Billie from 'Accidentally on Purpose'

In CBS' Monday comedy Accidentally on Purpose, Jenna Elfman's character, Billie, has two strikes against her becoming fashionable - she's a newspaper journalist and pregnant.

Dressing well in law enforcement isn't easy. Once cops are out of uniform, most departments require men to wear a new sort of uniform - a jacket and tie. The trick for a character is to dress professionally without looking shabby or too fashionable. "If you dressed characters on TV the way real people dressed it would be not really interesting," says Shelly Levine, costume designer for CBS' Thursday hit The Mentalist. "Sometimes you have to take liberties. TV is an amazing creature; so much of it is visual. If you are looking at boring people wearing boring clothes then everything becomes boring. You don't want it to become a costume. You don't want it to take away from the story."