How Well Did Younger Age In Its First Season?

Earlier this week, when we discussed the first season of iZombie on the Extra Hot Great podcast, I described the challenge of writing a character like iZombie's Liv, whose need to protect her big secret drives a lot of story. The analogy I used was to superhero shows, but it also applies to the first season of Younger: Liza Miller stands to lose a lot if her public identity as a twenty-six-year-old marketing assistant is revealed as a fraud, exposing her as the forty-year-old career-dropout mom she actually is, and she's spent most of Younger's first season making sure her true biography stays hidden. And since we've arrived at the season finale, of course Liza has to deal with the most serious threat of exposure that she's faced since embarking on this con in the first place; I just wish its weight had been distributed differently.

In the season's penultimate episode, Liza confessed her real age and situation to Josh, who was so shocked he wandered out of Lauren's Hot Mitzvah and into the night. In the finale, job one for Liza is to track him down (not hard: he's repaired to the only bar in Brooklyn) and apologize for her deception, which she proceeds to spend most of the episode doing. And here's where it started to lose me. I'm not going to sit here and act like Josh isn't cute, but haven't we seen over the course of the season that he and Liza have little in common other than sexual chemistry? The idea of Josh was that he could be someone Liza got a leg over to remind herself that her junk still worked after the last however many dead years of her very dead marriage; now she's in love? If that's the case, how come in every scene she has with Charles, she's totally eye-fucking him? We weren't supposed to think Liza was heading toward a realization that she and Charles make more sense as a couple, in pretty much every way, than she and Josh ever will?

But fine, let's pretend Liza's flirtation with Charles was all in my head. Even if we throw out all the scenes in which she seemed more than a little wistful that she couldn't tell him how right they are for each other without disabusing him of the notion that she's closer in age to his offspring than she is to him, she has been working hard at the office to keep up the fiction of her recent-college-grad identity, which has always been the arena where protecting the lie is more important. She's had close calls there before -- Jane Krakowski's Annabelle Bancroft noting that her hands give away her age, for example -- but running into former colleague Cheryl and immediately finding herself a blackmail target is the greatest peril Liza's faced yet. Liza's options seem to be either surrender to the terms of her shadow life, as Maggie suggests, and give Cheryl the proprietary information she seeks, or accept exposure, even if Cheryl's threat of leaking Liza's story to Gawker is kind of a weird one; maybe it would scandalize Empirical a little if a story ran about how easily its staff were fooled by Liza's fake IDs, but it might also lead to Liza getting a job writing for Jezebel, and given that the organization's just voted to unionize, she could do worse, and kind of currently is.

Anyway, what Liza actually ends up doing is threatening Cheryl right back with the email thread in which Cheryl tries to extort the P&L info from Liza, and Cheryl immediately backs down even though (a) if that were really illegal I sincerely doubt Cheryl would have pursued it over email, and (b) as I wrote in my post about the series premiere, assumedly Liza is working at Empirical under a false Social Security Number, which is way more illegal than anything Cheryl's trying to do. (Other than the blackmail component, if Cheryl were to get her hands on the information she's trying to make Liza give her, it would probably be more sneaky than actually criminal, no?) Liza snits to Cheryl that all she stands to lose is a "shitty assistant job," and while the show has kind of danced around the specifics of how Liza started her deception in the first place and what false documents she's using to sustain it, falsifying government documents is a big deal with serious criminal consequences. So while Liza's counter-threat is sitcom-convenient, these two are really not on the same footing.

And that's what makes this finale kind of a letdown for me: Liza's work life is and always has been more interesting than her love life, and the finale, in particular, prioritized them all wrong. I would have so much rather seen Liza get out of her Cheryl problem by confessing the truth to Kelsey and let her new coven of younger lady friends help her come up with a millennially-inventive scheme: we've seen throughout the season how resourceful Kelsey and Lauren are and how strong the bond of friendship is among the three of them, repudiating the image of millennials as feckless and entitled (although, admittedly, both Lauren and Kelsey living rent-free with Lauren's parents is not great). Or, I would have also loved to see Liza confess to Diana, giving Diana the opportunity to see Liza in a new light, make Liza a friend Diana clearly really needs, and start rehabilitating Diana from a cartoonish dragon lady and into a person. Or hey, what if Liza brought both the women who've been so important to her at work in on her secret and the three of them plus Lauren attacked Liza's problem with the combined wisdom of all their experiences, building a bridge between generations and uniting against Cheryl, a woman who has so little regard for her sisters that she'd dismiss Liza with that crack about nannies?

This makes it sound like I'm ready to abandon Younger, which I'm not: Sutton Foster is unceasingly charming and there's so much about the show to like. But Liza's big problems are not boy problems, and for Season 1 to end on a resolution that makes it seem like her biggest concern has been hiding her age from Josh is to undercut her as a character. The real risk she's taken on is a potential ten-year prison term and $250,000 fine so that she can rebuild her career. Keeping Josh from noticing her stretch marks shouldn't really be front of mind. AND CHARLES PROBABLY WOULDN'T BE THAT BOTHERED BY THEM ANYWAY, as I hope we find out for sure in Season 2.