In Praise of 'Younger,' the Show With the Only TV Love Triangle Worth Talking About

In 2015, I worked at 1515 Broadway, the New York City building famous for hosting TRL and for being the headquarters of cable channels like MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon and TV Land. Around the building, it was common to see billboards and giant posters promoting the biggest shows on those channels, and when I saw the poster for TV Land's new show Younger starring Sutton Foster, Hilary Duff and Debi Mazar, I immediately dismissed it, a decision based entirely on TV Land's lack of cool cred.  Last year, the show arrived on Netflix and, to my surprise, after watching the pilot episode, I was instantly smitten. It took me a few months, but eventually I polished off the entire series and now 2026 me is here to slap some sense into 2015 me. I was a fool to be so dismissive of this incredibly smart, well-written, impeccably cast sitcom, which also happens to feature the best love triangle on TV. (Sorry, Summer House.) See at Netflix Younger begins as a show about a 40-year-old New Jersey mom, Liza Miller (Foster), who gets divorced and moves to Brooklyn after her daughter goes to college. Desperate for an apartment, she moves in with her best friend Maggie (Mazar), an artist in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. (In the same way that Monica's massive West Village apartment on Friends was inherited from a dead grandmother, Maggie's massive artist's loft with a whole separate bedroom for Liza was acquired before hipsters and condos took over Bedford Avenue.) Liza is broke and forced to get a job, but no one will hire her because of the 18-year professional hiatus she took to raise her daughter. Because she has a gorgeous head of hair and Broadway-toned gams, she convinces a book publisher she's 26 and gets a job working as a marketing assistant. The show's premise is, let's be real, an annoying farce: 40-something Liza doesn't really look like she's 26, but the show uses Superman/Clark Kent logic and a Forever 21 wardrobe to convince ever