it all possible. Changing his surname seven years ago—unofficially, though not legally, because that would’ve drawn attention to it—was the smartest move he’d ever made.
If anyone in the media were to know that he was actually Tynan Howe, son of the notorious former congressman Addison Howe, a member of the infamous Howe clan…
It wouldn’t happen, Ty assured himself, for possibly the millionth time. The contestants were the attraction and sole focus of fan and media attention. Nobody knew the names of the camera and editing crews, nobody was interested enough to learn who they were. Why should they? To the fans of Victorious, he was as invisible as his camera.
And he wouldn’t have it any other way.
Every morning, as close to dawn as possible, the Victorious crew arrived by boat on the side of the island where the contestants dwelled in their makeshift camp. There was a shorter, more direct route through the jungle forest, but it was never used by the crew. That might’ve tipped off the contestants, who weren’t permitted to know how close they really were to the amenities of civilization in the crew’s camp. Plus, lugging all the equipment on foot via jungle pathways was impractical.
Ty eyed the contestants’ camp, a familiar sight to him after filming it all this time. It would’ve been considered a squalid setting if it weren’t located on a gorgeous island in the Pacific—and if the inhabitants weren’t in a voluntary contest to win a million dollars.
Those factors turned “squalid” into something else entirely, Ty had remarked—innocuously enough, he’d thought—to the show’s executive producer, Clark Garrett, who had coldly ordered him to “can the laughter.”
So much for small talk with the brass, Ty told his crew later. He hadn’t even been trying for laughs.
But though he mocked it, Ty did understand the network obsession with Victorious. After all, when the number of reality shows had proliferated on all the networks a few years ago, the TV-viewing public had tired of them. Audiences began tuning out in droves and ratings plummeted. Companies would no longer pay the exorbitant rates charged for advertising spots throughout the shows.
No advertising revenue meant no profits, the networks’ worst nightmare.
Eventually all the shows were canceled, no new ones were developed and the reality-TV craze was officially pronounced dead.
And then, one of the networks decided to resurrect the concept to schedule in the moribund Saturday-evening time slot. Ty knew that television executives assumed that nobody under ninety was actually at home watching network TV on Saturday night, but airing a test pattern was not acceptable, and even the worst sitcoms or dramas were expensive to produce.
So the new show Victorious was born. With a few variations, it was still pretty much a shameless clone of the original reality game show that had started it all. And with no star salaries and writers to pay, even the million-dollar prize money was deemed cheap.
Just right for Saturday-night television.
When Ty landed the job, he’d learned that Victorious was to be filmed and edited on location, a deserted island in the Pacific, for sixty-three days. Within the same week of shooting, the footage would be edited into a one-hour episode and then broadcast.
“It’s ‘truly live television,’” proclaimed executive producer Clark Garrett. “Or fairly close to it.” Clark hyped the fact that nobody, not even he, would know who won the million-dollar prize until just before the last show aired.
The sixteen participants, divided into two tribes of eight each and flown to the gorgeous tropical island, were all telegenic in their own way, some more than others. Currently, the cast was trimmed to six, after combining the survivors of the original two tribes into a single one.
Ty and the crew assembled their equipment while waiting for the remaining six contestants to straggle out of the mosquito netting and bamboo posts that served as their sleeping quarters. The contestants called it a tent, though Ty thought it looked more like a shredded parachute that had fallen out of the sky and landed on some random sticks of bamboo. He wisely declined to share this observation with the ever-testy Clark Garrett.
As usual, the crew filmed each contestant emerging from the tent, from earliest risers to sleep-in slackers. The order never varied from day to day. The Cullen twins, Shannen and Lauren, were always the first up and out; Jed was always last. Rico, Cortnee and Konrad, in varying order, appeared sometime after the twins and well before Jed.
The six had all been members of the same tribe initially and formed an unlikely but ultimately unbeatable alliance, always voting as a block and never against each other. They’d survived while everybody else was voted off the island.
With the crew’s camp Internet access, satellite dish and daily newspaper drops, Ty knew that the Final Six had become subjects for water-cooler discussions in offices on Monday morning all over the country. Watching Victorious before going out on Saturday night had become the newest fad in the coveted eighteen-to-thirty-four demographic age group, and the network execs were giddy with joy.
He was also aware that the contestants had no clue that ratings for the show had skyrocketed, and the media buzz about each participant was in high gear. The six were isolated from any contact with the outside world and unaware of their new fame.
Ty wondered how much the exposure would affect them, how they would change when back in the real world. He’d wager that it would and they would. He’d learned that lesson only too well from the glare of the Howes’ media coverage.
He pointed his camera at the twin sisters splashing water on their faces in their morning wake-up ritual at the small freshwater spring, an idyllic spot where the beach blended into the jungle opening. He was well aware that the twins had found the spring themselves while exploring the island in the first few hours after their arrival, making them heroines to their tribe. Fans speculated that the game-winning alliance had begun then and there.
“Who’s your favorite contestant?” asked Heidi, the young production assistant, who stood beside Ty as he was filming.
She asked that question every day or two, more to alleviate boredom than from any real desire to know, Ty suspected. Still, he wasn’t about to give out that information, not to anyone.
He said what he always said, remaining scrupulously neutral. “They all have their good and bad days.”
“Well, my favorites are the twins,” said Heidi.
“You and a lot of others.” Ty remained noncommittal, as usual.
“Identical twins are a novelty on any show,” Heidi pointed out, not for the first time. “And according to TV Guide Online, these two are incredibly identical. Wow, like, how true! We’ve been filming them for weeks, and nobody here can tell them apart yet. Naturally, the viewers can’t, either.”
“Naturally,” Ty echoed dryly. It was true, though. Twenty-six-year-old Shannen and Lauren Cullen were virtual mirror images.
“What would it be like to look like that? And be in duplicate?” Heidi wondered aloud. “They’re so pretty,” she added matter-of-factly.
What could he do but nod in agreement?
The Cullen twins were pretty. Very pretty. Striking brunettes with thick, shoulder-length dark hair and big blue eyes fringed with black lashes. With their youth, their
