Well, Henry was right--on the way out of Speyer, heading back to the A6 autobahn, you go right past the big Technik Museum. And if you've got a 3-year-old boy in the front passenger seat of your rented minivan (I still haven't figured out what the rules are over here--for all their scholarship, Bruno and Lambert profess complete ignorance of German child safety laws, and Bertha still hasn't said a word to anyone except her son), you really don't have a choice but to stop, especially when Conrad starts shouting "aereo! aereo!"

Nina began the meeting by telling Bradley and Renee a bit about what she was looking for. Since she took over as vice-president of prime-time programming, she had been trying to position her network as the place for strong narrative, interesting characters, and moral complexity. She confessed to being a big fan of the Spanish language telenovelas--she loved the long narrative arcs, stories that go somewhere and eventually come to a resolution—to an end. And as a business person she particularly liked the ability of some telenovelas to draw a substantial male audience.

"Absolutely" said Bradley. "On Spanish TV, the men have cojones!"

Nina paused for a moment and looked at Bradley and Renee.

By mid-morning on Tuesday, February 4, 2003, Nina Pagonis was running about 20 minutes late, which didn't concern her much because the people sitting in her office were the kind of people who would wait. Nina's assistant always showed her visitors into the public part of her office at precisely the moment of their appointments, whether or not Nina herself was present. It was simply good manners. If it proved a bit disorienting to some of her guests, well that could be useful, too.

The document that came to be known, in internal network memos, as "the Western Avenue Treatment," was discovered on the upper level of a Los Angeles strip mall, its pages scattered across the carpet of an abandoned office suite, apparently spit out by a nearby fax machine, the last functioning remnant of a small, ambitious production company called Terrapin Pictures.

At least that's the story Renee Alcala eventually told the network.