Nice Work If You Can Get It

By Shannon Maughan, Children's Bookshelf -- Publishers Weekly, 3/20/2008

Parker Posey and Lauren Ambrose,
co-stars of The Return of Jezebel James.

When the Fox sitcom The Return of Jezebel James made its debut last Friday night, a number of HarperCollins Children’s Books employees were watching with especially keen interest. That’s because Jezebel’s star, played by Parker Posey, is a children’s book editor who happens to work at a TV-land version of HarperCollins. Though the workplace on the show isn’t explictly named (not yet, anyway), viewers could clearly see the “HarperTeen” logo in some scenes, and publishing insiders would have recognized the offices as being modeled after the real Harper.

According to HC Children's executive director of publicity Sandee Roston, Jezebel’s creators, Amy Sherman-Palladino and Dan Palladino, visited Harper’s offices last year (they finished taping seven episodes in October 2007). “They met for some time with Harper’s publisher and editors, and we told them a few key things about the publishing process,” said Roston. “They were really taken with the conference rooms and quotes—our conference room is painted with quotes from our classic books such as Goodnight Moon, The Giving Tree and Charlotte’s Web and new classics such as A Series of Unfortunate Events and Fancy Nancy,” Roston explained. “That part of the decor was added to the show as a result.” Cover posters of the Warriors series, The Luxe and Prom Nights from Hell also got some exposure on the small screen.

To ensure that she and Palladino got the publishing world’s tone and lingo right, Sherman-Palladino enlisted Farrin Jacobs, executive editor of HarperCollins Children’s Books, to read the scripts and offer notes. “Every Monday or Tuesday afternoon, after they had finished a table read, they would send the script over so I could make sure that something wasn’t egregiously wrong,” Jacobs said. “But it’s TV. If it were too real, it would be boring. So I took the whole thing with a grain of salt.” Jacobs jokingly expressed some disappointment over a line that made it into Friday night’s broadcast. “Sarah [Posey] refers to someone as one of her ‘clients’ and I had made a note indicating that an editor would never say that; it would be ‘one of my authors.’ Ah, well.”

Jacobs notes that as the episodes go on, publishing insiders “will recognize that the writers did some research” citing this week’s installment about Sarah’s efforts to impress a 15-year-old prodigy so she can publish his new book. But aside from flashes of verisimilitude, this image of a HarperCollins children’s book editor still requires some suspension of disbelief. Elise Howard, senior v-p and associate publisher jokes, “We all have our assistants make personal dinner dates with our boyfriends every evening, live in very swank Brooklyn duplexes, and wear fabulous designer clothes.”