Bridging generation gap made show a classic
A millennial gag at the start, ‘Younger’ wrapping up its run
A year and a half after the end of its sixth season, “Younger” recently returned to conclude its business with a seventh on Hulu and Paramount+. The series, which premiered on TV Land in 2015, was that network’s first singlecamera situation comedy and is its last surviving original production. Created by Darren Star (“Sex and the City,” earlier, “Emily in Paris,” later) and based on a novel by Pamela Redmond Satran, it stars Sutton Foster as Liza, a 40-yearold divorcee who passes herself off as 26 to get a job at Empirical Press, restarting the career in publishing she left decades earlier as a young mother.
Like “Sex and the City,” “Younger” is built mainly around its women: Liza; Maggie (Debi Mazar), Liza’s artist friend and roommate; Diana (Miriam Shor), Empirical’s head of marketing; and Kelsey (Hilary Duff ), actually young, who begins the series as a junior editor and goes in and out of more powerful positions. And there is Kelsey’s friend Lauren (Molly Bernard), who moves from peripheral comic support to a more central, still comic role as the series progresses.
But they are more emotionally and practically entangled than the “Sex and the City” women; they work together or live together, and, though romantic involvements will drive much of the drama (and comedy), what matters most is the temperature of the women’s relationships; there are times when any two of them will be closer or further apart, on account of real or perceived betrayals or misplaced pride, but they will always come back together. The series runs on these moments of recognition and reconciliation.
That most of the main characters are older than 40 points to where the series’ point of view largely lies, generationally. Star was in his mid-50s when he created the show; Foster, a Tony-winning star, turned 40 two weeks before it premiered. And though Duff was in her late 20s, she had been acting since the 1990s; “Lizzie McGuire,” the Disney Channel teencom that made her famous, preceded “Younger” by 14 years. So apart from Mazar, who has been a regular or recurring member of several television series running back into the 20th century, whatever TV Land-brand nostalgia value “Younger” possessed at launch was, paradoxically, due to the kid.
The series does lean a little hard at first into gags about intergenerational mutual incomprehension and Liza almost blowing her cover by forgetting not to act her age. Lies and their fallout are of course at the very core of situation comedy. A recurring motif is that, as she is about to reveal the truth to someone, something happens that forces or allows her to put it off. Kelsey will have a number of unconvincing relationships, including with her professional nemesis Zane, played by Charles Michael Davis; work and Liza are what really matter in her world.
Liza is astonishingly ignorant of the rites and rituals and trivia of youth culture, but the joke inside that running joke is that she’s no worse off for it. Notwithstanding her turn-back-time adventuring, she’s a stand-in for the viewer, older or younger, who might feel similarly bemused by new fads and trends.
“Younger” takes what could be a fluffy fantasy and turns it into something special on the strength of good writing and casually great performances: It comes alive in reaction shots, the spaces between dialogue when thoughts are being processed, often the ones that close a scene, a private expression from a character after others have walked off, or the faces of friends or lovers, invisible to one another, in an embrace. That it’s a saucy soap is certainly a cornerstone of its appeal — you can’t go long before one character or another is having sex or talking about it — but it’s also a satire of the literary (and popliterary) world that, amid dropping real names for veracity, takes off in a thinly
PARAMOUNT+ disguised way on George R.R. Martin, Barbara Cartland, Marie Kondo and Karl Ove Knausgård, among many others.
As to the soapy part, Liza’s relationship with Josh (Nico Tortorella), a 26-year-old tattoo artist and sometime washboard player, begins almost immediately: The show’s premise is set when, making conversation in a bar, he mistakes her for someone his age, which leads to Maggie’s suggestion that she pass herself off as younger to get herself a job. Toward the end of the first season, the age-appropriate Charles, who runs Empirical, hoves into view, and a romantic triangle comes into focus.
What gets Liza hired originally is that when Diana asks what she thinks makes her special, Liza answers, “I’m a grown-up. I don’t think I’m special.”
It’s her maturity that makes her attractive and valuable.
Shor’s performance is in many ways the series’ most moving — we are primed for Liza, Maggie and Kelsey to succeed, but Diana is the kind of character many series would be satisfied to portray as a villain or a fool and mock or punish or just leave hanging. Shor seamlessly integrates Diana’s difficult work persona with her more vulnerable afterhours character.
As to the new season, and without going into details, the game board will again be turned over, the cards thrown in the air to put relationships out of joint, interfere with plans, and raise questions.
COVID-19 is not part of the story — indeed, the chronology of the show, which covers about three years, ends before the pandemic begins. But there are signs that the new season was produced under its limitations. Many hallmarks of the show — the busy streets, the packed bars, the book fairs and comic-cons — are missing. We are outside a lot.
“We’re not the young kids on the block anymore,” Kelsey says at Lauren’s 30th birthday party, in the new season. (It has earlier been pointed out to her that “millennial” already sounds dated.) “I’m not sure what defines me now.”
But the viewer knows. Characters here are forever being made to choose. Should they stay or should they go? Pass or publish? Marry or not? Although “Younger” celebrates breaking free from old patterns, it is at the same time, from the beginning and over the long haul, about finding a place, somewhere where the back and forth, the looking and losing, cease. Nothing in its DNA as a generous comedy that celebrates love and loyalty would suggest that the final season will change that trajectory.