The Bold Type is a fantasy. I know this, because in the pilot episode the lead character, Jane Sloane, invoked my name. In the scene in which this happens, the show’s three heroines are walking into the gleaming lobby of Safford Tower, the home of Safford Publications. Jane (Katie Stevens) is a plucky 25-year-old journalist who has just been promoted to a staff writer at a glossy woman’s magazine called Scarlet (a thinly veiled mash-up of Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire). Flanking her are her two besties at work and in life, Sutton Brady (Megann Fahy) and Kat Edison (Aisha Dee). While Jane is giddy about her new job, Kat reminds her that she has been walking through the same lobby every morning for four years. “Yes, but as an assistant,” Jane responds, jutting out her chin. “This is totally different. Joan Didion walked through this lobby once. And Meghan Daum. And Rachel Syme. Nora Ephron just emailed that one freelance thing in, but still.”

What imaginary magazine was this, where I was a part of this illustrious name sandwich? I have never worked at Hearst, whose giant tower is the model for Safford’s headquarters; nor have I ever been on staff at Condé Nast. I looked up Sarah Watson, a former Parenthood producer who created The Bold Type, and messaged her to ask how it happened. She told me that I seemed like the kind of writer Jane could actually become in a few years. I think of this as a kind gesture, but it also makes me laugh, mostly because I still feel like Jane every time I have the chance to enter a magazine’s marble-clad lobby: nervous, sweaty, and over-eager. The only difference is that I have a decade on Jane, and in that time, I have learned that making a life as a writer in New York is never as seamless as it appears on television, even when a show tries to tackle the more thorny aspects of the job.

Making a life as a writer in New York is never as seamless as it appears on television, even when a show tries to tackle the more thorny aspects of the job.

To its credit, The Bold Type—now in its second season on Freeform —has approached several complex issues with sensitivity and nuance. Over the course of the first season, for example, Kat falls in love with a Muslim artist named Adena, whom she meets while covering a story for Scarlet. Having previously identified as straight, Kat now spends several episodes sorting through her newfound feelings for a woman. She and Adena explore open relationships and religious beliefs, and perhaps most refreshing, they launch a detailed inquiry into giving and receiving oral sex as someone who is new to a lesbian relationship. In season two, we also discover that Kat, who is biracial, has always struggled to identify as a black woman, because she fears that doing so will erase her mother, who is white, from her backstory. But as she advances professionally, she realizes that she needs to embrace and go public with parts of her identity—her blackness, her queerness—in order to feel that she can be herself around the office.

Sutton’s story is less tied to her personal life than to her professional striving. When she lands her dream assignment on the fashion desk, she is desperate to impress her boss. This leads her to some dark places, such as using the corporate card to pay for an Instagram influencer’s cocaine and losing a $5000 diamond necklace in a taxi. Sutton’s ambition also makes her a target at work. Her colleagues use the fact that she is striking, polished, and impossibly charming with men to fuel rumors that she is sleeping her way to the top. (She has been sleeping with an older board member at Safford, but decided to cut off the affair so as not to look as if she is getting preferential treatment at work). Admirably The Bold Type doesn’t just have Sutton deliver speech about how she would never use her sexuality to get ahead in the workplace; instead, she tells her co-workers that “this slut-shaming has to stop.”

The show’s forays into larger debates, however, are not always successful. I cringed when, in a recent episode, Sutton reveals that she still owns and keeps under her bed a rifle from her rural high school shooting club. Jane begs her to get rid of it, and the show makes a rare misfire in stretching this request out, having Sutton attempt to justify her gun ownership for an entire episode. By the end of the show, Sutton melts her gun down into a decorative vase, but her stubborn inability to let go of it feels anathema to her character. This is a show that, above all, wants to feel progressive—and so it shoehorns in Big Issues (gun control, sexual assault, cancer) into its voyeuristic peek into the women’s magazine world.