Should You Stay Up Past Your Bedtime For Younger?

What Is This Thing?

Forty-year-old stay-at-home mother Liza is forced to re-enter the workforce when her gambling-addict husband not only loses all their money but leaves her for a blackjack dealer. When her efforts to regain a toehold in her former field, publishing, fail due to the gap in her employment history, her best friend has a suggestion: Liza should pass herself off as a twenty-six-year-old! Crazy plan, or so crazy it just might work?!

When Is It On?

Tuesdays at 10 PM on TV Land.

Why Was It Made Now?

If TV Land wants to be taken seriously for its original comedy slate, it needs to break from cheap-looking junk like Hot In Cleveland and The Exes and air something that wouldn't be that out of place on, say ABC Family (former home of Jane By Design, kind of a reverse Younger about a teenager pretending to be a seasoned fashion pro). Also, no one was ready for Sutton Foster to leave TV when Bunheads got cancelled.

What's Its Pedigree?

Foster, who plays Liza, co-stars with Hilary Duff -- as Kelsey, an editor who's in her actual mid-twenties; Debi Mazar, as her best friend Maggie; and Hedwig And The Angry Inch and Swingtown alumna Miriam Shor, as Diana, Liza's boss. Presiding over it all as series creator and director is none other than Darren Star, late of Sex & The City and, more importantly, Beverly Hills, 90210; he adapted the show from the novel by the same name, by Pamela Redmond Satran.

...And?

If ever there were a forty-year-old who could convincingly play a twenty-six-year-old, Sutton Foster is she: she's vibrant and sparkly, and her round cheeks, pointy chin, and ski-slope nose puts her in the company of every latter-day Disney princess. What is, when you get down to it, a pretty outlandish premise seems like just the latest high jink in a life full of them for this character. But the circumstances of Liza's specific bid to rejoin the paid workforce also lend credibility to her story. Liza can't offer herself as an unpaid intern or volunteer to prove herself on a single project, as stay-at-home parents searching for jobs are often advised to do. She's about to lose her house. She needs a job.

In the first episode (there will be two tonight, but only the first was available to screen ahead of time), there's a strong mix of relatable goofiness and real shit. For instance, when Kelsey invites Liza to come out for Krav Maga and the two of them are changing afterward, Kelsey expresses shock (and horror) at the size of Liza's apparently aggressively natural bush, which Liza explains away by saying she's been living in India; I can confirm from personal experience that change-room pubic astonishment goes both ways, generationally; I never got used to seeing fully hairless twentysomethings in the locker room at my gym in L.A. or New York. The time and effort and attention that kind of upkeep must take! They could be using that time to take naps!

But we also see some of Liza's wistfulness about having declined to pursue her career after having her daughter, Caitlin, and her frustration at the entitlement of the younger women -- including Kelsey, even as Liza cultivates her as an ally -- whose paths she crosses. When Diane interviews her, she ends by sarcastically asking what makes Liza special. Liza: "I'm a grownup. I don't think I'm special." Good answer for this interviewer; also...dark. And interesting.

...But?

I wish Diane and Kelsey had been drawn with the same attention and care that Liza and Maggie are; when Kelsey invites Liza out for drinks with her boyfriend who's in finance (because of course he is), Liza is alarmed, in a maternal way, by how recessive Kelsey gets in his presence -- behaviour that has no relation to anything else we've seen from her in the episode so that the scene seems to exist to remind us that Liza has a daughter and is projecting her anxieties about said daughter onto Kelsey. However, Diane is the real problem: she's a cartoon ballbuster who takes credit for Liza's ideas and is dismissively rude to her. I think we're supposed to feel this is due to the supposed gap in their ages, and underline what Liza's lost if this woman doesn't realize they're peers, but it is possible for managers not to treat their reports like peons -- even in a field as competitive (and rapidly shrinking) as publishing, even in New York.

Also, I realize that this is just a silly TV Land comedy, but the episode glosses over Liza's acquisition of fake IDs (facilitated by Maggie, apparently) for use in her new guise with zero talk about what will happen if she gets caught. A fake driver's license to show her fake age -- whatever, any teenager has one of those. But presumably she also needs a fake SSN, which seems like more serious business to me, and yet the montage cuts straight from her waiting for the driver's license to Maggie quizzing her on One Direction. There could have been the tiniest amount of lip service paid to the fact that this isn't a caper, it's fraud.

...So?

I really find Foster endlessly charming, so even though I kind of wish it were a show about Liza and Maggie and/or that Diane could have been Liza's mentor and not her antagonist -- whose jealousy, as Kelsey says and we're apparently supposed to believe, is just about her younger colleagues' youthful good looks -- I'll keep watching. I also might be turning it into an Amy Sherman-Palladino show in my head. If that tip improves your viewing experience, feel free to borrow it.