#YoungerTV

[younger-tvland]

Liza: I should probably get going.

Josh: What? Why?

Liza: You've got work to do.

Josh: Hey, hey. I wanna be here with you. And when we get home, the only thing I wanna work on is your hot little (whispering something in her hear).

[brookezilla]

oh look! it's yet ANOTHER middle-aged couple that was robbed in the end.

best of Charles Brooks and Liza Miller || Younger 2015-2021 ❤️‍🔥

[onlineantiques]

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[jennifersworldsblog]

Just fucking ran into my bedroom door🤣

[aflawedfashion]

Younger 4x02 | Josh and Kelsey Dancing (requested by anon)

[angryhideouthideout]

Cheers!

gif credit to @bunhead4life, @younger-tvland, and @tvlandgirl

[livelovecaliforniadreams]

1x1 | 7x12

[empiriconda]

Liza, I have been a fool. And I am sorry that it took me so long to realize that. Forget marriage. 

[booksaremyadventures]

I haven’t entirely processed how I feel about the younger finale but like they were endgame right?!

[younger-tv]

my god, my charles/liza heart is absolutely shattered.

disappointed is an understatement. i am feeling anger right now. (hello to me in 5 stages of grief)

i don't get why they just had to do that until the end. i guess they want to keep in with their unpredictable writing brand but this is uncalled for.

they simply just can't let it be after building it up for the past 5 years 🥺😩

but as i mentioned, i will be in this charles x liza ship until the end of time. #teamcharles #hellofanfics

[younger-tvland]

1x10 The Boy with the Dragon Tattoo

[altman-shelby]

jealous and bitchy charles is something else 🔥

[vices-aand-virtues]

As we make our way into the final episodes of Younger, I have some Thoughts™️

1. I have seen a lot of talk about how Liza would be better off alone than with Charles because then she is right back where she started when the series begins. Though likely is part of her thought process, this is incorrect for a couple of reasons. First, Liza is in a completely different place in her life than she was when we first met her. She has a fabulous career in publishing and, even when they’re not together, the support of Charles. She doesn’t have a baby at home to take care of; Charles’s daughters are old enough to be relatively self-sufficient in terms of not needing someone to watch over them all the time. Then we have to look at all of this together and realize this, the second point: Liza didn’t think she could + wasn’t allowed to have both a career and a family most of her life. Now she has seen that she not only can do it, she’s great at it. She is extremely successful and loves her work, but still has time for her daughter and form/maintain a solid relationship with Nicole and Bianca. She still makes time for the things that are important to her outside of work. She gave up part of herself to stay at home and be just a wife and just a mom for almost two decades. Then she gave up some of herself to maintain her lie. Now she’s thriving at work and fully and openly herself for the first time in YEARS. For to have a brilliant career with more to come AND a wonderful partner/husband/whatever is a WONDERFUL resolution for her based on where she started.

2. To have this much Liza/Charles tension and back and forth and more “will they won’t they” AGAIN, after waiting 5 seasons for them to get together, just over one full season of them actually together, only for them not to end up together is absurd and makes no sense. Liza has had this entire season to accept that she and Charles are donezo and move on, but she hasn’t, and not for lack of trying. It’s more clear every episode how drawn to one another they are despite themselves. To put them through all that for a contrived “girl power” ending would be a huge disservice to the characters and the show.

3. Speaking of, I’m exhausted by “girl power” endings of late because they’re inorganic and forced. It’s supposed to come across as empowering for a woman to choose her career over love or a relationship, but it’s actually just a sexist take from the opposite end of the spectrum. Women can have both!! We are 20 years into the 21st century!! A woman can PRIORITIZE her career over romantic entanglements, but women don’t — and shouldn’t!! — have to choose at this point. We already know that Liza isn’t defined by her relationship to a man. We know she is a strong woman who isn’t afraid to ask for + take + go after what she deserves. I don’t need to see her choose her career because she is already thriving! She does not have to be alone for X number of years so she can get her career on track. It’s there. She’s on the journey. What would benefit her most would be something she hasn’t had before — a steady and fully supportive long-term partner. Imagine what it would be like for her to finally be married or lifelong committed to someone she is wildly in love with, who is wildly in love with her, who also fully supports her career, is her biggest cheerleader, who believes in her and sees her talents more clearly than anyone else. Hello!!

4. Liza is clearly still very in love with Charles and vice versa. In the past, when her relationships have ended, the desire to get back together was pretty one-sided. It wasn’t, like, super easy for her to get over, but she made peace with it and moved on. That has yet to happen. She just can’t let Charles go completely. She is trying to be supportive of his relationship and assures him she just wants him to be happy, but we have heard her say more than once that she is still in love with him, and her actions are pretty indicative of that as well.

5. Until S7, Charles has always chosen Liza. Even given the current circumstances, he still keeps choosing her in a different way. He knows she is on his side. He knows she is great at her job. He knows she supports him. No matter their relationship status, he knows those things to be true. That’s why he always takes her up on any offers she makes to him in S7 — because he knows who she is. He chooses her to be his work partner or support system or his sounding board. And she allows herself to be chosen; she ASKS to be chosen. He doesn’t have to accept and she doesn’t have to offer, but they do it anyway. It’s a conscious daily choice they continue to make.

6. Charles would never in a million years marry Quinn because she wouldn’t be a good stepmother to his daughters. We may have seen ~some~ dimension from Quinn, but ultimately she’s a ruthless, manipulative, conniving snake. She’s fake and primarily has a “what’s in it for me” attitude. There’s no way Charles would want that to be the example his daughters live with, and honestly I don’t think Pauline would even allow it. If he thought Liza’s baggage created complications for his custody, I cannot even imagine the turmoil Quinn would cause. Quinn is a loose cannon. Pauline is a little bit of a bitch when it comes to Liza, but she’s smart enough to know/see who Quinn really is, and with Liza, it’s at least “the devil you know.”

7. It would be completely nonsensical for Charles and Quinn to get married/end up together because a) we barely know her and b) he was just proposing to Liza. From both a logical and writing standpoint, it doesn’t make sense. It would be some piss poor storytelling for that to happen. On the flip side, it would make sense for Josh to end up with Clare, a late-entry side character, because we have known her longer and know they have a history. The same can’t be said about Charles and Quinn. If Quinn hadn’t become so involved with Empirical, if she had just been another author, her relationship with Charles would be about as meaningful as his relationship with Rhada. But since we see her through Liza’s eyes and we see her be an annoying presence at Empirical post-Charliza split, it seems like a bigger deal than it actually is.

8. Putting her back with Josh at this point would be a worse ending than Game of Thrones. It would be a twist that came out of nowhere that writers would justify by saying the signs were there all along. Liza more than once has made clear that she has chosen Charles over Josh. She has showed us that’s the case. For her to suddenly have an epiphany with two episodes left, especially considering how little shared screen time they have, would be total fanservice and a complete regression from all the growth they BOTH have had. It’s also, like, not fair to Josh to keep waiting on her and hoping she will come back? He deserves some reciprocity and stability too?

9. We have seen only the benefits when it comes to Charles being impulsive in matters of the heart...until now. I totally understand his heartache at her counter proposal and I, personally, think she’s being stupid. But regardless, I think for him to just walk away from their relationship at that point was a pretty knee-jerk reaction that he didn’t think through. And I think his pride is a little hurt over his perception of her not WANTING to marry him, so instead of trying to work it out or compromise, he’s digging his heels in. He jumped into a relationship with Quinn, which was clearly impulsive. Rational, level-headed Charles would not have done that. In fact, he laughs off the suggestion of it in S5 and says the iconic, “divorced moms from Jersey are more my style.” I believe cooler heads will prevail.

10. I REFUSE TO BE VICTIM TO ANOTHER SHIP WHOSE TENSION AND FEELINGS WERE TEASED AND BUILT UP OVER 5 SEASONS ONLY FOR THEM TO BREAK UP OVER SOMETHING STUPID AFTER ONE AND A HALf SEASON AS A COUPLE AND THEN GET BACK TOGETHER IN THE LAST 5 MINUTES!!!! I WILL NOT!!

Anyway Team Charles 4 Lyfe. Here’s hoping these idiots in love stop being idiots and start being just IN LOVE.

[paperclipninja]

Some finale thoughts

I’ve been sitting with the Younger finale the past couple of days and trying to wrap my head around it all and why I feel the way I feel. And how do I feel? Great question - sad maybe? Disappointed? Underwhelmed? A little bit of all of the above? But most of all I think I feel duped. And that is the feeling I’m having the hardest time reconciling with my overall love for this show. Also, heads up, this post is focusing solely on Liza and where her story ended up.

I want to be clear that this isn’t to do with who I wanted Liza to end up with romantically. Yes, I have always been an unabashed Charles and Liza fan, but I am first and foremost a fan of good storytelling. I am genuinely a showrunner’s dream audience because you tell me a compelling, well written story and I will follow you wherever you want to take me and appreciate the heck out of the journey and find satisfaction in the resolution. Because good storytelling isn’t about appeasing factions of an audience or taking pleasure in exploiting the trust viewers have in the way certain narrative conventions play out, only to hoodwink them at the 11th hour. It is about striking the balance between the predictable and unpredictable, staying true to the story that has come before and the endpoint that has been set, but doing so in a way that acknowledges that there are ways that certain conventions need to play out in order for an audience to feel satisfied. And for me, this is why Younger has fallen so incredibly short in the finale.

I am here every day of the week for a a clever twist but I have said it before, when it comes to executing any kind of bait and switch well, there is a really fine line between an audience feeling elated because they ‘got it’- they read the cues correctly and get the sense they were ‘in on it’ - and feeling like a fool. The Younger finale left me feeling as though my entire understanding of this season (and maybe series) was completely wrong. I was led to believe that I was supposed to be Team Liza, to be rooting for her to find success in life and love after starting over again. 

So imagine my elation when during this entire season Liza seemed to have identified who she wanted in her life romantically and so, as the drama of season 7 unfolded, anyone could be forgiven for thinking that the heavy focus on Liza’s relationship with Charles was going to culminate in her FINALLY getting who she wanted romantically, while achieving the career success she desired (and set her on this journey in the first place) would be the final obstacle for the character to overcome. Is that route predictable? Maybe. Could it have maintained the follow through that we come to expect in this kind narrative but still have delighted with unexpected ways of getting there? Absolutely. 

To feel like this entire season has been working to convince me that romance was a big part of what Liza wanted in her life, fabricate an inordinate amount of drama around the character she wanted to spend her life with, reunite them and then suddenly try to convince me in the final episode that the lie, which has not been mentioned once in two and a bit seasons, is an issue between Charles and Liza, only to have the protagonist serve as some kind of example that if you lie you can’t have it all...I’m sorry, what? And wanting to bookend the series with the bar scene, I totally get it, full circle, it ends where it all began - it’s a basic storytelling technique that I have marked in many a high school essay - but it once again comes back to me wanting to feel a sense that this was a looming possibility, that it was earned and I was ‘in on it’. 

An effective twist doesn’t come out of nowhere and any argument that this didn’t, it came from the start of the series, is rubbish. In the context of this season, which is what any viewer holds in their mind as a season winds up, Josh and Liza reconnecting in this way was completely tacked on and contrived. Again, it could have been a really sweet moment if the break up that had just occurred between Liza and the man she had been desperately in love with for the entire season, didn’t render the entire season redundant, or if Josh and Liza had had more than one 2 minute interaction in episode 1. Like, what was the point of any of the drama from this season if the focus of the series was never meant to be the romantic relationships? And if the series was never meant to be about the romantic relationships, why end with the possibility of reconnecting with Josh at all and instead end with the four women toasting one another's’ success? 

And THAT is why I feel duped. It’s not about who Liza may or may not have ended up with or the mental gymnastics required for the finale to make any sense in relation to the rest of the season. I feel duped because all the way up until this final episode I was under the impression that I was watching a different kind of show. One that was feel-good and light and fluffy and had its fair share of drama but the fun kind, and resolved in ways that were sometimes predictable, sometimes not, but always satisfying.

I was under the impression that by rooting for Liza, I was rooting for her to succeed and that telling a lie to combat ageism was worth it because the ridiculous premise paid off and she did get it all. Is it cheesy and too happily ever after? Maybe. But you know what? That is what I felt like I was sold all these years. A happy escapism that would often take the ridiculous and make it delightfully entertaining and never take itself too seriously. And with that comes certain expectations of the way storylines will build and resolve: reducing such a significant aspect of Liza's story to a cautionary tale on the perils of lying seemed completely out of place for the tone and type of show Younger has always been.

So perhaps I did misunderstand the type of show I was watching all these years, perhaps my expectation of my favourite series (and yes it remains my fave) to end all wrapped up in a neat way that saw these characters I’m so invested in ride off into the sunset with everything they desired was unrealistic (or perhaps for many they all did and if that’s how you felt then I’m honestly thrilled for you). 

The loop back to the moment when the lie was conceived, right down to the verbatim dialogue from Josh and Liza’s first interaction, essentially creates a Groundhog Day scenario - Liza is back where she started, sure with some career success and some pretty great experiences, but the character growth has been stagnated by this lie from the very beginning apparently. And again, if this season had been working towards this moment of another reset, starting over once again but without the lie in place, I’d be so on board because I actually really like this idea. But to expect an audience to make the leap from one story that’s been told the entire season to this one is too much of a leap at the last minute IMO.

I will always love Younger, I was excited that season 7 seemed to be really deliberately building towards a clear ending, but I will be forever perplexed by the choices made in that finale. 

[aflawedfashion]

Younger 6x08 -  The Debu-taunt (2019)

[youngercloset]

Who: Laura Benanti as Quinn Tyler

What: AKRIS Tulle Cutout Long Sleeve Double Face Wool Blend Midi Sheath Dress - $2990 (No Longer Avaliable)

When: Younger| 07X08 "The Baroness"