ReasonForOurHope

Tuesday, April 7, 2015

New TV Show Mini-Review: Younger



I love Sutton Foster.  She received my CatholicSkywalker award for Best Actress in a Comedy for Bunheads.  She is an amazing performer who projects intelligence and emotion all the while showcasing a fantastic song and dance talent.

She is already a star on Broadway.  She deserves to be a TV star or movie star.

She deserves better than Younger.

Younger is a terrible show.  It is not lacking in wit, but the humor is filtered through a morally disgusting filter.

The plot of show is interesting.  After getting a divorce, 40-year-old Sutton Foster's character is trying to make it in the big city, but all her potential employers in the publishing industry think she is too old.  But because she is in such great shape and was mistake for someone much younger by a suitor in a bar, she decides to try and pass herself off as a twenty-something.

It is a cute idea and has potential to juxtapose a Gen-X mindset verses the Millenials.  And there is some of that.  There is a great visual gag where she changes her email from @aol.com to @gmail.com. It almost works as a critique of the narcissistic, techno-idiocracy of modern young people.  But it seems to revel in its baseness rather than step above it.

The show is made by the makers of Sex and the City and it shows.  I was shocked that on TV Land they would have graphic discussions of female genitals and would show the groping of private parts.  But the frank sexual nature of the show is a gigantic turn off.

To give you an idea of the tenor of the jokes, Sutton Foster's character maps out her fictional younger life.  When asked why she has "9/11" and "First [insert vulgar sex act]," listed together, she says, "Both happened on the bus to middle school."  I was so disgusted by that one joke that I couldn't invest at all in any of the other jokes or the characters.  They all appear to be different shades of awful.

Sutton Foster is a star.  This show dims the luster of her brightness.

1/2 out of 5 stars.

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