2
Tuesday, March 5th, 1985, 7:33 P.M.
Aside from her fellow producers being occasional slackers, Charlotte had already come to realize that their persistent flirtations were growing tiresome and that it was getting harder for her to conceal her impatience with the whole scene. Simply put, she was doing her job and they were wasting her valuable time. As usual, the least appealing of the bunch was the one who was the most aggressive. Whenever he touched her, it made her feel queasy all over. Sometimes she thought that if she just ignored them, they would eventually get tired and stop doing it. That never seemed to be the case, however. If anything, they seemed to ramp up their immaturity every time she rebuffed them. It was typical male behavior, she thought, brought on by years of nobody telling them that it was wrong and inappropriate. Either way, the shit was going to hit the fan tomorrow. These late nights were going to stop.
After dispensing of those unpleasant thoughts, Charlotte couldn’t help but go over the day’s shoot in her head. Normally, she never thought too much about the story lines or the scripts themselves for that matter. The show was just plain silly and Charlotte knew it. All of the girls did. In their minds, the show was more about promoting the band’s ultimate act of performing live on stage and producing quality albums. There was nothing like the publicity of a prime-time television show, but in the end, it was always about the music.
As Charlotte rolled on down the highway, she was pleased to recognize that she had received probably the funniest line from that day’s shoot; funny being a bit of a misnomer. Acting upon her authoritative nature, Charlotte was plugged to play the role of sheriff in an old, western town along with some of the other characters. The directors were often loose enough to let the girls do that in many of the scenes. They gave her a vest, a sheriff’s badge, a gun belt, and a moustache to wear. When one of the town’s prospectors asked her, “Are those the dirty varmints from Dodge City that just came through here?”
Charlotte got the privilege to reply, “No, those were the clean varmints. The dirty ones won’t be by until after lunch.”
Steering her car, Charlotte just shook her head and rolled her eyes with embarrassment. The show was filled with stuff like that: corny jokes and slapstick, physical antics. It was reminiscent of the old Monkees program from the sixties and even included fast-action scenes of the girls carrying surfboards and frolicking in the surf. The network made no apologies for the blatant comparisons, however, choosing instead to relish in the show’s success without saying a word. It was a big hit amongst teenagers and young adults, but dropped off significantly after that. Americans over the age of forty simply appeared to have little or no interest in watching the show. Apparently, their musical tastes were already set in stone. The bulk of the country’s sentiments reflected directly in the show’s ratings.
In the three seasons that the Go-Go’s half-hour sitcom was on the air, it never once cracked the top ten in the Nielsen ratings except for the debut episode and the following week, which came in at number two and number seven, respectively. Usually, it hovered somewhere in the latter teens or dropped off into the twenties. The ratings on the reruns for that season largely depended on how many of the Go-Go’s songs were being played on the radio at the time.
When Charlotte would make inquiries to the executives about the ratings positions or the status of the show, she was told repeatedly not to worry about anything.
The studio kept telling her it was a big hit.