Guess what?

Suit & Tie was a hit!

We're talking right out of the gate!

Can you believe it? Me, either!

Credit where credit is due: The DuckGoose marketing people really brought their A game. For two solid weeks, it was relentless saturation bombing. If you were a kid age two to eleven, you could not escape us even if you wanted to. (Which you didn't!) If you watched TV, you saw endless teasers and clips. If you were online, there were also exclusive interviews with our animated characters. And online games! Not very exciting games, but still... games! And discussion groups! Where I spent countless hours just drinking in the excitement! And also resisting the urge to lash out at the occasional Negative Nelly who refused to get on board the Suit & Tie train. I kept it together until one young lady with the screen name of DancerDana complained that the show "looks dumb."

Oh, really, DancerDana? You think the show looks dumb? Well, I think you look dumb! I think you look so dumb that when you look in the mirror your reflection goes, Duh! You're not Dancer Dana, you're DUMB Dana a dumb dummy dumbo from Dumbville!

(Yeah, I know that wasn't clever — except maybe the part about the mirror, which still kind of makes me chuckle — but I had signed in pretending to be a ten-year old and I needed to stay in character. In any case, after that little outburst, I was banned by the moderator which I completely deserved.)

And not that I care what critics say (cough, cough) but... they fucking raved! All of them! Which becomes somewhat less impressive when you consider that we had a total of maybe five reviews. (Just as nobody wants to write kids' TV, nobody wants to review kids' TV, either.) They loved the character designs, the voice talent, the quirky, infectious music. But, as one reviewer noted, "what really makes this show stand out is the quality of the writing. Smart, subversive, hysterical."

Tammy and I had a lot of fun with that. Tammy would pitch a joke and I'd go, "Hmmm. It's smart and subversive... but is it hysterical?" And then I'd pitch a fix and Tammy would lament, "It's hysterical now, I'll give you that, but we've kind of lost the subversion." Believe me, we beat that stupid bit to death. Our staff came close to mutiny.

Immediately after the Nielsen ratings came in, DuckGoose was picked up for season two. The entire crew celebrated in the bullpen with champagne poured into plastic cups and inappropriately intimate hugs. Tammy made a short heartfelt speech thanking everyone for their spectacular work. I nodded in enthusiastic agreement, adding, "And by the way, if any of you have ideas for more stories, please let us know. Because we got nothin'!" Everyone laughed, although it was only sort of a joke. We had just finished producing fifty-two eleven-minute episodes. We barely dragged our exhausted carcasses over the finish line. But now — and without any break at all — we had to start coming up with fifty-two more. How the hell were we going to pull that off?

We needn't have worried.

A little while later, we were back in our office, still savoring our win when Evelyn showed up at our office. She cracked open the door and poked her head in. "Hi. Can I talk to you for a minute?"

"Sure!" I said genially. "Come on in!"

That, it turned out, was a huge mistake. You see, people who worked in Human Resources were best understood as the vampires of the business world. Under no circumstances should you invite them in. We knew this, but in our triumphant euphoria we had forgotten, and for a few credulous moments we actually believed that she had come to congratulate us on our success.

We realized our error when she opened the door all the way and revealed that she had not come alone. A couple of steps behind her was a security guard. Specifically, Gene. Gene became head of security after his predecessor went down in a sexual harassment scandal. (I swear, DuckGoose would be ten times more productive if they made chemical castration a job requirement.) I got the impression that he was ex-military because he had fantastic posture and a weird habit of crisply saluting everybody as they walked by his desk.

Gene waited outside the door. "I'll be right here if you need me, ma'am."

"Thanks, Gene." Evelyn closed the door behind her. The implication that we were so likely to act out violently that she needed Gene standing by to provide protection was not only insulting, but pointless. Even though I was only a green belt, I would have had no problem taking her out before Gene even knew what was happening.

Ninja!

Evelyn gestured at our couch. "May I?" She sat down without waiting for an answer. She placed her notebook on her lap, her knees demurely pressing against each other. She uncapped her pen.

"These conversations are never easy," she began. The dolorous turn in her tone was alarming. Tammy and I exchanged a wide-eyed look. What the hell? "But unfortunately, it has been decided to let your option expire." Passive voice, the Devil's syntax.

"You're firing us?" Tammy blurted, incredulous. We had been in show business long enough to know that fortunes reversed themselves neck-snappingly fast, but this was insane. We went from All hail Aaron and Tammy! to Pack up your shit and get out! in under ninety minutes. I glanced at the half-full glass of champagne on my desk. It still had bubbles, fizzing with joy.

"You are not being fired," she stressed. "Your option is expiring." She wasn't just nitpicking. As our lawyer had told us, firing us put them in legal jeopardy. Deciding not to pick up our option did not.

She scribbled in her notebook. Again, I had no desire to engage in violence, but if I did, I am pretty sure I would have used that notebook to beat her to death. Blood all over her stupid Anne Klein suit.

"But... but... our show had a great premiere!" Tammy protested. "The best one the company has had in years! It was just picked up for a second season!"

"Yes. And on behalf of everyone at DuckGoose, we very much appreciate all of your excellent work. But the company has decided to go a different way."

Tammy cocked her head in confusion. "That different way being... non-excellent work?" she countered acerbically.

Evelyn put on her concerned listening face while Tammy ranted. Evelyn had clearly chosen to wait Tammy out as she thundered about the injustice of it all. It was especially galling because she had acquiesced to the company's tacit demand that she forgo her star turn at Comic-Con because she was transgender. (Obviously, Evelyn disputed that characterization — scribble scribble — and we certainly could not prove that was the reason.) Both she and I had been good team players, albeit snarky ones, and still we were getting fucked over. No good deed...

I was as angry as Tammy, but I chose to stay silent. I knew that nothing I could say would change anything and I didn't want to give Evelyn the satisfaction of losing my shit.

When Tammy finally ran out of steam, Evelyn asked if we had any more questions, which we did not. "OK," she said, wrapping things up. "I hope everything works out for you."

"Thanks," I said. "And I hope that when it's your turn on the chopping block that you are treated with a lot more respect than you just showed us." I said it calmly, almost genially, like a concerned friend. And for a moment it seemed to effect her as her eyes focused on some indeterminate point in the future when her walls would come tumbling down.

"Yeah," she said with a rueful laugh. "Me, too." Then she snapped back to the present, all business. "So we are going to need your employee I.D.'s."

Then it got shittier as Evelyn informed us that Gene would stay to supervise as we cleaned out our office. "Please remove personal property only," she said. "Anything else you will be charged for."

Again, we were offended. Not so much because she accused us of being thieves; after all, back when we were force majuered out of Disney, we pretty much stole everything that wasn't nailed down, and had every intention of doing so again. No, the offensive part was denying us any kind of face-saving victory on our way out. After all our hard work — after all our excellent work — it would not have killed them to part with a few hundred dollars' worth of office supplies to give us a dignified exit.

But it got even shittier still. Because when we called our lawyer to apprise him of our situation, he explained that we were still legally obligated to finish post-production for season one. And since this was CG animation, it would take a year.

A year!

Mercifully, it wouldn't consume all our time. We could do other projects — for instance, we had high hopes for our sitcom pitch about a guy who gets separated from his wife and lives in the guest house or, if we got desperate, a show about what happens to a guys' friendship when one of them stops being a guy — but full-time staff work would be impossible. More upsetting, honestly, was that it also meant that we would have to return to this fucking place, over and over, feeling like a surrogate mother watching someone else raising her child.

And that someone else was Benny. Benny was a DuckGoose lifer. He started there in the early '80s and became their reliable workhorse, the guy they hired to take over when a show runner left. He had run dozens of shows and created none. His gifts centered not around creative talent — he was famously mediocre — but a preternatural ability to ingratiate himself to executives. To me, the most interesting thing about him was how consistently his routine worked despite the fact that he was transparently full of shit.

We ran into him on our way out and he was in top form. He made a big deal at how unjustly we had been treated by those DuckGoose monsters. And then he blew his trademarked smoke up our asses.

"I swear!" he said, "After I saw what you two pulled off with that show I plotzed. I was so intimidated! I told them I didn't even want the job!" Seeing our skepticism he raised his right hand like he was about to testify in front of Congress. "Hand to God! I feel like I'm going on after The Beatles."

Tammy knew full well that Benny was being insincere, but she also saw an opportunity. "Well if it helps, we have a terrific writing staff. You should think about keeping them on."

Benny stared at Tammy like she had just sprouted a second head, and it started speaking in German. "Are you kidding? Think about? What's there to think about! What kind of shmegeggy breaks up the '61 Yankees?" All of Benny's references were pretty outdated. "I need people who understand your vision, because without that, I'm one screwed Jew!"

A couple of days later, we'd get a sad little text from our Suit & Tie writers. It was a picture of them carrying boxes of their personal effects, looking comically sad and lost, with a stern-faced Gene hovering in the background. Benny had let them go. All of them.

And the shittiest thing of all, we couldn't even root against the show because we had merchandising points that could pay off handsomely if Suit & Tie succeeded. (So really, nowhere near the shittiest thing of all.) But that was a big if. Because he not only got rid of our super-talented writers, he also — according to our friends on the show— made no attempt to stay true to our vision. It was just the same uninspired pabulum he had been peddling for his entire prosaic career.

Tammy and I were often asked if we believed that we were let go because Tammy was transgender. I wish we could have answered with a definitive Yes! because it would have been cool to be LGBT martyrs, but we weren't so sure that's what happened.

For starters there was a new DuckGoose President and, like every incoming executive, he felt the need to shake things up. It made sense. He wasn't getting paid a ludicrous amount of money just to declare that everything was okey-dokey. And there was no reason to believe that wouldn't filter down to our show.

After all, it had been an incoming network president that terminated Doug and Gabe's The Has-Beens with extreme prejudice. And we had gone through something similar with one of our pilots, which had been the absolute favorite of the season. It was called The Scale and it was about an overweight woman struggling with body, romantic and work issues. After witnessing our uproarious filming on show night, the network president declared, "I'll see you at the upfronts, boys!" (we were both still boys back then). One week later, she was fired and her successor was decidedly not a fan. His exact words: "I'm not gonna watch some ugly fat woman whining!"

The new DuckGoose president wasn't going to cancel his most successful new show, but nothing was stopping him from marking his territory with some creative changes.

Also, as Gia pointed out at our Suit & Tie Writers Commiseration Dinner, there was perhaps a financial incentive as well, given that Benny's quote was much lower than ours. Or as she put it, "That fucking fuck costs a lot less than you fucking fucks." She's like Emily Dickinson reincarnated, that one.

And while Tammy and I believed that we brought a special kind of magic to what we did, to the accounting department we were all fungible numbers on a spreadsheet and it would make no difference to the audience whether we were on the show or not.

Obviously, we recoiled at that kind of bloodless corporate logic. We believed that sacrificing quality in the name of profits would be short-sighted and ultimately self-defeating. And generally speaking, our predictions were borne out. That said, though, the show Tammy and I had so painstakingly created did absolutely fine. Without us, without our writers, without our vision. Suit & Tie went another five seasons and nobody noticed, much less cared about, our absence.

And that, I think, really was the shittiest thing of all.