Younger

The Work of Being Young

I’ve never fully trusted stories that want me to accept that an obviously gorgeous person has somehow vanished from public view. But Darren Star’s *Younger* isn’t trying to claim its 40-year-old lead is invisible because she looks bad. It’s saying that in New York publishing, a 40-year-old woman chasing an entry-level job may as well not exist. Star, who once mapped the glossy anxieties of *Sex and the City*, turns to a harsher kind of reinvention here. Liza Miller (Sutton Foster) is divorced, broke, and picking up the pieces after her ex gambled away their savings. She needs work. Nobody will hire her. So she gets fresh highlights, memorizes One Direction trivia, and passes herself off as 26.

It’s an absurd setup, the kind of premise that feels beamed in from an older sitcom era. Somehow, though, it lands. More than that, it grows into one of the sharpest comedies of the past decade. Whether that says something embarrassing about our culture’s fixation on youth or just proves the show knows exactly where to jab probably depends on your tolerance for the joke.



What makes it work is Sutton Foster’s whole physical approach. She’s a Broadway performer who knows how to fill a room, and here she smartly pulls that energy inward. Watch how Liza carries herself around her twenty-something boss, Kelsey (Hilary Duff). There’s a touch too much stiffness in her stance. Her smile stretches just a little too far, like someone trying not to blow her cover. When she has to fake her way through a conversation about some new dating app, you can almost see her brain sprinting before she lands on the right shrug. She isn’t simply pretending to be 26. She’s playing a 40-year-old woman who is already tired of the effort it takes to pass for 26.

There’s an early scene where her whole lie nearly unravels over intimate grooming trends. She has to recalibrate, fast and painfully, to the body expectations of a younger crowd. The moment is played as comedy, but the panic underneath it is real enough. It’s the kind of panic that reminds you how much cultural information expires without anyone announcing it. The script never scolds Liza for lying. If anything, it saves its real contempt for the system that cornered her into it.



The real pulse of the show isn’t the age scam itself, or even the inevitable romantic mess around it. It’s the friendship between women. Hilary Duff is excellent as Kelsey. In a thinner version of this series, Kelsey would just be a millennial punchline with good hair. Here she’s driven, loyal, and carrying more stress than she lets on. Duff gives her a warm, practical steadiness. That’s what makes Liza’s deception sting. It contaminates a friendship that feels genuinely precious. Whenever Kelsey opens up to her, assuming she’s talking to someone from the same generation, you can catch that flicker of guilt on Foster’s face.

*Time Magazine* noted that the show is "a breezy, bawdy but heartfelt story about a woman starting over," and that’s exactly right. The breeziness is the disguise. Over seven seasons, the series keeps poking holes in the idea that aging is some kind of personal defeat.



I kept waiting for the premise to collapse under its own weight. A secret this big can only stretch so long before a show starts feeling dishonest with the audience. But the writers manage the reveals carefully, handing out new shifts in power right when the setup risks going stale. *Younger* circles a pretty brutal question. If the culture keeps telling women they lose value the second they stop resembling the future, why wouldn’t they game the system back? Liza’s lie isn’t cruel. It’s survival with better lighting. And watching her make it work is a real kick.