me a fraction of what they paid Mack. Do they think I’m naive, or just really bad at math? Or is it because I’m a woman?”
Avery stood up and looked at her agent.
“My last episode killed. The ratings were off the charts in every demo. We ended the season on a high note, and we should strike while the iron’s hot. We have everything in our corner, all the bargaining chips.”
“Oh, you mean the episode when you allowed your insane producer to drop you to the bottom of a swimming pool in a minivan? That’s called a sweeps week stunt, and I forbid you from ever doing anything like it again. Keep pulling stunts like that and you won’t have any years in front of you—prime or otherwise.”
“It’s good to know you care so much, Dwight. I like this softer side of you, but I prefer the ruthless, deal-making agent who’s always had my back. Especially when you’re negotiating the most important contract of my career.”
“The network is not going to base your contract on sweeps week.”
“I’m not asking them to base it on sweeps. I’m asking them to base it on the entire last season. The numbers speak for themselves, from ratings to revenue.”
Over the past year, Avery had done a redesign of the classic newsmagazine show. The biggest difference between Avery and her competition? She never touched politics. The talking heads had that angle covered, and Avery didn’t have the stomach for it. She lightly covered current events and performed the obligatory interview with dignitaries when the present environment demanded it. But she allowed her co-anchors to cover the hard news of the day while Avery took on society’s nonpolitical topics. She had parlayed a journalism major into a law degree, and they each served her well in her role on American Events. Avery had a knack for sniffing out the truth when looking into a true-crime story, and the legal smarts to know when to hand her findings over to the authorities. One of her most-watched exposés covered the details of a missing toddler from Florida. Avery’s investigation—which included interviews with the parents, a deep forensic analysis of the case report, and the discovery of new information provided by the father—uncovered disturbing evidence that suggested the child had drowned while under the supervision of her grandmother, who then hid the child’s body in a shed behind her home. So startling were Avery’s discoveries and so vetted were her sources that the authorities took notice and reopened the case. American Events cameras rolled when police showed up at the grandmother’s house with search warrants and confirmed the tragic findings.
Over the past year her popular true-crime specials were legend, and her stories of hope and survival—from sinking a minivan into a pool in order to demonstrate how to escape, to jumping from an airplane to reveal the best way to recover from a failed parachute—drew viewers from all walks of life. Simply put, Avery Mason was redefining newsmagazine television and others were scrambling to keep up.
Her first contract with HAP News was a modest two-year deal that named her as a contributor to American Events. It allowed Avery to host several segments each season and occasionally fill in for Mack Carter when he took vacation time. Avery used those introductory years to get her feet wet and learn the business. Her rising popularity soon brought a more substantial contract that named her co-host of American Events. Mack Carter was the star, but Avery was earning a name for herself and finding an audience. When Mack died—a shocking event that stunned the nation—the network restructured Avery’s contract into a lucrative one-year deal that paid her half a million dollars as they scrambled for a permanent host. The future of AE was uncertain, and in that moment, Avery was an experiment. She was inexperienced and unproven. She was young and untested. She was, everyone believed, a temporary fix. But Avery Mason had proven them all wrong. She rose to the challenge and never balked.