From stolen pitches to fashion closets: 8 movies and shows set in the magazine world, including ‘The Devil Wears Prada 2’

Inspired by the real experiences of former Cosmopolitan editor in chief Joanna Coles, this Freeform series is a rarity in the genre: its editor, Jacqueline Carlyle (Melora Hardin), is a fierce mentor rather than a tyrant—a deliberate and welcome subversion of the queen-bee archetype. Some storylines draw directly from Coles’s career, including one inspired by a product test that goes disastrously wrong (see: the yoni egg episode). The catch? Real media professionals widely criticised the show’s suggestion that an assistant could go four years without writing a single article—a premise that anyone who has worked in digital media will find gloriously absurd.

ABC‘s Ugly Betty, based on the Colombian telenovela Yo soy Betty, la fea, weaponised the fashion-world setting to explore class, immigration and identity with a boldness few workplace comedies have matched since. America Ferrera (Betty Suarez), a brilliant Mexican-American assistant from Queens, navigates the hyper-stylised world of Mode magazine while fending off the endlessly scheming creative director, Wilhelmina Slater (Vanessa Williams). Crucially, Betty never undergoes a conventional makeover—her aesthetic evolves on her terms. Real editors praised her journalistic preparedness and willingness to learn as a refreshingly accurate portrait of what genuine early-career drive actually looks like.

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Beneath the nostalgia-soaked 1980s soundtrack and charming body-swap premise, this 2004 rom-com delivers a pointed critique of media ethics that still resonates. Jennifer Garner (Jenna Rink), a 30-year-old fashion editor at Poise magazine, discovers her adult self has been plagiarising ideas and trading editorial secrets to rival publication Sparkle—a betrayal orchestrated partly by her own co-editor. The twist, of course, is that she did it to herself. It is a sharp, candy-coated warning about the moral compromises involved in climbing the masthead, wrapped in a Whitney Houston dance sequence.

Darren Star‘s Younger shifts the genre from glossy magazines to book publishing—but the same anxieties apply, perhaps even more acutely. When 40-year-old divorcée Liza Miller (Sutton Foster) lies about her age to land an entry-level job at Empirical Press, the show becomes a sharp, often uncomfortable indictment of the industry’s relentless commodification of youth. The show argues, convincingly, that the pressure to appear young and culturally relevant is not a vanity issue—it is a survival one. The unapologetically demanding Diana Trout (Miriam Shor) occupies the queen-bee archetype with immense, scene-stealing conviction.

This criminally underrated comedy, set in 1970s Los Angeles, follows idealistic feminist Joyce Prigger (Ophelia Lovibond), who teams up with shady adult-entertainment publisher Doug Renetti (Jake Johnson) to create the first erotic magazine aimed at women. Beyond the meticulous period wardrobe—every corduroy jumper and patterned blouse painstakingly recreated—the show offers a historically grounded, often surprisingly moving look at what happens when radical idealism meets the profit-driven realities of low-rent publishing. The tension between Joyce’s feminist manifesto and Doug’s tabloid instincts is the show’s beating heart.

Long before The Devil Wears Prada 2, NBC’s Just Shoot Me! was skewering the absurdities of the fashion-glossy world with sharp, neurotic wit. The series centres on Maya Gallo (Laura San Giacomo), a principled journalist with a temper who reluctantly joins her father Jack’s (George Segal) Blush magazine after being fired from a serious news job. The tension between Maya’s editorial ambitions and the superficial demands of a high-fashion title feels remarkably prescient—and the ensemble cast of high-strung ex-models and philandering photographers remains an affectionate, razor-sharp portrait of ’90s media culture.

This NBC sitcom—starring Brooke Shields (Susan Keane) as a magazine writer who leaves her fiancé at the altar—perfectly captures the 1990s trend of building an entire publication’s identity around a single, highly relatable lifestyle columnist. Set at The Gate in San Francisco, it leans heavily into office romance, particularly Susan‘s complicated dynamic with her editor and boss, who happens to be her ex-fiancé‘s brother. Light on industry realism, perhaps, but it understood something important: in magazines, personality has always been the product.

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