Younger.
The first time I watched Younger was in the middle of the pandemic. I’d just gotten my stationary bike—a very simple one, around $100, there because I’d evolved from thinking going on walks was too germy to riding my bike outside was too tedious to this happy medium of riding my bike in my living room, where I could both get all of my angst out and stay inside. I had just gotten my stationary bike and the only way I could ride it consistently was by watching TV. A friend recommended Younger, and so I set to watching it. It’s about a forty-year-old woman trying to go back to work after taking a long hiatus to raise her kid. Now everybody thinks she’s too old to work in an entry-level position and too behind to work in an upper-level position so instead they don’t hire her at all. Her friend suggests she pretend she’s in her mid-twenties since she can pull it off, and she does. Except she not only gets a job this way but a boyfriend and a best friend, who are both in their mid-twenties too.
The show is about working in the publishing industry and about keeping a big secret and about the stakes of telling the truth. It got me through many an hour of working out, and even though that was four years ago now (four whole years!), I still remember the show fondly.
I started rewatching it again because I wanted to see something that I knew I liked. I usually don’t have the patience to rewatch things—I like to have no idea how things are going to turn out, the stress of that maybe an outlet for my jitteriness (instead of stressing over my own life). I’m not one for reruns, but I also don’t have a great long-term memory so it was sort of like watching it for the first time (except sometimes I’d have a vague but certain feeling about how things were going to go).
This time, what I like about Younger is how—while dated in ways—the show does a lot more than we’re used to shows doing. It’s inclusive—at least when it comes to age and queerness—without being performative. It’s not exactly politically correct but it’s also not trying to offend anybody. The writing is smart, and everyone in the show has both good and bad traits (no one is full-on villain or hero). For a show based mostly in an office building, they were able to make the work done there seem especially interesting—often hinging whole episode plots on publishing drama. I’m almost done rewatching the first season, and it went by quicker than I’d anticipated for something that I’d seen before. I find myself invested in these people, even though I already know (vaguely) how they’re going to turn out.
I still watch the show on my same exercise bike, but a lot of my life looks different than it did four years ago. Somehow, during the pandemic, I learned that I needed to take care of myself if I’m not going to go off the deep end in angst, and since then, walks have been more crucial and journaling and writing every day. I ride my stationary bike a few times a week and try to eat well and sleep enough. It’s definitely not a perfected practice but I’ve been especially intentional about building on it since the pandemic, and I’m proud of what I’ve built. Like these characters who are trying to figure out who they want to be, how to be that person, how to be honest about that, I’m trying to figure myself out too. Because look how quickly four years can go by and judging by the main character in Younger, who is forty and twenty-six at once, look how quickly time can go by in general, tossing you further and further along before you’ve so much as taken a deep breath.
Image: Hulu
