What it cares about, deeply, are the permissions that come with her transformation. Younger, in that vein, is less concerned about the practical mechanisms of Liza’s deception-her makeover is done and finished in the series’s first episode-than it is with the consequences. It’s literature, too, that has tended to bring eloquence to its explorations of the broad, interrelated, and often fraught notions that contribute to “identity”: permission and prohibition, biological fact and social construct. It’s literature that has tended to tap into the deepest anxieties of its respective ages, whether gender ( Twelfth Night, Orlando) or social class ( Vanity Fair, The Great Gatsby) or race ( Black Like Me, The Human Stain). Younger, in its way, is part of a long tradition of literature that explores the phenomenon sometimes, by way of the 1929 novel, shorthanded as “passing”: self-camouflage so as to encompass another race or gender or social class than the one someone has been born into. Is that posture liberating, or gross? Is Younger taking a brave stand against a culture that so often treats middle-aged women as socially and sexually less-than-or is it, backhandedly, endorsing those unsavory assumptions?īoth, really. Here is the Aaliyah hypothesis, reinterpreted for a time that is bringing a new fluidity to gender and adulthood and identity itself: Age, socially, ain’t nothing but a number. Here is every Oil of Olay ad ever, in the form of a TV Land sitcom. With all that, under its chirpy, soap-operatic veneer, Younger makes an argument that manages to be both deeply subversive and broadly reflective of the culture at large: Youth, it suggests, is not a biological reality-or even a stage of life-so much as it is a state of mind. ![]() Youth, Younger suggests, is not a biological reality-or even a stage of life-so much as it is a state of mind. In Younger’s estimation, age is an outfit that one can don and abandon at will. Younger treats the typical categories of time’s effect on identity-“20-something,” “middle-aged,” “of a certain age,” etc.-as social situations rather than biological edicts. And her show, fittingly, presents youth at large as a kind of social class unto itself. ![]() Because, for Liza, and for the age-obsessed universe she inhabits, youth is social standing. And yet-like its creator Darren Star’s previous exploration of age and sexuality and identity in a tumultuous time, Sex and the City-it offers, almost in spite of itself, deep insights into the culture of the moment. Which is all to say that Younger, a fairy tale fit for basic cable, is a treacly confection of a show: witty but not wise, delightful but not deep. And also Pretty Woman, and She’s All That, and Mean Girls, and Clueless, and The Princess Diaries, the small difference being that the makeover in this case concerns the heroine’s age instead of her social standing. And also Cinderella, only with the fantasy in question being not princessery, but that even more sought-after thing: extended youth. And also My Fair Lady, only with ‘Enry ‘Iggins’s voice coaching replaced by Maggie’s advice on the proper use of illuminating foundation. (“We’re gonna be 26-year-old bosses!” Kelsey is fond of enthusing.) She meets a guy-Josh (Nico Tortorella), a tattoo artist-who assumes that she, like he, is in her 20s. ![]() She befriends Kelsey (Hilary Duff), an editor and a rising star at the firm, who takes Liza under her wing. Liza, youth-overed with the help of blond highlights and sassy nail polish and a newly normcored wardrobe, gets a job as an assistant to a Miranda Priestly-esque marketing executive (Miriam Shor) at Manhattan’s Empirical Press. Hilarity, and confusion, and many, many lies, ensue. Prospects for her self-reinvention look pretty dire until Liza happens upon a way out of her catch-22: She’ll pretend to be 26. When Saturday Night Live Tried to Keep the Lights On Shirley Li
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