With my newfound auxiliary fame, people were suddenly tagging me, messaging me, and even occasionally retweeting me. The production company made up a second Twitter profile for Mike, because no one in Hollywood could spell Cthulhu. For the six weeks of the show’s premiere run, I think that Mike spent about 12 hours of every Wednesday on social media (up from his usual two to three). The next morning, Twitter lit up with #BigGiantSwords. We knew that the technical quality would be very good, but we had no idea what to expect from the story. After the filming, editors far away in Hollywood take dozens of hours of footage and shape them into neatly packaged, dramatic 40-minute episodes. This not-a-script isn’t shared with the “talent,” and it’s still only a rough outline. “Reality TV” is also called “unscripted TV,” but the producers keep notes about what they want to have happen in each scene.
I’d say that we celebrated, but the lead-up to the first episode was nearly as anxiety-ridden as the contract negotiations had been. We marked the premiere by going to watch it at the Wharf with assorted cast members and friends. The show aired in the depths of winter, from mid-January through February. They brought us lunch and were fairly pleasant to hang out with, so it wasn’t all bad. In between, I just had to keep the house cleanish and the children out from underfoot, while I harangued the crew to pick up their coffee cups. I appeared onscreen occasionally, to remind Mike to pay attention to the bottom line and/or to get some sleep instead of spending the whole night on the Internet. During filming, he often worked day and night, playing his part in multiple takes of sometimes grueling scenes while the production crew was on the clock, then going back to do “actual, Newtonian work” building the weapons for the next day’s shoot. “Irish Mike” was the star of the show, which Discovery would end up calling Big Giant Swords.
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