Pens and Needles

Steve Levitan knew the fashion world would be easy to make fun of. He was almost as certain it could be funny. Funny enough, say, to sashay down a prime-time runway and leave a sophisticated audience in stitches.

“I flip through a magazine like Cosmo and I can’t believe the stuff I read,” says Levitan, 35, a former writer for “Frasier” and “The Larry Sanders Show.” “I can sit here and look at a magazine and there are 100 things that will make me laugh, more so than if I sat here and thought about it all day.”

And so was born “Just Shoot Me,” Levitan’s comedy series set at a fictional women’s glamour magazine called Blush. The show, starring George Segal as the magazine’s self-centered publisher and Laura San Giacomo as the high-minded journalist daughter who works for him and loathes it, premiered as a midseason replacement on NBC last March. Based on its promising early ratings, “Just Shoot Me” was renewed for the fall season and has thus far avoided becoming another of TV’s fashion-flavored failures such as “Models Inc.” and “Central Park West.”

Levitan says he modeled Blush “100%” on Cosmopolitan, although Blush’s publisher, Jack Gallo, is a man. He also consulted the staff of Vogue and spent three days in the New York offices of the Elite modeling agency.

“This is a world where people will discuss clothes like they are living, breathing things.” Levitan marvels. “They say things like, ‘Oh, this is such an affectionate jacket. Look at how it hugs you.’ And then they turn around and talk about the models like they are props.”

Despite the show’s sometimes stereotypical and always satirical portrayal of its subject, Levitan says, his sources in the industry have nonetheless had good things to say about “Just Shoot Me.” Emboldened by the praise, he is pursuing several supermodels to appear as guest stars. (He won’t name names, but think of the one whose mole launched a thousand magazine covers.)

Levitan describes his own fashion sense as “nonexistent” and says of his writing team: “I couldn’t put together a worse-dressed group of people if I tried.” But they are putting a lot of thought into what their characters will be wearing on the show’s first full season. Levitan has already contacted several New York designers about donating wardrobes. “The characters should be trend-setting, cutting edge,” he says.

Wendie Malick, who plays shallow fashion editor Nina Van Horn, will be outfitted in Ungaro, for example. Segal will wear Armani, although “there is something cuddly about George, so no matter how crisply you dress him, it still manages to round out all the sharp edges,” Levitan says. San Giacomo’s character, Maya, presents a bigger challenge because she must “look fabulous” despite her anti-fashion rhetoric.

But in attempting to make Blush a place where people “are dressed to kill,” in Levitan’s words, doesn’t the show run the risk of becoming too much a part of the world it seeks to parody?

“I don’t think we can afford to pull any punches,” Levitan insists. “Besides, I think all the hip, smart, self-aware people realize how ridiculous their lives are sometimes. That’s true in fashion and it’s true in television.”