The Latest Younger Has Story Problems Up The Wazoo

Five episodes in, there's a lot to praise about TVLand's Younger. It's letting its protagonist, Liza, have lots of hot sex with a fox who's more than a decade her junior. It's showing that Liza's ignorance of certain pop cultural or technological events of recent vintage is easily remedied and not a long-term impediment to her competence in her new publishing job. It's keeping her daughter almost entirely out of the picture. All this and more has surely contributed to the announcement yesterday that the show's already been renewed for a second season. But even a very good show can sometimes have story problems, and this week, we get one right in the cold open: who asks a work friend to dig something out of her babymaker?!

The issue here is: Kelsey has to leave a staff meeting early because she's experiencing discomfort from a stuck "Goddess Cup," so-called, I assume, because the Diva Cup didn't want the product placement juice (as it were) that it would get from having its name appear in this plotline. At first, as Kelsey lets Liza in on the issue, the setup seems like it's just another excuse to dramatize the generational divide between Liza and Kelsey: Liza's never heard of the item, and when she describes it and Liza surmises that it's "like a diaphragm," Kelsey's never heard of that. When Kelsey repairs to the bathroom to get advice on extracting the cup, it leads directly to some pretty solid business, as Lauren, via FaceTime, tells her a related horror story: "I knew a girl who got a tampon stuck and she had to go to the walk-in clinic? Weeks later, she was convinced a rat had died in her apartment, but it was just her. It turns out the clinic only removed half the tampon." Let's assume Alison Brown, who wrote the episode, is familiar with this infamous Jezebel post about a tampon's ten-day sojourn in the author's parts, and congratulate her on coming up with a version that was suitable for airing in a TVLand sitcom!

That said, there are issues with this story that I feel a female writer should have avoided. Like, when Liza comes to check on Kelsey and learns that the cup is still stuck, Kelsey cracks, "Clearly, I have a huge vagina. I don't know why I bother carrying a purse." But like...if her vagina were big, wouldn't that mean the cup would come right out? A chihuahua's not going to get stuck in a big doghouse, right?

But the bigger problem is how Kelsey decides to end the blockade, as she emerges from the stall and tells Liza, "I need you to lock the door, and I need you to wash your hands." Liza:

"I wouldn't ask, but it's an emergency!" More like "I wouldn't ask, but we're on a sitcom!" Do I buy that Kelsey would tell Liza about her situation? Sure: they've been out drinking a lot, and Liza already knows about the second most embarrassing thing Kelsey's done lately, which is to drunk-sext her fancy new author. What I don't buy is that Kelsey would ask Liza to stick her finger (or fingers, or hand, if Kelsey's vaginal size self-assessment is accurate) into her action to try to pull the cup out. For one thing, if Kelsey has not been able to dislodge it herself, I'm not sure Liza's going to have any more luck, given that she'll only have one way of feeling its location -- and no visual, unless one of the pockets on her leather jacket happens to contain a speculum. For another, Kelsey and Liza have known each other, at this point, for maybe a month; if Kelsey really hasn't been able to pry this thing loose and really believes that a friend with a liberal arts education will do a better job of digging out the cup than a medical professional, wouldn't she have asked Lauren to come over and help instead? (But seriously: a doctor. Even the incompetent one in the dead-rat tampon story would notice if she or more likely he only yanks out half of a menstrual cup.)

The title of the episode is "Girl Code," and it does great work in showing how destructive it is for women to get hung up on superficial generational differences: when Maggie needs a new gallery, Girl Code jumps her in to Kelsey's squad, via Liza, and Kelsey and Lauren use their angles to arrange a space for Maggie to put up her art show in a pop-up gallery of her very own. I guess maybe we're supposed to think Kelsey wouldn't have gone to the trouble if Liza's willingness to pitch in (as it were) with Kelsey's menstrual malfunction hadn't brought their friendship to a new level of intimacy (literally: that counts as third base, right?). I just wish the story could have gotten them to that point without ignoring both reasonable limitations on human interaction...and basic facts about human anatomy.