Younger Creator Explains Series Finale's Ambiguous Ending: 'The Journey Continues' (Grade It!)

Andy Swift
·3 min read
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Friendly warning: This article contains spoilers from the series finale of Younger. Haven’t watched? Get to streaming!

After seven season of scheming, dreaming and occasionally catching Matthew Morrison getting tender with a sheep, Liza Miller’s journey came to a conclusion on Thursday with the series finale of Younger. And boy do we have Feelings (with a capital F!) about the whole thing.

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Let’s start with Liza and Charles, who finally reunited last week, only to once again call it quits — and not even because of the botched Inkubator deal. (Hell, Liza’s feelings for Charles were so strong that she foolishly handed full control of the billion-dollar idea over to Kelsey!) The anticlimactic split came much later, after Liza told Charles that he’d been accepted into Yaddo, an exclusive artists’ retreat that she submitted him to in secret.

“If I hadn’t gotten into Yaddo, would you have let me know?” he asked during pillow talk. And “maybe not” wasn’t the answer he was hoping for. “It would have just been your little secret,” he said. After several seconds (which felt like several hours) of silence, Liza asked, “We’re not going to make it, are?” And just like that, Team Charles was benched for good.

“Liza’s relationship with Charles was based so much on them projecting who they are to one another,” series creator Darren Star explains to TVLine. “They hadn’t been together authentically for very long, and when push came to shove at the very end, they realized that they weren’t right for each other. More importantly, she was never going to overcome this lie she told at the beginning of the series. The lie had consequences. It gave her a career, but it cost her personal relationships.”

Speaking of Liza’s career, one finale twist we can all support is that Charles asked her to basically run Empirical while he’s off Yaddo-ing. Does it mark one of the fastest success stories in publishing history? Possibly. Were there other employees who probably deserved it over her? Almost certainly. But come on, this is Younger — we threw “realism” out the window when Thad’s twin brother Chad came into the picture.

Of Liza’s major career milestone, Star reminds us, “That was her dream. That was her objective in the series. It’s why she lied about her age, why she did everything — to get into publishing, to a job that she loved.”

But the biggest moment for Liza — or at least the moment that will absolutely have fans screaming at their televisions — came in the episode’s very final moments. While out celebrating her professional victory, Liza bumped into Josh at the bar, at which point they recreated their entire first conversation from the pilot. And when Liza noted that she didn’t know Josh was there, he replied, “Really? Because you know what, I’ve been right there by your side all along.” The. End.

Wanting this final interaction between Josh and Liza to speak for itself, Star simply says, “They’ve always had each other in their lives, and the journey continues.” As for for his decision to end things on such an ambiguous note, he says, “I think of all the paths her story and her life could take, and we wanted to leave it open to all possibilities. To me, there was something elegant about coming full circle in her story.”

And for all the fans who assumed the series would end with Liza writing a book about her experience, perhaps even a book called Younger, Star says, “I think that would have been a little on the nose. It’s not something we ever actually considered.”

OK, fellow Younger fans, let’s hash this out. Were you surprised that Liza and Charles called it quits after spending all season getting back to each other? And how did you really feel about that ambiguous ending with Josh? Grade the finale and season in our polls below, then drop a comment with your full review.

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