Ugly Betty, starring America Ferrara, may have moved production to New York this year, but its take on our town is still reassuringly Hollywood.    (Photo: Andreas Laszlo Konrath)

54. Because when people find out I am single, they don’t look at me in a way that is the perfect combination of horror and pity.
—Carla Stockton

55. Because it’s best place to earn one- sentence stories to amuse friends and family back home. Like: “I was at a hipster dance party and some flailing NYU student accidentally punched me in the eye.”
—Sarah Sumner

When Ugly Betty’s Betty Suarez breathlessly competes for a magazine-editor training program; when Mad Men’s Peggy Olson glows with satisfaction, having broken through the glass ceiling and secured a thrilling gig as an advertising copywriter; when any of 3,000 crusading imaginary lawyers pounds the desk and achieves justice in the name of a falsely accused corporation and/or rapist, you can be sure you are inhabiting the one place where New York professional life remains powerful and assured: Hollywood. As the sand-castle economic structure of our city’s major industries is flattened by a wave of bad news, it’s oddly comforting to know that in movies and on TV, work remains thrilling and exalted, a matter of life and death (or at least the climactic final-act presentation that trumps one’s snide office frenemy). Should Betty get her own pink slip, she’d likely transform it into an underdog triumph—a magazine called Pink Slipper, perhaps?—because in our mutual imagination, that fabulous New York glamour job remains eternally secure.

Related:

• Articles by Emily Nussbaum
• Table of Contents: Dec 22, 2008 issue of New York | Subscribe!