June 12, 2025, 3:00pm

If you believe the American media, two industries are responsible for the whole wheel of culture. One’s in New York and makes print matter, and one’s in Los Angeles and makes :pops in cigar: motion pictures.

Hollywood’s long been self-infatuated. Movies about movie-making predate Sunrise Boulevard and Singin’ in the Rain. But the same is true in publishing. Novels about novelists struggling to write novels have proliferated since the medium’s advent, from Joyce to Miller to Bolaño to Lerner to Chabon to Byatt to Baldwin. It’s a tale as old as time, flop era be damned. Artists and entertainers simply love to make art and entertainment about making art (and entertainment). But what’s that about, beyond personal myth-making? And, more interesting to me, does work produced about making work tease affinities, cross-medium?

I believe so. Which is why I’ve made this pairing list, to celebrate the spiritual similarities inherent to showbiz shows and publishing shows. If you like X, you might like Y. But honestly, if you’ve made it this far? You probably like ’em all.

Hacks —> Younger

Hacks explores an intergenerational workplace frenemyship in Vegas/Hollywood. Younger does the same thing, but in Brooklyn/(a barely recognizable) Bryant Park. The twisty plots of both shows hinge on recurring betrayal. And in both cases, you stick around to see how this whole mentorship situation is gonna shake out. They each have about as many inside jokes per minute, too. (For the dorkiest readers at home, Hacks’s relationship to John Oliver = Younger’s relationship to Karl Ove Knausgaard.)

This pairing is for the industry insiders. 

The Studio —> The Bold Type

Here we have two love letters to glossy versions of basically bygone industries. Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s The Studio is a beautifully shot backlot hagiography with sprinkles of farce. The Bold Type, set at a fictionalized version of Cosmopolitan magazine, is about as sleek and self-conscious. Both shows launch on the premise that your dream media job is possibly not as great as it looked from the mailroom. But when it counts, both shows also skew sentimental about the powers and pleasures of conglomerate-funded storytelling.

Whether you’re a Conde Nast clacker or a d-girl with auteur dreams, this pairing is for the jaded believers. 

30 Rock —> Jane the Virgin

Liz Lemon epitomized the messy mogul. Her quest to “have it all”—meaning, in TV’s own terms, the hit show and the happy family—is constantly being thwarted by the antics of her comedy show co-workers. Jane Villaneuva, the aspiring romance novelist, is about as hapless. Things keep befalling her. Like this fetus she never asked for!

There’s something bracingly un-glamorous at work in both these shows, which skewer their industries with love-laced darts. And the high absurdity suits the relatively low stakes behind making, respectively, sketch comedy and soulful smut. This pairing reminds us all to take a chill pill. Whether it’s a book or a sitcom, sometimes we’re just here to have fun.

This one’s for the goofy realists. 

The Larry Sanders Show —> Love & Anarchy

There’d be no 30 Rock without its antecedent, The Larry Sanders Show. (Probably ditto Hacks, for that matter.) But this late night comedy about people making a late night comedy took itself a little more seriously. Or at least the eponymous hero did.

The Swedish import Love and Anarchy (Kärlek och anarki) also maintains a dramedic sensibility, but for the publishing biz. Extolling the series as a great pandemic binge, Emma Kantor described the latter as “filled with industry satire, office hijinks, and sexual tension.” In other words? There’s earnest chaos. Love, meet anarchy.

This pairing is for the balanced consumers. 

The Comeback —> The Other Black Girl

Okay, okay, hear me out. I know Lisa Kudrow’s HBO mockumentary series about a delusional woman (Valerie Cherish) trying to reclaim her sitcom throne is, yes, a comedy. Whereas The Other Black Girl, adapted from Zakiya Dalila Harris’ 2021 novel of the same name, takes a satirical premise and then hard turns into thriller. But genre differences aside, both these projects explore scrambling for scraps, the perils of unchecked ambition, cruel industrial standards, and what a lack of solidarity (or fear of the döppelganger) can do to a single psyche.

This pairing = cautionary tales. 

Call My Agent! —> Just Shoot Me

And here we return to madcap ensembles. Because whether you’re launching an acting career or a magazine, it does in fact take a village.

The French sitcom, Call My Agent!, offers a delightful, not-too-withering peek behind the old red curtain. It’s more in thrall to its characters than it is jaded. Which rhymes with a sitcom predating Peak TV—the goofy, earnest episodic about magazine makers, Just Shoot Me. Both shows remind us that before all the gloss is applied, making magazines and making television is a job. Pure and simple. And also, both shows have three words in the title. Badda bing!

Happy bingeing.