Review of Younger Season 1

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

About a year ago (at the time of typing this) I quit my job as a professional film critic to explore what was out there in the world when it came to publishing about the movies and books I wanted to see, not just what was popular in the moment. Digital media and working within it can be fun and all, but it can be grinding when you’re just chasing after all the latest trends and clicks for SEO.

I started this blog four years ago, during the pandemic, but never really took it seriously beyond the occasional post here and there about what I was up to. In 2023 I began to realize the impact this blog was having on me, and other people were reaching out about reading it, so I expanded. Once I quit my job, I decided to focus on the blog more while job hunting, as I do make a few pennies here and there from the display ads on the screen.

Television has been something I’m really catching up on during this period, as television shows require quite a bit more commitment than a movie for me. You can’t also really take a break from them somewhere in the middle of a season, as then you’ll completely lose interest or forget the entire plot. When I do that I try not to review those shows, as my review is a bit more unreliable.

I wanted to watch Younger specifically because it took place in the publishing industry, as well as because it starred Sutton Foster. I’m very much involved in the Broadway community and worked in Off-Off Broadway spaces for several years now, which means that I know who’s who in the theatre world and am excited to see them outside of theatrical spaces.

So I pressed play, and I found this to be a show that’s quite easy to get through! Let’s get into the review before I ramble too much.

A woman gets a job in publishing by pretending she’s so much younger than she is, leading to certain consequences in her personal and professional lives.

Our main character in this show is Liza Miller, who, at the start of the series, is 40 years old. We won’t know that though if we’re going off of what’s going to happen next, but for now we know this about her: she’s divorced, and her daughter has chosen to go to India to probably get away from the messy situation.

Liza is unable to find a job because of her age in the industry she actually wants to break into: publishing. Turns out they’re only looking for younger women and won’t hire people above the age of 35, but when Liza meets a young, dashing 26-year-old guy named Josh, she hatches a devious plan.

She decides she’s going to pretend that she’s in her twenties, and she’s quite successful at it despite not knowing what social media the kids are using today. She is hired in the office of Empirical Press Marketing, and she’s the assistant to the head: Diana Trout.

Diana is someone who can be difficult to work with, but Liza works with her smoothly and while trying to keep her sanity. While at the office she befriends someone who’s “the same age” at 26: Kelsey Peters. Kelsey is going to be the one to show Liza all of the inner workings of the people whose age she’s pretending to be.

Liza also starts befriending the dashing young man from earlier, Josh, and starts to have a bit of a romantic fling with him. That’s fine, but he has no idea she’s a 40-year-old divorcee with a daughter. Nothing wrong with that fact, it’s just that she’s concealing it from him at first.

The course of the first season is about Liza learning to balance these two lives she’s living, as well as trying to avoid them from colliding completely. There are some close calls whens he might out herself as someone who might not be the age she’s claiming to be, and at the end of the season we’re going to have to see what actually might happen when she can’t keep it up anymore.

Overall Thoughts

I liked this season, even though I was wondering about the logistics of this happening in the real world. It’d be completely unrealistic in so many ways because of the fact you have to provide your SNN and documentation, plus with the Internet it makes things a lot harder versus the 1900s.

However, I don’t know if I’m going to continue on to other seasons. This feels like a show that comes out of the early 2000s in so many ways, and it felt entirely nostalgic for me while I was watching it. Like a show that acknowledges Twitter as it once was because it was filmed in 2015? It’s now nostalgia.

We’ll see if I continue watching it or not, but for now I’m fine with having watched it, but not passionate about continue it any further. We’ll see if I do—but if you’re interested in the show and haven’t seen it, go ahead and try it.

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