TV people: They’re just like you and me

Here’s the thing: You can say anything to people who work in TV. You can make fun of the fact they’re Irish. You can be standing at Marie Claire’s premiere party for the new NBC show Lipstick Jungle (which puts its competitor, Cashmere Mafia, to shame, incidentally). And, coming off the proud buzz of having chatted up Charles Askegard, Candace Bushnell’s beautiful blond husband—who’s wearing, by the way, the most handsome bespoke navy chalk-stripe suit you’ve ever seen (Paul Smith, if you must know)—you can boldly tell James Signorelli, director of Saturday Night Live, that you think WGA lawyers could do better, for God’s sake. You can try to make time (okay, at least eye contact) with meatball-maker/celeb chef Rocco Dispirito. And you can have quite a few “Lip-tinis” which you generally would never do, being a wine drinker, but they just taste so good, and then you can tell some serious looking dude who may or may not head NBC’s local news programs across the whole country that he’s wearing his pocket square wrong and that it’s just like a Hillary-hating Irishman from Bay Ridge to do so. (No kidding.) You can do all of these things around TV people, because, honestly, TV people will say anything to you. They’ll tell you with a challenging smile that they’ve never read your magazine. That they won’t vote for Hillary because her voice is shrill. That even union lawyers are blood-sucking leaches. Because even when they’re out of work, TV people tell it like it is.