The Real-Life Salaries Of Your Favorite TV Characters

It’s a strange time of year: Weeks into our New Year's resolutions, most of us are fighting hard to abide by the budgets we made, or our vows to socially detox. (See: More nights in watching Netflix, fewer nights out at bars or restaurants.)

All this downtime in front of the TV has given us a lot of time to think — particularly about how our lives stack up against our favorite pop culture characters. For years, we’ve been drawn to hard working women who we've watched make their mark in their fields, and enjoy the financial windfall that comes from all those long hours. It’s hard not to think that a job in PR or publishing would be as glamorous and well-paying as it seems on TV. Nab one of those gigs, and you’ll enjoy the same lifestyle as your favorite characters.

Or will you? (Dun, dun, dun.)

That’s why we reached out to Aubrey Bach of PayScale.com, who gave us realistic salary ranges for jobs held by some of our most beloved fictional working women, from Samantha Jones to Annalise Keating. Unfortunately, fiction pays way better than reality.