Love is in the air, but needs a little help to get going and Jane is determined to help her friends out. Billy is caught off guard when Zoe invites him to meet her parents and he isn't so sure he is ready to take that step. Kate, on the other hand, decides to help Gray take the next step with her love life by setting up an online dating profile for her. Mortified by her mother's actions, Jane must now try to put a stop to the online dating scheme before Gray finds out and fires her for sure. Meanwhile, Rita decides to finally fight for Ben - but is she up for taking on life-long mean girl Amanda?
"Jane By Design" is a light-hearted drama about Jane, a teenager who lands a job at Donovan Decker, a hip fashion house, when they mistake her for an adult. Jane soon finds herself juggling life both as a regular high school student and as an assistant to a high powered executive in the cutthroat world of fashion... all while trying to keep her true identity a secret. Jane By Design stars Erica Dasher (The Lake) as Jane Quimby; Nick Roux (Lemonade Mouth) as Billy Nutter, Rowly Dennis (Desperate Housewives) as Jeremy Jones, India de Beaufort (One Tree Hill) as India Jourdain, Meagan Tandy (10 Things I Hate About You) as Lulu Pope, Matthew Atkinson (CSI) as Nick Fadden.
And featuring Andie MacDowell (Four Weddings and a Funeral) who stars as Gray Chandler Murray - Jane's steely boss whose constant demands keep her on her toes.
The economy — sluggish, recession-y, depressed — while slow to recover has also been slow to inspire television series about the slow-to-recover economy. As if in recompense, not one but two shows with premises rooted in high unemployment premiere Tuesday.
In each, the lead characters lead double lives for the sake of a job: In the much remarked upon but hardly anticipated "Work It" on ABC, two men put on wigs and dresses to sell pharmaceuticals at a firm that prefers to hire women over men (because, as one character explains, "the doctors seem to want to nail them less" — because doctors are, you know, dudes). In "Jane By Design" on ABC Family, a high school teenager passes as an adult while working as an executive assistant at a high-powered house of fashion.
"Work It" has been controversial in the contemporary sense: an organization has made a public fuss about it, the complaint itself becoming news in a way its target, left alone, would not. (See also: Parents Television Council v. "The Playboy Club"; Florida Family Assn. v. "All-American Muslim.") In December, the LGBT advocacy groups GLAAD and HRC took out a full-page ad in Variety that, under the headline "'Work It' will harm transgender people," suggested that "by encouraging the audience to laugh at the characters' attempts at womanhood, the show condones similar treatment of transgender women."
That is too great a logical leap. "Work It," as even its critics point out, makes no such association; you can't hold it accountable for what someone might mistakenly take from it. A comedy of disguise, its estimable forebears are "Some Like It Hot" and "Tootsie," and if it has any deeper point, it is the old one that masquerading as a woman can make one a better man.
There may be a Teachable Moment here, but calls to cancel the series are misguided (as are all such calls) and likely unnecessary. It is a windmill, not a giant, and it should wind down shortly on its own.
Passing on to the show itself, "Work It" feels like the third installment in ABC's Manliness Trilogy, preceded by "Last Man Standing" and "Man Up!," into whose (temporarily?) vacated space it moves. The recession, a male character says here, is really a "mancession — women are takin' over the work force. They'll just keep a few of us around as sex slaves."
In fact, the recession did open an employment gap that favored women over men; in the news in 2009 and 2010, it was possibly the grain of sand around which this pearl, from "Friends" vets Andrew Reich and Ted Cohen, has formed. That and somebody's fondness for "Bosom Buddies." You can almost hear the pitch.
But the series — which is to say, the pilot — is just not very good; the jokes creak and wheeze, and there is nothing in the performances to distract from the material. ("Bosom Buddies" at least starred Tom Hanks, America's future sweetheart.) If you want to call it insulting to men who dress as women, you have to also call it insulting to men who don't, and to women.
(Sample lines: "Have I gotten drunk and slept with a random guy yet?" "I'm Puerto Rican — I'd be great at selling drugs.") Yet it is not actually ill-willed, just ill-witted.
"Jane By Design" is a light-hearted drama about Jane, a teenager who lands a job at Donovan Decker, a hip fashion house, when they mistake her for an adult. Jane soon finds herself juggling life both as a regular high school student and as an assistant to a high powered executive in the cutthroat world of fashion... all while trying to keep her true identity a secret. Jane By Design stars Erica Dasher (The Lake) as Jane Quimby; Nick Roux (Lemonade Mouth) as Billy Nutter, Rowly Dennis (Desperate Housewives) as Jeremy Jones, India de Beaufort (One Tree Hill) as India Jourdain, Meagan Tandy (10 Things I Hate About You) as Lulu Pope, Matthew Atkinson (CSI) as Nick Fadden.
And featuring Andie MacDowell (Four Weddings and a Funeral) who stars as Gray Chandler Murray - Jane's steely boss whose constant demands keep her on her toes.
The economy — sluggish, recession-y, depressed — while slow to recover has also been slow to inspire television series about the slow-to-recover economy. As if in recompense, not one but two shows with premises rooted in high unemployment premiere Tuesday.
In each, the lead characters lead double lives for the sake of a job: In the much remarked upon but hardly anticipated "Work It" on ABC, two men put on wigs and dresses to sell pharmaceuticals at a firm that prefers to hire women over men (because, as one character explains, "the doctors seem to want to nail them less" — because doctors are, you know, dudes). In "Jane By Design" on ABC Family, a high school teenager passes as an adult while working as an executive assistant at a high-powered house of fashion.
"Work It" has been controversial in the contemporary sense: an organization has made a public fuss about it, the complaint itself becoming news in a way its target, left alone, would not. (See also: Parents Television Council v. "The Playboy Club"; Florida Family Assn. v. "All-American Muslim.") In December, the LGBT advocacy groups GLAAD and HRC took out a full-page ad in Variety that, under the headline "'Work It' will harm transgender people," suggested that "by encouraging the audience to laugh at the characters' attempts at womanhood, the show condones similar treatment of transgender women."
That is too great a logical leap. "Work It," as even its critics point out, makes no such association; you can't hold it accountable for what someone might mistakenly take from it. A comedy of disguise, its estimable forebears are "Some Like It Hot" and "Tootsie," and if it has any deeper point, it is the old one that masquerading as a woman can make one a better man.
There may be a Teachable Moment here, but calls to cancel the series are misguided (as are all such calls) and likely unnecessary. It is a windmill, not a giant, and it should wind down shortly on its own.
Passing on to the show itself, "Work It" feels like the third installment in ABC's Manliness Trilogy, preceded by "Last Man Standing" and "Man Up!," into whose (temporarily?) vacated space it moves. The recession, a male character says here, is really a "mancession — women are takin' over the work force. They'll just keep a few of us around as sex slaves."
In fact, the recession did open an employment gap that favored women over men; in the news in 2009 and 2010, it was possibly the grain of sand around which this pearl, from "Friends" vets Andrew Reich and Ted Cohen, has formed. That and somebody's fondness for "Bosom Buddies." You can almost hear the pitch.
But the series — which is to say, the pilot — is just not very good; the jokes creak and wheeze, and there is nothing in the performances to distract from the material. ("Bosom Buddies" at least starred Tom Hanks, America's future sweetheart.) If you want to call it insulting to men who dress as women, you have to also call it insulting to men who don't, and to women.
(Sample lines: "Have I gotten drunk and slept with a random guy yet?" "I'm Puerto Rican — I'd be great at selling drugs.") Yet it is not actually ill-willed, just ill-witted.