#its premiere was on my first birthday and i haven’t been normal since learning that fact

[emp-t-man]

you know that saying about whatever you hyperfixated on at twelve being with you for the rest of your life

it’s not wrong and i hate it

[postguiltypleasures]

Goodbye to Younger

Unfortunate to say, I don’t think I have ever seen Sutton Foster on Broadway. I watched her previous show, the one season wonder, Bunheads, and felt obliged to follow her to Younger. I don’t have particularly strong feelings about Sex and the City, show runner Darren Star’s previous hit. There are huge gaps in the episodes I’ve seen, and I haven’t seen any since the first movie came out. I enjoyed watching it with friends, but never tried it alone. I bring this up, because I have mostly watched Younger all alone. The series about a recently divorced forty year old woman named Liza who lies about her age to get a job in publishing after years of being a stay at home mom. She lives with an artist friend her real age (Maggie), befriends a colleague her fake age (Kelsey) and quickly get in a love triangle with men from each age group (Charles and Josh, respectively). The first season wasn’t that well received. There were times while watching it that if felt cringeworthy. Criticism of being out of touch with the publishing industry was definitely warranted. I remember reading a review that called out an early plot involving Joyce Carol Oates not having a Twitter account when she really does have one and frequently trends for not great reasons. I cringed while watching that episode. (The reviewer, Miriam Krule was wrong about the long term treatment of the character of Diana. Younger would have been unwatchable if she were right long term.) After the first season Breanne L Heldman published an interesting interview on Yahoo! News with Darren Star and Marti Noxon about having buzzy shows on unexpected networks. But also Kate Dries at Jezebel also wrote an item about Hilary Duff, who plays Kelsey, covering Fleetwood Mac’s “Little Lies” that doubles as a “who’s actually watching Duff’s new show?” bit.

With the second season the press got immediately better. New Yorker critic (and long time SATC fan) Emily Nussbaum wrote a positive review about how the show mixes froth with more serious subjects like agism and difficult divorces. And from then on the critical response was generally good-but inclined to dismiss as fluff.

(I have to interject, the episodes that Liza’s ex-husband showed up seem to dampen the real reasons for their divorce and I am torn between seeing this as a sign of him actually being charming, and the show needing to move on quickly from exploring too dark topics.)

The ensemble gelled and I wanted to highlight this charming interview Molly Bernard, who played Lauren, did an

interview with Maria Elena Fernandez back in 2016. I liked this interview. She talks a lot about what her grandfather meant to her, as a person and acting coach. It covers too many of her gigs to be really insightful for Younger, but that is part of the charm. It’s interesting to focus on Lauren as a character representing the spirit of the series. My first impression was an impersonal, crass caricature of a millennial, what Liza had to work against to convince people that she is a millennial. At the end of the first season she threw herself a “Hot-Mitzvah”, like a Bat Mitzvah for when the awkward years the celebration normally occurs during are over a. The first episode of the final season includes a party for her thirtieth birthday, making something of a full circle moment. The first party definitely worked more for the show’s dramatic purposes, which is related to a theme in this good bye.

During the penultimate season, while the show was was at its peak of being loved by the people, Alissa Wilkinson dedicated one of Vox’s (now defunct) Episode of the Week columns to her changing thoughts on the series’s central love triangle. wrote about. I chose to include this article while I started drafting this, before the season actually aired, in the hopes that I would finish writing by the end of the season. (Obviously, it really didn’t work out.) The article covers Wilkinson’s impression of the show from the beginning. She was Team Charles in the love triangle, but plot points within the first four episodes of the sixth season made her rethink that. As the final season disappointed some of the show’s biggest supporters were disappointed, I thought of it as insightful on how the show could make terrible missteps, and that the love triangle was not as well weighted as viewers hoped earlier on.

The first article I saw going into the final season was on the AV Club written by Innes Bellina. The headline promised that the new episode would remind fans why they love it. Interestingly, it seems positive to optimistic about some aspects of the plot that others would later said made the season terrible, such as Maggie’s plot. It’s even warm towards a plot involving a Greta Thuneberg stand in, that I watched wondering, “will people who like this show more than me love this?” Based on Twitter anecdotes, they mostly didn’t.

At TVLine there were a couple of interviews with the cast. The first, written by Andy Swift is filled with assurances that despite the extended hiatus things will be exactly as intended and as the viewers have always loved. The second is also by Andy Swift and focuses on the Josh/Liza/Charles love triangle. Interestingly they insist that the Love Triangle was never that big a deal, it was always about Team Liza. There is a certain amount of sense to this, but it might also be related to one of the bigger problems fans had with the final season, which is how isolated Josh felt from the rest of cast, especially if they were going to have (spoiler) the implied rekindling of his relationship with Liza that the final scene suggests.

Before the season premiered, Scarlet Harris published an essay in Bitch praising the female friendships, in particular between Liza and Kelsey and Liza and Diana. The essay clearly loves this aspect of the show, but also highlights how dissappointing the the men and the cis hit romantic relationships with them are frustrating. It comes with the hope and the final season would have Liza choosing herself and focusing on her and Kelsey’s friendship and professional goals. It’s an interesting pice to look back on and consider why the final season didn’t satisfy many fans. Ultimately the show was attempting to spin off Kelsey, (in the final episode she announces plans to move to Los Angeles) and it spent a lot the season with her trying to make her job after demotion better, but ultimately deciding that she had to move on. I did kind of like how Kelsey being demoted and Charles returning to his position as publisher wasn’t treated as a reset. That there were lingering frustrations all around. It’s just that some of these frustrations led to real non starters of plots.

If anything prepared me for the change in temperature for this season when the New York Times ran an article by Alexis Soloski pondering if Younger and The Bold Type ending this season meant that this was the end of portraying media jobs as glamorous, well paying and aspirational. It focuses more on The Bold Type, but the general idea that Younger was out of step with the now.

Then came some surprise tweets from Emily Nussbaum:

Man, Younger is bad this season The Maggie plot feels ripped from Californication, of all bad influences A full-on bummer-wish they found a way to just tie things up & end it. It’s not even parodying publishing anymore (and avoiding subjects like race entirely.)

Also, I’m happy to suspend belief, but in what universe would Kelssey [sic], a hardened, trend-spotting Millenial publisher, and Lauren, an influencer publicist, credulously join a reality show & non imagine a bad edit? C’mon.

It’s so bizarre that Younder has shriveled into full hate-watchability in a single season. I can’t remember a steeper quality decline! What the hell happened over there.

So the things that I thought of as quirks of the series that I learned to leave on a curve, were actually things that made people who loved the series deeply dislike the season. This confused me. How to make sense of it?

I'm going to look at a couple of final season interviews and try and make sense from that side.

Laura Benanti, who played the Billionaire (and Liza’s romantic rival) Quinn, was interviewed by Vulture Devon Ivie. She discusses her character’s Sound of Music speech in which she identifies as the Baroness and identifies Liza as Maria. Benanti relates to this speech as she has played both roles. They discuss how the fans frustration with the love triangle directs most of the anger towards Charles, instead of Quinn. While they praise this as an enlightened response, it might also be fans turning on the show. Why invest in a story about Liza’s relationship with Charles when he doesn’t seem worth ending up with?

After the season ended, Sutton Foster gave an interview to Elizabeth Wagmeister at Variety. Foster is very enthusiastic about the final season. She loves how open ended it is about Liza’s love life, (she and Josh reenact their meet cute in the final scene) and that Liza is in a good place professionally. The various frustrating steps getting there aren’t addressed. I like that she and Charles realize they aren’t going to work out and ending things. That might have played better if so much of the season wasn’t about pining for him while he got in a bad relationship with Quinn. The possibility of rekindling things with Josh might have played better if they interacted more in the season. (That said, Josh was always closer to the spirit of the show than Charles. Also this is at least the third show I’ve watched in which the solution to a cis-het couple disagreeing about having children, where the man wants one and the woman doesn’t is resolved by him having a child with another woman. Individually I’m fine with the stories, but I hate that it’s a trend.) Foster also discusses how the show is escapist, and a fantasy while talking about how the show didn’t address COVID-19.

Earlier, I wondered how the show would address the Trump administration, and ultimately, they didn’t. Part of me thinks the thing that went wrong for former fans is related to the attempt to stay light and fantasy like in the face of so many painful changes. For most of the show’s existence I wanted someone to talk to about it in comparison to Sex and the City. It had a more regular plots about not having money and gentrification. Its take on its main four female leads romantic lives ended up differently, but they may have had similar problems with the romantic relationships. Somehow, trying to stay a light fantasy seems to turn into not really learning. I’m not sure if the final season was disappointing because of a decline in quality, or circumstances highlighting its worst tendencies. In any case, it was the show ending I was most ready to say good bye to, and now I have.

[eternalreviewrose]

Boku Dake ga Inai Machi--REVIEW

Title: Boku Dake ga Inai Machi (ERASED) Length: 12 episodes Premiered: Winter 2016 Production Studio: A-1 Pictures Rating: R/NC17+

Summary: Satoru Fujinuma is a normal (struggling) manga artist and pizza delivery man with an extraordinary ability he calls “Revival”. He jumps at most five minutes back in time whenever tragedy around him strikes, and do his his naturally good nature, does his best to prevent them! When someone dear to him is killed, he somehow jumps back fifteen years, back to his fifth year of elementary, which is when his classmate, the mysterious Kayo Hinazuki, was murdered. He decides to help change the future and make sure Kayo stays alive.

Due to spoilers, my !personal! review will be under the ‘keep reading’

This anime wasn’t bad. It has been on my to-watch list ever since its premiere, and thanks to my being in an anime club, I’ve finally gotten a chance to watch it. I thought I would pace myself with the twelve episodes, seeing as I had about three days to complete it, but ended up going through the whole six hours with minimal breaks.

Another worry was its studio, A-1 Pictures, which I’ve had negative experiences with. For some reason, the shows I’ve watched from A-1 either are poorly adapted from source material (an entire season of Kuroshitsuji with terrible original characters to back me up) or they take on horrible series from the get-go (Sword Art Online, I’m looking at you).

Now for the actual review:

Characters: 8/10 The characters were very well written, in my opinion. Because Satoru was thrown back in time fifteen years, it was perfectly alright for him to have his adult thoughts while in his eleven-year-old body. The classmates were written nicely, and Satoru’s mother was superb. Even his co-workers were fine. However I feel as though Yashiro, or the teacher, was written too obviously. I knew he was the killer from maybe his second appearance, but that’s only because I’m a veteran and I knew a teacher wouldn’t have a prominent role in a drama-mystery series about murders and kidnappers. Admittedly, there were times where I thought maybe Kayo’s mother committed Kayo’s murder, but that died down when I found out Hiromi was also a victim. Also, for a negative tick, Kenya was too much of a smartass for me, being as he is only eleven throughout most of the series. That kid simply knew too much.

Art: 7/10 One reason I dislike A-1 Pictures is because a lot of times their shows end up suffering from ‘same-face syndrome’, and I feel like that happened here in some cases. I had to remind myself time and time again that Kayo’s mother and Sachiko (Satoru’s mother) were two different characters because their faces looked identical. I also for a long time thought that Satoru’s boss was one of his childhood friends, only because they looked similar. As for backgrounds, because this is based off of real areas of Japan, the localizational art isn’t bad. It’s accurate, and moreso during the time skip to 1988. One of my favorite shots is the repeated camera rolls. I don’t know why, but it’s mesmerizing.

Sound: 8/10 I honestly didn’t know that Asian Kung-Fu Generation still made music, as I remember listening to “Rewrite” from Fullmetal Alchemist back in 2003, but this opening “Re:Re” was amazing. I tend to skip anime openings to get on with the story, but I couldn’t do it. I only watched/listened to the ending once, (this is worse to say since I can’t remember what it’s called) and that’s simply because I was engrossed with the plot. But I do remember that it was a very beautiful song. The OSTs did a phenomenal job capturing the suspense and melancholy this show produced. The voices were excellent, even if Satoru and Kayo’s purposeful monotone voices irked me at times.

Story/Pacing: 7/10 A time skip is going to be obvious when dealing with a character that can time travel, so I will be overlooking anything dealing with that. When Satoru is a child, the narrative literally gives you the dates which things happen: Satoru and Kayo’s birthday is on March 2nd, and throughout the show, that fact doesn’t change or becomes ambiguous. In fact, we’re reminded over and over again that X-Day, or Kayo’s original day of death, was the night before her birthday, or March 1st. Keeping track of the dates like this is a very good way to slow down the storytelling process and keep the audience interested. The same cannot be said at the end of the series, after Satoru’s fifteen-year coma. From what I’ve read, the story is split into two arcs: the first being the entirety of Satoru’s jumps back into his childhood, up to the point where it is absolutely sure that none of the three targeted children died, and then the post-coma arc. The latter of the two lasted maybe, what, three episodes at best? Satoru woke up from his coma, ran into Yashiro again, and then helped put Yashiro behind bars. It’s rushed beyond belief, and that’s probably why it gets a lot of negative reviews, because the ending just wasn’t as exciting as the first half of the series. One downfall from the narrative is Satoru’s “Revival”, which is never explained. We never learn how it came to be, why only he has it in this universe, or why he is suddenly unable to use it at the end of the series. I feel as though this is just a plot point stuck onto Satoru’s already blunt and boring character, to make him stand out. I haven’t read too far into the manga, therefor I have no idea if it explains it there, but knowing about this ability would have made me a little happier.

Entertainment: 9/10 I could not put my laptop away unless it was to use the bathroom. I was immersed in this series from start to finish, even if I was falling off the track at the end due to the drop in story quality. It’s a murder-mystery that keeps you at the edge of your seat in a different way from all the rest, mainly due to its time travel and having children be the main characters for most of the story.

Overall: 7/10, specifially, 7.8/10 I would not mind watching this again. It kept me at the edge of my seat, entertained beyond belief, and itching to know if I was right about Yashiro being the killer from the moment I thought it was him. I greatly recommend this series, it’s not the best out there, but it’s most certainly a must-watch.