Falling in love with Azzedine Alaïa. (Photos via Shao-Yu Liu.)

I hate department stores. They remind me of being a chubby 12-year-old with braces being dragged around by her mother to try on bat-mitzvah dresses at the Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s located in the heart of Delaware’s Christiana Mall. (We eventually decided on an electric blue sleeveless number, and suffice to say I have vowed to burn the photobook of evidence the first chance I get.)

So sartorially misinformed was I that for many years I associated most department stores with the cheap and gawdy—obviously, I reasoned, most cool clothes come from stores that sold only their own brand, places like Ann Taylor, or Hot Topic. Up until embarrassingly recently, I didn’t understand what my so-called friends were driving at when they offered to take me shopping at Macy’s, Nordstrom’s or Bloomie’s. I just flashed back to Delaware and that blue dress and assumed that they were making some sort of ironic commentary on prom season.

But a girl can’t live in blissful ignorance forever, and by the time I was, oh, say, 28, I found out that, far from being tacky, New York’s haute couture was synonymous with, yes, Madison Avenue designer flagships, but also: Bergdorf’s, Saks Fifth Avenue and Barneys. I had never stepped into these hallowed halls of fashion. I had to take a Valium just to step into a Century 21, with its maze-like layouts, dressing room item limits and panic-inducing number of choices.

But I couldn’t wear jeans and sweaters with cat faces on them forever, and no matter how well that kitschy-cute skunk hat I had purchased last summer in South Dakota went over at a recent Broadway after party, I realized that eventually I would have to make peace with the luxury department store.

To face the minotaur, I turned to one of the world’s most knowledgeable sources: Terron Schaefer, the executive vice president and chief creative officer of Saks Fifth Avenue. Recognizable as the “Simon Cowell” (his words) of the design competition Fashion Star, where he plays the role of a Saks’ “buyer” (their words), the impeccably dressed and terrifyingly well-mannered Mr. Schaefer has spent most of his life as a Willy Wonka of haute couture retail.

Working at the marketing division of Doyle Dane Bernbach, he was in charge of clients like Harrods (where Mohamed Al-Fayed had once suggested building an indoor roller coaster to attract boys looking for school clothes), Polaroid and Bloomingdales. After a brief respite working in Cambodia for Doctors without Borders—“I needed to get as far away from that world as humanly possible,” he sighed—Mr. Schaefer landed the premiere gig at Saks, only three blocks away from his first offices at DDB.

Terron Schaefer, dream maker.

Meeting at his office across the street from Saks Fifth Avenue where, in 1923, Adam Gimbel famously began his upscale rival to Macy’s, I admitted that I had never been to the store. I knew enough about the company to know I couldn’t afford a bangle, let alone a whole outfit.

But this was about the experience. Walking into Saks for the first time was like going through the looking glass of a regular department store. Here—as they say in Cabaret--—everything is beeeuuuuutiful! As I stood gawking at the giant, colorful fish that swam in a window-sized tank across from Coach bags, Mr. Schaefer guided me up to the third floor: the designer floor, which is where I learned how it is that people found themselves in deep, deep credit debt.

I had always assumed that clothes were clothes, and anyone who spent more than a couple hundred dollars on an entire outfit was a sucker. But that was before I walked among the theatrical Oscar de la Renta and Alexander McQueen gowns, the lace and paisley of Erdem, the deceptively simple lines of Akris. At each, Mr. Schaefer pointed out the intricate detail and attention paid to both the clothes and the surrounding environment: in a room showcasing Japanese and Belgian advanced designers—Comme des Garcons, Junya Watanabe, Anne Demeulemeester, etc.—there was a black “aqua” table by Zaha Hadid that seemed to defy the laws of gravity; a bronzed willow tree chandelier by Michele Oka lit the hallway; the blown-up photo of a Japanese basket that was photo-transferred onto the floor design for the Ralph Rucci/Chado boutique.

Mr. Schaefer explains the concept of luxury retail. Notice my stylish cat sweater.

We spent three hours going through each designer. Halfway through an explanation of why a certain designer’s lack of buttons was so important, I could feel myself slipping into a catatonic state of information overload. What was I doing here? I didn’t know my Valentino from Versace ... hell, I didn’t even know if those names corresponded with real people. And the looks I did like were so completely out of my universe, money-wise, it was like being on a clothing safari.

These are "punk" bags that cost more than my life.

True, I was learning some fashion trends for this season: mesh is in (you could find the sporty material in ready-to-wear Commes des Garçons, Jil Sander and, yes, even Burberry, not to mention all those mesh-encased booties from Chanel to Reed Krakoff), tight bandage dresses are in (woe be to anyone with a BMI higher than .02%), and so is a tony punk aesthetic, as realized by the infamous Christian Louboutin spikes as well as the prevalence of “takes” on the motorcycle jacket. It was unclear if these seasonal items were inspired by the upcoming Met Costume Institute Gala, “Punk: From Chaos to Couture,” or the other way around.

The color “guava” was also thrown around as a high seller this season.

Still, I doubted it would help with my larger problem: my complete inability to dress myself. I wanted someone to tell me what I needed to wear in order to look fabulous, how to accessorize without clashing and then, preferably, hand it to me in my size at no cost.

“Does this store have a layaway plan?” I attempted to joke at the hour-and-a-half mark, after fingering a gorgeous Michael Kors black and white gown. Mr. Schaefer gave a half-cough/half-laugh and mercifully treated the question as rhetorical.

Even more devastating was the fact that I couldn’t just buy whatever the model was wearing and call it fashionable.

“No one buys a whole look,” he had told me when we arrived on the floor. “I mean, you can, but you’ll hardly see anyone do it. It’s much more of a mix and match.”

I tried to explain that my version of matching was wearing two different shades of black, but we gamely kept going. On and on and on. Fendi, Zoran, Missoni—each designer like a new constellation that needed to be memorized in the fashion universe. This wasn’t fun. It was work!

And then something strange happened. Though Mr. Schaefer was gently guiding me by the arm through the first hesitant hour, by the second I was darting away to look at pieces I liked. I stopped doubting that all my choices were ridiculous: After all, if it was being sold at Saks, it couldn’t be a faux pas, right?

Mr. Schaefer knew that I was ready to fly on my own. “I think it’s time you saw your new favorite designer,” he said, with a mischievous smile. “I think you’re going to be a big fan. It’s Stephanie Seymour’s favorite too!” I honestly wasn’t sure if I saw the connection. All doubts vanished from my mind, however, as we reached the realm of Azzedine Alaïa.

Like a moth called to the flame of the Tunisian-born, France-residing designer, a moment after I walked into the alcove I was banging down the dressing room doors to try on the eggshell-blue Calypso skater dress, the matching, metallic bolero, the pink and black Papier vitrail cut-out dress with its tulle skirt. The Entrelacs dress in its muted pearl, which originally looked so staid, paired so perfectly with the greige textured cotton Alvéole biker jacket that it attracted a small crowd of bystanders when I stepped out of the changing room to show it to Mr. Schaefer.

Blam! I'm a princess.

“May I ask ... are you a model?” one of the women asked.

This lady could have been a plant for all I knew; in that moment, I would have willingly forked over ... jeez, the $8,145 that the ensemble would have cost me.

“Consider it an investment piece,” Mr. Schaefer said, before noting that the ALAIA was the preferred brand of Peter Brant’s wife, Stephanie Seymour.

We barely had time to rush to the Saks shoe floor before the three-hour mark, a place so overwhelmingly glamorous and gargantuan that Mr. Schaefer had gone to D.C. to petition the postmaster general to give it its own zip code—a brilliant piece of marketing savvy that has led to branding of the department as “10022 Shoe.”

Seriously, those shoes at the left have heels that start in the middle.

It was there I tried on Kanye West’s Mercury-inspired Giuseppe Zanotti heels (complete with golden wings) and a collection that featured the heel in the middle, instead of the back of the shoe. I marveled at (but didn’t even think of trying) Sergio Rossi's razor-thin, 4-1/2-inch bootie heels. Even more terrifying was Mr. Zanotti's 6-1/2-inch wedge with no heel whatsoever, letting the wearer’s soles dangle precariously off the ground, like a high-wire act with no safety net.

Anyway, after conquering the socialite soldier’s baptême de feu that is shopping at Saks Fifth Avenue, I figured, the shoes could wait for another day.

Jimmy Fallon and Jay Leno. (NBC)

Wednesday's official announcement from NBC that Jimmy Fallon will be replacing Jay Leno on The Tonight Show was the culmination of months worth of speculation, rumors and gossip. When the media learned that Mr. Fallon was not only moving the show back to New York, but would be hosting the program from Johnny Carson's old studio, the comparisons between this latest drama and the bitter NBC late-night feuds in the past--Conan vs. Leno, Leno vs. Letterman--were inevitable, despite the network trying to play off the move as amicable. Hell, trying for the 11:30 (or now, technically, 11:35) slot on NBC is more of a political bloodsport than Game of Thrones, with at least twice as much backstabbing and allegiance shifting. (Though less decapitation ... that we know of.)

Here are the five best rumors about the new Tonight Show, along with any responses from NBC or its players.

1. Rumor: NBC was so pissed at Leno for mocking its ratings that it pushed the 22-year veteran out.
Last month, The New York Times ran a piece about the fallout from a joke that Mr. Leno made on Tonight about NBC sliding into fifth place in the ratings. The article cited three sources that claimed that NBC's top entertainment executive, Robert Greenblatt, and Mr. Leno engaged in a flame war after the episode. As Bill Carter wrote:

This moment of conflict between Mr. Leno and NBC’s management preceded recent reports — denied categorically by NBC executives — that the network was preparing to make a change, moving out Mr. Leno and bringing in Jimmy Fallon, the star of its 12:35 program “Late Night.”

Damage Control: NBC staged a dinner for Mr. Greenblatt and Mr. Leno, though of course that only fueled the fires to speculation that this was a "last meal" kind of scenario.

2. Rumor: Jay Leno and Jimmy Fallon must hate each other.
It's happened with Jay Leno and literally every other contender for Tonight (including Carson, who wasn't a huge fan of his successor), or anyone who shares the time slot on a different station, so why should the brazen Mr. Fallon be any different?

Damage Control: On April 1, the two hosts got together and sang a parody duet of West Side Story's "Tonight."

Then again, it was April Fool's Day, so who knows how much stock to put in this bonhomie. However, Mr. Fallon does have a history of being, if anything, overly gracious to the cranky Mr. Leno.

3. Rumor: Fallon is already becoming the biggest late-night diva of them all.

Amid all these other swirling rumors was one that only applied to Mr. Fallon: that he had fired his longtime manager Eric Kranzler right before signing his Tonight deal.

Damage Control: Well, besides his former manager, everyone else seems to love Mr. Fallon.

4. Rumor: Jimmy Fallon rode in a sidecar of Jay Leno's motorcycle.

Thanks for this, New York Post:

Damage Control: The image turned out to be a fake, though without any sort of disclosure, you could be excused for thinking it was real.

5. That Seth Meyers will host in Fallon's former time-slot.

Every time a host moves up, it's an opportunity for some fresh blood to move into the recently vacated space. Right now, the biggest name being tossed around is Saturday Night Live’s Seth Meyers, which would be great ... Weekend Update every weeknight!

Damage Control: None, quite yet.

That is definitely Ben Silverman. (NBC)

The biggest news tonight on NBC is, naturally, the end of 30 Rock’s seven-year run. "Will Liz Lemon finally realize her mistake and run back into the arms of Dennis Duffy?" That's the biggest question. That and "How many articles about Tina Fey's 'contribution' to comedy will run before it starts sounding like an obituary?" But there are other interesting turns for the Peacock's Thursday-night lineup that we should be paying attention to. For instance, why has former NBC exec wunderkind Ben Silverman started popping up in episodes of The Office?

We noticed it two episodes ago, when Daryl went to Philly for an interview at Jim's sports-related startup. (Yeah, you do have a lot of catching up to do since you stopped watching three seasons ago. Like: there hasn't been any regional manager of Dunder-Mifflin since Andy left on his boat, but apparently no one from corporate has noticed, so why is anyone even bother showing up for work anymore when they could stay home and draw a paycheck?) One of Halpert's co-workers looked strangely familiar, like Scott Disick with a larger forehead. Where had we seen him before?

And with a shock, we realized that it was disgraced party-boy Mr. Silverman, who had shot up the corporate ladder when he came up with the idea of bringing The Office to the United States, only to fall from grace soon after. Ironically, the only time we've heard about Mr. Silverman since was during his own attempt at a comedy/commercial venture with Will Arnett and Jason Bateman called DumbDumb, which was part of his larger startup Electus, which was backed by IAC—and that is all anyone knows about that.

Of course, Mr. Silverman would have retained a fondness for the Scranton employees, since it was the golden feather in his otherwise shabby and kind of gross cap. But out of all of the return cameos the show could have fixed on for its final season--Steve Carell, Rashida Jones, Will Ferrell, hell, even Idris Elba--Mr. Silverman is perhaps the oddest fit. He's not only not an actor, and not only is he appearing on the network that humiliated him (and continued to, well after his departure, in the form of 30 Rock’s oily antagonist Devin Banks, played, oddly enough, by Arnett), but he decided to show up right before the big announcement that ABC has picked up his new show Bet on Your Baby. (Oh God, we hope not literally.)

So what is this return to The Office about? Revenge? A show of "No hard feelings"? A grab for some TV face-time before we all forgot who he was? Not sure: since Mr. Silverman's thought process is protected behind a shield of glossy, magazine-perfect hair. But one thing's for sure ... we're really going to miss 30 Rock.

"I pooped my pants," confessed Roker. (NBC)

Al Roker, who is a very famous weatherman (or so we've been told), admitted on Dateline last night that he pooped in his pants at the White House after his gastric bypass surgery in 2002.

"I probably went off and ate something I wasn't supposed [to], and I was walking to the press room, and I thought I had to pass a little gas," Mr. Roker told NBC's Dr. Nancy Snyderman. "And I thought, 'Whose going to know?' Only, a little something extra came out."

Dr. Snyderman took this in stride. "You pooped in your pants," she shrugged, like a real doctor would.

"I pooped my pants," he concurred.

Video below.

Also, the full video quotes from Al Roker's book, in which he says about his weight loss, "I no longer had to beg my wife for sex."

And thus, the two most disturbing images of the day are left to your imagination! Enjoy!

Nick Cannon (Getty Images)

NBC, finally emerging from its Jeff Zucker hangover (don't worry, Mr. Zucker's doing fine) with a booming fall season, has signed a first-look deal with comedian/TV host/radio personality/actor/Observer profile subject Nick Cannon. 

Mr. Cannon will develop programming for the network, a role he performed at cable network TeenNick. In our 2011 profile of Mr. Cannon, Mr. Mariah Carey noted, "I call it an entrepretainer. It’s a businessman and an entertainer at the same time. That’s kind of what you have to be.” His involvement with NBC has thus far included hosting America's Got Talent during the summer and briefly acting on oft-retooled sitcom Up All Night.

Emma Koenig

Deadline reports that Emma Koenig's Tumblr blog, "F*ck! I'm in My Twenties!" is being developed as a series at NBC. If it makes it to air, it would be one of at least two series about an adrift twentysomething writer. Ms. Koenig, the sister of Vampire Weekend lead singer Ezra Koenig, was profiled this summer in the New York Times, in a piece focused on her recent move out of her parents' home. That piece described Ms. Koenig's work as "a sweetly dark look at a life stage, something resembling the HBO series Girls, but defanged a bit." NBC can only hope!

Oh! But we totally know who should cover the (obvious) theme song. (Updated below)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rYEiERfKqU
Alternative suggestions:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF0VaBxb27w
http://youtu.be/du4uH1fC9B8
We guess the only real question is who should play the literature's biggest love-struck assholes? Could it possibly be better cast than the BBC miniseries starring Bane from The Dark Knight Rises?
http://youtu.be/-sT6PUQz_HU

Han Lee, of '2 Broke Girls'

Last season, television’s most anodyne evening got a shot of hipness in the form of Sex and the City executive producer Michael Patrick King’s new series, 2 Broke Girls. The CBS comedy about young ladies in Brooklyn was an instant hit, kicking off a season-long discussion about girl-women on TV (viz. Girls, New Girl) and getting hailed as a slice-of-life comedy by those who thought that a permanent war over the sartorial choices of “hipsters” coupled with the protagonists’ burning ambition to open a cupcake shop seemed an apt depiction of life in the big city.

But there was another element to the show—something we hadn’t seen in a while. The Tiffany Network’s new Monday night sitcom was brazenly, shockingly, unapologetically racist.

Among the tokenish cast of minorities called upon to behave in baldly stereotypical ways are restaurant manager Han Lee (Matthew Moy), who comes in for mockery for his apparent asexuality and his utter misunderstanding of American culture. (Are his hilarious mispronunciations an homage to Mickey Rooney’s unforgettable turn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s?) Earl, played by Garrett Morris, is a hep-cat jazz musician of the sort one might encounter if whisked back in time half a century or so, or in the reeaal cool fantasies of a white person who’s never met a black person, while Oleg (Jonathan Kite) is a sexually voracious Ukrainian with a pan-Eastern European accent. “You’re so stinky, my mother in Korea called me and said, ‘What’s that smell?’” Han tells Oleg in a typical moment of sparkling repartee. To which Oleg replies with an unkind evaluation of the boss’s manhood.

It’s almost enough to make you long for the days of NBC’s Must-See TV—or even the springtime debates over Lena Dunham’s Girls—when we all complained that prime time was too white!

When asked about 2 Broke Girls’s use of stereotypes, Mr. King offered up his own homosexuality as a sort of license to offend.

“I’m gay,” the producer said at this year’s Television Critics Association press tour. “I put in gay stereotypes every week! I don’t find it offensive. I find it comic to take everybody down, which is what we are doing.”

Gay male humor has historically been predicated on an irreverent disdain for propriety—which, in this day and age, has apparently come to include the gleeful bashing of ethnic minorities. After all, if you’re gay, you’re a minority too: it’s a rainbow-colored “get out of jail free” card, per Mr. King’s argument, entitling the bearer to say whatever he likes. “What is or isn’t acceptable as funny in 2012 seems to be a very abstract idea,” Mr. King wrote in a recent essay in Entertainment Weekly (not online). He added that the way he knows that his gags about race do not cross the line is that the live audience at 2 Broke Girls tapings laughs.

The argument makes you wonder where exactly the show recruits its live audience. Just because idiotic racial humor has a fan base doesn’t mean it belongs on prime-time television.

Besides which, there’s a difference between laughing because something is funny and laughing because it is shocking or transgresses certain boundaries of taste. Take the new NBC comedy The New Normal, whose title refers to gay male parenting but could also be taken as an allusion to the increasingly racy and race-conscious television landscape. The show’s creator, Ryan Murphy, whose other current network series is the racially diverse, often irreverent Glee, seems to think that bigoted humor is the fabric that knits a family together. In a recent episode, a racist lady-of-a-certain-age played by Ellen Barkin finally comes to accept the gay man (Andrew Rannells) for whom her daughter is acting as a surrogate. They bond over an ethnic joke—something about adopted Chinese babies coming with egg rolls. It’s sort of a heartwarming moment, but not quite. The family that mocks Chinese babies together stays together?

The series’s sole regular minority character is Mr. Rannells’s assistant at his haute TV-production job. She’s a brash, aggressive black woman of the sort that’s been sassing up the small screen forever, or at least since the heyday of Jackée.

Interestingly, the assistant on The New Normal is played by a Real Housewife of Atlanta, NeNe Leakes, meaning that she came to national attention under the watchful eye of Andy Cohen, the Bravo executive. Mr. Cohen, who also happens to be gay, seems to have his own blind spots when it comes to racial humor. A recent leitmotif of his talk show, Watch What Happens, involves the host, lovingly or not, replaying for laughs a local news clip of a heavily accented black woman talking about her house catching on fire. It’s not impossible for ethnic humor to be funny—far from it. But there’s a certain humanity missing from these shows, where the object of humor isn’t other characters but simple stereotypes. And while gay producers certainly didn’t invent narrow-minded humor, they have lately made it their own.

Should we just come right out and call them the Gaycists--those who hold what Lauren Bans of GQ first defined as "the wrongheaded idea that having gay characters gives you carte blanche to cut PC corners elsewhere"? Let’s. A further definition: Out gay men whose knowing, ironic appropriation of racist tropes, and whose self-aware frankness about their own prejudice, sashays right across a line the rest of us have come to respect.

Race and gay culture have always made for an uneasy mix. The black drag queens of Paris is Burning—exiled even from white gay culture—have birthed generations of gay men who’ve picked up the vocal intonations and mannerisms traditionally associated with black women. (Think of Project Runway champion Christian Siriano, for example, or Will & Grace’s Jack in full finger-snapping dudgeon.) For white gay men, a group perpetually exiled from the mainstream, identification with blacks, Hispanics and other minority groups goes hand-in-hand with a sort of mockery that’s as much about the jokester’s outsider status as it is about the target’s. This isn’t new—using the women of Sex and the City as his mouthpiece, Mr. King set an episode of the show in the milieu of black drag queens, with Carrie Bradshaw, known for her love of “ghetto gold,” screeching in faux African-American patois about her drag-ball-style “twirl.” And the camp humor aesthetic, from Paul Lynde through Will & Grace, has always used its practitioners’ outsider status as a pass for universal derision. It’s all in good fun—isn’t it? But the combined airtime given to 2 Broke Girls, The New Normal, the urbane gay couple of Modern Family (who were, admittedly, created by straight people), with their Spanglish-screeching harridan of a sister-in-law, and Andy Cohen’s bickering Atlanta Housewives (whose antics are somehow always more GIF-worthy than those of their white counterparts in other cities) adds up to a troubling conclusion: Now that gay marriage is a reality, any gay man with some disposable income and a sperm sample can become a parent and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is consigned to the history books, affluent white gay men have finally been granted admittance to the majority culture, and as such, they are seizing on a privilege long-beloved of their straight counterparts: trashing minorities!

They laugh at themselves, sure, but with the apparent belief that their flaws are cute. The gay men of The New Normal are gently chided for their affectations, particularly Mr. Rannells’s fastidious dresser—but they hardly come in for the worst of Ms. Barkin’s slurs. Those are reserved for random bystanders, like a black schoolteacher of whom she asks “Hablo English?” Sure, Mr. Murphy’s trademark nihilism means that he mocks just about everyone through her character—but isn’t it all a bit wearying? “It’s very clear that I have great affection for her,” Mr. Murphy told Vogue of Ms. Barkin’s character. “It’s like what I said about the [Christian advocacy group] Million Moms: Watch the show! I get that you feel marginalized and on the outside too! We have more in common than you think!”

Indeed. But despite the fundamental conservatism of much of the entertainment industry, no one’s granting the Million Moms the clout to produce a television show casting themselves as the heroes of their own story. Whatever happened in Mr. Murphy’s past, he’s now the consummate insider, with the social cachet to do whatever he likes in his career or his personal life; that Vogue interview notes that Mr. Murphy and his husband are, like The New Normal’s protagonists, considering having a child through surrogacy. He’s portraying the world the way he sees it—with minorities as window-dressing around gay men. (This seems to be a pattern: On Mr. Murphy’s Glee, Chris Colfer’s gay teen embarks on a lovingly portrayed relationship with a fellow singer, while two Asian students’ relationship gets the derisive nickname “Asian Fusion.”)

Mr. Murphy and some of his colleagues don’t mean any harm. And the shows are far from unwatchable: The New Normal earned a rave review from Slate’s television critic, June Thomas, who happens to be a lesbian. “When the whole of America is listening,” she wrote, “it’s tempting to deny the humor. But I admit it: I laughed.”

Meanwhile, 2 Broke Girls’s ratings success, and the availability of Oleg and Earl one-liners immortalized by YouTube users, indicates that there’s a large constituency who enjoy such ethnic sketches as filtered through Michael Patrick King’s tin ear.

That said, not everyone’s so forgiving of The New Normal and its ilk: Salon’s Willa Paskin wrote that the Ryan Murphy show’s jokes “can be momentarily bracing—this show is going there!—but they’re also unremittingly nasty,” while Asian-American cultural critic Andrew Ti wrote on Grantland that “The pervasive crime of [2 Broke Girls’s] Han Lee really boils down to his infantilized speech patterns, thrown in, I assume, just in case his Asian face didn’t drive the message that He Is Not Like You home enough, and you were starting to think of him as some kind of human being.”

But maybe it’s not just the gays who are taking their seat at the table and ingratiating themselves with a rude blast of ethnocentric realness. Take Mindy Kaling’s new series, The Mindy Project, which debuted Tuesday night, featuring the Office star as an obstetrician. While the Indian-American actress, who is also the series’s creator, doesn’t mine her own background for humor, she tosses stones at a Serbian character (a “war criminal”), Gabourey Sidibe (she’s still a punchline?) and her character’s immigrant patient base (“This office is not an inflatable raft!”). Characters like Ms. Kaling’s on The Mindy Project or the gay couples of Modern Family and The New Normal or the two broke girls may belong to groups that have been underrepresented on television until recently, but if they see any irony in their easy mockery of other marginalized groups, it’s not making it to the screen.

That said, The New Normal shows signs of growth; though its most recent episode has Ms. Leakes’s character talking about how black people are always late, and a deeply unsettling joke about Tiger Woods’s lust for white women, the plot, in which the central couple wonder why they have no black friends, manages to play on the edge and actually say something about privilege, rather than throwing jibes at those who don’t have it.

It may not be normal, but it certainly does feel new.

The creatures outside looked from monkey to man, and from man to monkey, and from monkey to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

PETA members are planning to dress in black and wear monkey masks outside Rockefeller Center in order to protest the new series Animal Practice, the new sitcom starring a capuchin monkey named Crystal. In a press release, the animal-rights group's senior vice-president Lisa Lange stated: "The cheap laughs that Animal Practice gets from putting a monkey in a lab coat come at a heavy cost for animals who spend their lives deprived of everything that is natural and important to them." New York's Vulture blog features today a post by producer Gavin Polone, who also objects to the series, citing a primate veterinarian's diagnosis: "Crystal's natural response to a threat, sometimes called a fear grimace, has been reinforced and used in the show. This expression is often interpreted by the uninformed as a smile or laugh. But during her training, at some point the stimulus of fear had to be introduced."

Animal Practice represents, for NBC, an attempt to appeal to the sort of broad audiences that have eluded higher-brow experimental series like 30 Rock or Community. Protests or no, it's hard to imagine this show getting pulled from the air before the end of the season.

Kara Laricks with Broadway star Montego Glover at her presentation last week.

As New York shovels up the Fashion Week embers around town after the onslaught, The Observer still has a few loose ends. One thing we wanted to know in all the ruckus was how the new comers had fared.

Kara Laricks, the winner of NBC reality show Fashion Star, is certainly a new face in the crowded sea of designers. Under the tutelage design mentors Jessica Simpson, John Varvatos and Nicole Richie, Ms. Laricks convinced the buyers' judging panel from H&M, Macy's and Saks Fifth Avenue that her creations were worthy of the $6m capsule collection award. The show was a hit: Nielsen TV Ratings Data reported 4.81 million viewers for the finale, and NBC has already renewed Fashion Star for a second season and begun casting. We caught up with Ms. Laricks after her first presentation at Runway@Pier 57 last week to get all the buzz about her début. Were her masculine-feminine-meets-1920s-Japanese matchbox looks a triumph or did she she fall flat?

What did it feel like to finally present your first bona fide fashion week presentation?

I felt vulnerable!  In the past, if my collection was not well received, I was under the protective wing of The Academy of Art University, NBC, Saks Fifth Avenue, Macy's, H&M ... this time, the pressure was all on me.  However, there was never any question as to whether or not I would continue designing post Fashion Star and I knew "sticking my neck out there" would be worth the risk no matter what the response. Now that my first collection has been shown at New York fashion week and the reviews are rolling in, I feel exhilarated, proud and accomplished. Can't wait for the next!

Any dramas or disasters leading up to the big day?

Of course - wouldn't be fashion without a little bit of drama ... one of my models was stuck at a Calvin Klein fitting until minutes before my presentation - thank goodness for my talented (and speedy) hair and makeup team.

What did you do to keep calm?

I am always amazed when people remark that I appear calm, as I am usually a ball of nerves on the inside. However, I instantly calm down when I pause and take a look around at all of the incredible people who support me.

So now that Fashion Star is over, what has been your biggest struggles?

Putting together my first collection hasn't been a steep learning curve, but a right angle. For the first time, I have had to figure out how to produce an entire line, secure PR, a venue, models and the list goes on. The biggest challenge is keeping my fans and consumers informed of the process. Fans of Fashion Star were used to seeing a garment one evening and buying it the following day.  In the "real" world, it takes six months to develop a collection, show the collection to buyers and take orders—then add on another six months for production and delivery to stores.  It's tough not to get the people what they want when they want it!

Are you still tight with the cast?

Absolutely! Nzimiro, Nikki, Sarah and Edmond were at my presentation, cheering me on. I also received well wishes from the rest of the cast that wasn't able to be there. I had no idea a reality competition would turn into real friends, real support and real dreams come true.

What’s one thing you absolutely hate about fashion week?

The fact that when I am presenting my own collection, I do not have time too see other designers' work—I am still catching up— so grateful for Style.com!