Excerpt from Escape! by Stephen Fishbach, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"A job?" She looks suspicious. "What kind of job?"

"Any job," Kent says. He hadn't even thought of it before this moment, but it's true. He really could ask Billy Phillips for a job. The man employs hundreds, maybe thousands, and Kent has a way with people. "You know how these things work. Some HR employee gets a résumé forwarded by the CEO. They almost have to find something for me."

"Oh, Kent." Margaret takes his hand and kisses his fingers with a tenderness he hasn't felt from her in years, and Kent thinks maybe he can pull magic from the sky.

Chapter 2

Beck

I only took the gig on Surf Dogs because the prodco offered me showrunner with an EP credit. My work until that point had been teen moms and feuding housewives, emotional stuff, and Surf Dogs was exactly as ludicrous it sounds. Dogs were pulled by their owners on surfboards into the sea and then rode back to shore, where they were judged on balance and poise. My dad had thought I'd be a doctor. "We're bringing you in because we're hoping for a more elevated surfing-dog show," the network exec told me in my interview, quite earnestly. In my vanity, I let myself believe him. The show was tucked so high on the cable dial that flipping there too fast could make your ears pop. Still, we had a niche audience of animal fanatics and stoners, and our production crew had the scrappy unity of a high school math team.

Short, slobbery Buster the bulldog was going to be an audience favorite. Between rides, he'd dig holes in the sand and snap his jaws at the sand crabs. But while the show was ostensibly about the dogs, really it was about their owners, and Buster's hairstylist owner Dave was TV gold. He was six foot three with an extra inch of bleached-blond hair. While Buster surfed, Dave patrolled the shore like a jumbo-size bird of paradise, squawking at curious onlookers to keep away from his "hound."

It would have been easy to caricature Dave as a classic stage dad. From the way he name-dropped his salon's clientele-surf royalty I'd never heard of and eighties sitcom actors who'd retired to the shore-I could see in his mind he was basically already a celebrity. There was just the minor fact that he'd never appeared on-screen, and Surf Dogs was the very thing to buff out that flaw in the universe. But I wanted to give Dave more than a snarky parody edit. A decade of filming reality television has taught me that within every fussy fame whore lies a telenovela's worth of heartbreak, so I'd scheduled one last day of filming. One last chance to spelunk into Dave's subconscious and discover whatever trauma he was displacing onto his goofy little pet.

My crew set Dave up for an interview with his back to the ocean. Buster was cradled in his arms. The dog's tongue lolled from his mouth as he panted contentedly. It was a hot afternoon in Huntington Beach, the kind of brutal summer day in climate-apocalypse California where the air itself could ignite. Down the coast, tourists swarmed the pier. A little boy was standing on his tiptoes to stare through a rusted-out spyglass. Kids clustered around a kiosk where a hippie sold shark-tooth necklaces, clamoring for a totem of danger in their innocent little lives. My awareness was like a sonar, constantly pinging the world for stories.

"We've been talking for days about Buster," I began. "Let's talk about you. Why did you want to be on this show?"

"I'm out here to celebrate Buster and all the surfing dogs who bring joy to the community through their talents!" Dave scratched Buster behind the ears, and the dog snorted happily.

I smiled and nodded. "Did you have any personal reasons for applying?"

"I personally believe so much in these incredible dogs."

I kept smiling. This was the challenge of filming reality TV today. People lived inside a carapace of clichés. They'd read so many hyperbolic articles from entertainment media that their internal headspace was like a breathless headline from People.com. But for the sake of Dave's story, I needed to shuck that shell like an oyster. Let the camera slurp up his salty-sweet humanity. I'd been noticing his accent. You can learn a person's life story from their diphthongs, and Dave's flattened vowels suggested small-town Midwest. I imagined a taciturn farmer dad, a long-suffering mother standing over the stove. And here this bleached-blond man-child was racing across a California beach playing hype monster for a surfing bulldog.

Excerpted from Escape! by Stephen Fishbach. Copyright © 2026 by Stephen Fishbach. Excerpted by permission of Dutton. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.