matchbook

he producers knew they had a hit even before the first episode. Bigger than Game of Thrones, bigger than The Sopranos season three. Christ, maybe bigger than the Super Bowl. And now the networks wanted a piece of the action. The execs had run and rerun the numbers, saw how everybody would be tuning in. Just don’t fuck it up, they told the producers, not that anyone believed they would. Or could. The box would be unstoppable.

It was simple, really. Keep the cameras rolling. Keep the set minimal. Just the box (unadorned, cardboard, not too big) and a lighting rig. Just ordinary people. No need for make-up. Keep it honest, or at least Hollywood honest. It’s the raw truth of it, see, desire laid bare beneath the show’s single rule: Don’t open it. Don’t open the box.

Somebody always opened it.

It never ended well. The contents always terrible. Like the bees that swarmed the shy barista who tentatively plucked at the lid (this, when there were still bees left); or the maggot-covered carcass (deer? cow? the commentators couldn’t decide); or the flesh-eating bacteria; or the 1970s porn stache; or the staggering student loan debt. We all winced at that last one, yet we couldn’t turn away.

There was the solid week of plagues: locusts; frogs (this, when there were still frogs left); biting flies and gnashing gnats; tech bros and robocalls; an army of incontinent goats. There were spiders and sax solos; eczema, Ebola, and emetic emus; crabs (horseshoe and genital); and mimes, so many mimes. Calving icesheets. A tsunami-inducing earthquake. Plummeting satellites, each one piercing the atmosphere in a brilliant display that we all cheered. See, it’s not all bad, some clamored, until somebody else opened the box and out came dysentery, out came Cybertrucks or, once, a bag of dicks (gummy, perfect for a bachelorette party, and laced through with E. coli).

And we couldn’t stop watching. Ratings spiked, dipped slightly during the genocides, then spiked again. Crises were declared. Congressional hearings (this, when there was still a Congress) were convened. The box was subpoenaed, and the producers frothed. But at the hearing, the box held no answers and, under advice from its counsel, pled the Fifth.

Cut to a close-up, the producers said, and the cameras zoomed in on the box sitting on the Committee table, its microphone crackling before it. And there, as the cameras zoomed closer, the box’s lid moved—or was it a trick of the light? Cut to a wide shot of the hearing room in disarray, the Chairman banging his gavel for order, shouting at the gathering staffers to step away, to Not Open The Witness. Wait for it, the producers said, cue camera three. The Chairman’s red face. Cue two, the silent box and its microphone. We all leaned forward, expectant. We didn’t once look away.