Total Professional

Chapter 1: The Other Rachel Buckley

The email arrived at 4:47 p.m. on a Tuesday, which Rachel Buckley would later consider cosmically appropriate. Nothing good or important had ever happened to her before five o'clock. Her entire professional life existed in the gray, fluorescent hours between eight and five, inside a beige office park off Sawmill Road in Columbus, Ohio, where she wrote scripts for Pinnacle Training Solutions.

Pinnacle made corporate training videos. Not the slick, TED-Talk-adjacent kind with drone footage and a pulsing soundtrack. The other kind. The kind where a middle-aged actor in a short-sleeve dress shirt pretends to learn something about workplace harassment while his scene partner nods with the intensity of someone defusing a bomb.

Rachel was good at it. Disturbingly good. She could take a forty-page OSHA compliance manual and turn it into a twelve-minute video that warehouse managers would actually watch without checking their phones. She'd won two Telly Awards, which she kept on her desk because nobody at Pinnacle knew what a Telly Award was and she enjoyed the mild confusion they generated.

"You have a gift," her boss, Dale Petrocelli, had once told her, "for making things that should be unwatchable almost watchable."

"Thank you, Dale."

"That wasn't entirely a compliment."

The email was from someone named Janine Ortiz, whose title was Talent Coordinator at NBN, the National Broadcasting Network. Rachel read it three times, then closed her laptop, opened it again, and read it a fourth time.

Ms. Buckley,

We were thrilled by your submission packet and would love to discuss the Head Writer position on "Tonight with Doug Fenton." The team was particularly impressed by your voice—sharp, grounded, and exactly the tonal reset Doug's show needs. Could you come to New York this Thursday for a final interview?

Best,
Janine Ortiz

Rachel had not submitted a packet to "Tonight with Doug Fenton." She had not submitted a packet to anyone. The last creative thing she'd written outside of work was a Yelp review of a Thai restaurant that she'd spent forty-five minutes on and then deleted because it felt "too mean."

She googled "Rachel Buckley comedy writer" and found the other one immediately.

The other Rachel Buckley had written for three late-night shows, a Netflix sketch series, and a Comedy Central pilot that critics called "bracingly smart." She had a verified Twitter account with sixty thousand followers and a headshot where she was laughing mid-sentence in a way that suggested she was always saying something brilliant. She lived in Los Angeles. She had bangs.

Rachel—Columbus Rachel, training-video Rachel, Rachel without bangs—stared at the screen for a long time.

Then she did something she could not explain to herself then or ever.

She replied: "I'd love to. Thursday works."

She told herself she'd go to the interview, realize the mistake, have a funny story, and fly home. She told herself this while booking a one-way ticket to New York, which she could not afford, on a credit card she should not have been using.

On the flight, she read everything she could find about "Tonight with Doug Fenton." The show had been on NBN for three seasons. It was not doing well. Doug Fenton was a former stand-up comic who'd been famous in the early 2000s for a Comedy Central special called "Doug Fenton: Mostly Fine," which had aged about as well as a banana in a glove compartment. His late-night show had launched with decent numbers and then slowly, steadily deflated, like a balloon at a party no one was attending anymore.

The reviews were brutal. "Fenton seems to be hosting a show he's already mentally canceled," one critic wrote. "The writing is competent in the way that a beige wall is competent," wrote another. A third simply said: "Who asked for this?"

Rachel landed at LaGuardia, took a cab she couldn't afford to midtown, and walked into the NBN building at 30 Rockland Plaza wearing the one blazer she owned. It was navy blue. She'd bought it for her aunt's funeral.

Janine Ortiz met her in the lobby. Janine was small, efficient, and carried a tablet like a shield.

"Rachel! Welcome. Everyone's so excited."

"Everyone?"

"Trish wants to meet you personally. That almost never happens."

"Trish?"

"Trish Moody. VP of Late Night. She greenlit your hire."

"My hire?"

Janine smiled the way people smile when they think you're being charmingly modest. "The offer went out yesterday. Didn't you get it? HR is a disaster. Anyway, come on up."

Rachel followed Janine into an elevator. She had approximately forty-five seconds to decide whether to correct a mistake that was rapidly compounding or to keep her mouth shut and see what happened.

The elevator doors opened onto the seventeenth floor. A sign on the wall read: TONIGHT WITH DOUG FENTON — STUDIO 17-C.

Rachel kept her mouth shut.

Trish Moody's office was a corner room with floor-to-ceiling windows and a view of the city that seemed designed to remind you how small you were. Trish herself was a tall woman in her fifties with silver hair cut in a precise bob and the calm, evaluating gaze of someone who had fired hundreds of people and slept fine afterward.

"Rachel Buckley," Trish said, standing to shake her hand. "I loved your packet. The bit about the senator and the escape room—that's exactly the kind of premise work Doug needs."

"Thank you," Rachel said, because she had no idea what else to say.

"Here's the situation. We're three weeks into the season. The previous head writer, Gary Molinaro, left for personal reasons."

"Personal reasons?"

"He had a breakdown in the parking garage. Very personal. Very loud. Security has the footage. Anyway, we need someone who can hit the ground running. You tape your first show Friday."

"This Friday?"

"Four days. I know it's tight. But your résumé speaks for itself."

Rachel's résumé—her real résumé—spoke mostly of forklift safety videos and a six-part series on proper hand-washing technique for food service employees. But the résumé Trish was holding was not hers.

"I should mention—" Rachel began.

Trish's phone rang. She glanced at it, held up one finger, and answered. "Yes. No. Tell him I said no. Tell him I said it louder. Thank you." She hung up. "Sorry. You were saying?"

Rachel looked at the view. She looked at the sign on the wall. She looked at Trish Moody's expectant face.

"I was saying I'm excited to start."

"Good. Janine will show you the writers' room. Welcome to the show."

Rachel walked out of Trish's office and into a hallway and then into a restroom where she locked herself in a stall and pressed her forehead against the cool metal door and whispered, "What are you doing, what are you doing, what are you doing," seventeen times.

Then she washed her hands—using proper technique, naturally—and went to meet her writers' room.