Younger: Season 1 (2015)

Although Darren Star has released a couple of series since Sex and the City,  as well as a couple of remakes of his older 90s output, Younger is perhaps the first series that feels definitively post-SATC, picking up the cusp of New York City’s sexual subculture as a decade later. A lot has changed since then, and the various experiments of the foursome in SATC seem quite quaint when compared to a millenial generation for whom promiscuous and queer modes of attachment are simply the norm, thanks to the omniscience of mobile social digital media devices. At least, that’s what Liza Miller (Sutton Foster) discovers when she decides to pose as 20 instead of 40 to land a job at a major New York publishing house, following a divorce that forces her to dowsize from her family home in New Jersey to downtown Williamsburg, where she moves in with her old friend, Maggie (Debi Mazar). Liza may be straight and Maggie may be gay, but they both quickly find themselves seduced and bemused by an altogether new queer orientation and generation as Liza’s experiment proceeds and she finds herself drawn, on the one hand, into a monogamish relationship with a Williamsbug tattoo artist, played by Nico Tortella, and, on the other hand, into a squad-crew run by her best friend at work, played by Hilary Duff. Both are offered as more or less queer modes of affiliation and collectivity, preventing the series ever descending into anything resembling cynicism or hostility towards the next generation, even or especially when it’s clear that they’ve completely exceeded the lessons and fan base of SATC. Instead, Star addresses one of the most difficult challenges posed to contemporary television – how to incorporate and acknowledge the very promiscuity of the digital platform that delivers it – as an exercise in camp, specifically a form of camp commensurate to a world in which transitioning has replaced sexual orientation as the locus of queer identity. And there really is an increasing sense that Liza isn’t simply passing for young, or dissembling herself to everyone she meets, so much as transitioning into an an emergent mindspace in which one of the queerest things you can do – especially for a woman – is to simply refuse to act your age, in terms of your partners, peers and professional life. In that sense, there’s something quite utopian about the series, especially at a time when the convergence of Hollywood sexism and ageism is visible and vocal as never before, as Foster and Mazar sink into a queer temporality that works perfectly against the backdrop of the publishing world, which turns out to be as enmeshed in queer economies and digital technologies as television itself. In fact, one of the main jokes of the series is that if television has become more novelistic, highbrow and quality-controlled, then it’s also become more deluded as to its splendid aesthetic isolation, a delusion that Star’s exquisite sense of camp cuts against and undermines, if only because one of the main lessons Liza and Maggie learn is that this new queer New York doesn’t regulate highbrow and lowbrow expectations in any traditional or recognisable way. The result is a series that offers every actress the best possible role in its power, regardless of convention or expectation, but especially Mazar and Foster, who have both, in their different ways, subsisted as character actors on exactly these kind of transitional roles over the years – and it’s their romance, self-deprecating yet resilient, sexually confident yet sexually sheepish, that really drives the series' wonderfully poised sense of camp.