Life of the Mind had kicked off with huge market share, Henry remembered. For the first three weekly episodes, the four loonies fought like cats and dogs, and while viewership declined after the big kick-off, it remained extraordinarily high. The island's ample population of bikini-clad platinum blondes provided a sympathetic outlet for the men's frustrations, but mostly the nuts liked to sit in front of the camera and gripe about their unappreciated genius. Henry was so happy he didn't even mind being stuck on a boring island; nuttiness was bursting through the seams on his talent, and he was winning points in market share for BOP.

Each week, across America, people laughed, slapped their knees, pointed at the television and said, "I work with somebody just like that."

At the time, Henry laughed with them. To him, these nuts were America, its very soul. He believed that most people, lacking self-awareness, laughed at and despised in others those attributes that were their own worst traits -- a sort of self-loathing by projection.

The situation got even more comical when Tom Willard found out, somehow -- Henry still wanted to know, since the remote island was supposed to be sequestered for the duration of the shooting -- that the media back home were making fun of him and the other nuts on the island. Willard got severely depressed, blamed the Illuminati, blasted the liberal media for twenty minutes on episode four and got the other nuts all riled up, who carefully prepared and gave their own speeches. It was one of the high points of the show. For some reason, they hadn't thought that people would see them as completely gonzo. Oh, the comedy of it.

Dillon sent a plane loaded with crates of champagne for the crew. The stockholders had just given him a raise, stock and bonus worth twenty million dollars.

"Hello out there in TV Land I'm George Lovins, and I'm an inventor and a practicing electrical and mechanical engineer. I was the president of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers for a while, back when I didn't have so many gray hairs. Ha ha. You may already know me from my visit to The Tonight Show, where I talked about the coming completion of my free energy machine. I say free energy machine because that's basically what it is, even though it does sound too good to be true. I say free, because in terms of physics it's free, but I'm sure its output will be taxed, don't worry about that. My free energy machine is basically a pulsed motor generator that harnesses the perpetual motion of spinning particles -- that's atoms to people like you and me -- and uses them to create magnetic fields in which you can turn a motor shaft and therefore create either useful work output or electrical energy. I could make this device today, as other great men have tried before me based on this theory, but the government has been conspiring to keep essential materials out of my lab, and researchers heading in the same direction have been harassed. I'd like to thank the BOP network for inviting me on to work with a fine team of smart people to . . ."

Henry smoked fiercely, ground out his cigarette, then lit up another. The problem didn't come until the next week. The loonies, apparently, had snuck off during the night and had some secret meeting. Now they were smiling and happy and working together on some project that BOP wasn't even allowed to shoot. To humor the nuts, Henry had signed a contract with them that would keep cameras out of directly shooting what they were working on to protect their intellectual property rights, since at the time Henry was humoring their optimism about making some world-shattering invention. He also thought it would help with the suspense so that when the nuts revealed their world-changing device and the viewers back home got to see how ridiculous it was, the show would close with a sensational ending that grabbed tons of publicity.

Now he had boring footage.

The nuts were still funny in episode five, just not as funny now that they were optimistic, happy and avoiding each other's throats.

The viewing audience quickly dwindled to a strong hardcore following, sort of like The X Files.