5 Things to Know About ‘Younger’ Season 3
Age ain’t nothing but a number for some people, but for Younger’s Liza Miller, it’s the biggest complication in her life.
The TV Land comedy returns for its third season this week, and Liza (Sutton Foster) is still harboring a huge secret from her bosses and co-workers at Empirical Publishing — that she’s a 40-year-old divorcee, not a 26-year-old millennial.
Her young boyfriend, Josh (Nico Tortorella), knows, and the secret caused the two to split up briefly. He wants to win her back, but things got even more complicated when Liza quit and her handsome age-appropriate boss Charles (Peter Hermann) begged her to come back — and ended up kissing her! Now, she’s torn between two men, and she’s back at Empirical, where the guilt of deceiving friend and colleague Kelsey (Hilary Duff) is tearing her up.
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How long can Liza keep her secret? Will she finally ‘fess up to Kelsey? Will she choose Josh or Charles? Yahoo TV asked the stars of Younger all of these burning questions, and here’s what we found out about Season 3.
1. Emotions Are Running High
“It’s an emotional season,” Duff tells us.
“There’s more at stake,” adds Foster. “Liza is going to have to start asking a lot of hard questions. Hearts are going to be broken, I think.”
Molly Bernard, who plays Kelsey’s BFF Lauren Heller, also reveals that all of the characters will open up and show their vulnerabilities this season. “There are so many surprises,” she says of their storylines. “Lauren finds herself in a really surprising situation this season, and that’s because she’s vulnerable.”
“I think they’re opening all the storylines up this season,” says Miriam Shor, who plays hard-charging publishing exec Diana Trout. “Everybody knows the characters now and you can get into more intricate storytelling.”
Related: Ken Tucker Reviews ‘Younger’ Season 3
2. Team Josh or Charles? How About Neither?
“I’m Team Both,” Foster says with a laugh. “She doesn’t want to choose, because why does she have to choose? She has everything she’s wanted for a long time. She has two boys who are giving her attention who are both amazing. She has a great job. It’s a fairy tale.”
The men in her life don’t make it easy for her, either. Even the actors can root for the other’s character. “On paper, it makes sense,” Tortorella says of Charles and Liza. “It’s a no-brainer.”
But Hermann can see why Liza belongs with Josh. “The few times Charles has seen the two of them together, something wakes up in her around Josh.”
This love triangle is causing Liza a lot of stress and distracting her from the real priority: her job. “Ultimately, the best thing for Liza would be to choose no one,” Foster notes.
Don’t expect a final resolution on the triangle anytime soon, either, because as Duff jokes, “If she made a choice, who’s going to watch the show?”
3. Sex Is Alive and Well in the City
Hey, this is a Darren Star show, so yeah, “There’s a lot of sex this season — for everyone!” Foster says. Duff chimes in, “In unexpected places. A lot of public sex this year. A lot of nudity.”
Not only is Liza contemplating a reunion with Josh, Kelsey’s about to get some action, too, after the death of her fiance, Thad. Well, there’s his odious, stalkerish twin brother, Chad, but Kelsey gives him the boot quickly. Instead, “Kelsey has a bit of a boy bender,” Foster teases.
There’s also the odd coupling of Lauren and Debi Mazar’s Maggie. “We have fun. We like each other,” Mazar notes. “She and I are still involved, and then there’s another flip of the switch and there’s other stuff happening.”
4. The Publishing Industry on the Show Will Follow Real Life
A major storyline introduced in the premiere is Empirical’s rocky future. Charles is eager to reel in a young tech millionaire as an investor, but will that be enough to save a sinking ship? As Foster notes, the real publishing industry is going through some hard times.
“One of our episodes is called ‘The Last Day of Books.’ And of course, it’s affecting Empirical,” she says. “The whole season is about trying to save the company and about the Millennial Imprint that’s trying to gain notoriety and new readers.”
5. Girls Rule, Boys Drool
As big of a part as the love triangle plays on Younger, so do the friendships that Liza has with Kelsey, Maggie, Lauren, and even kinda-sorta Diana.
“What I love is that one of the ways Liza stays afloat is through her relationships with the women in her life,” Shor says. “I feel like for entertainment purposes, so many shows will show women being catty or competitive, and my own experience is that the female friends in my life are what keep me going forward and not fall apart.”
Younger makes it so that Liza and Kelsey’s relationship is just as central as her romantic ones with Josh and Charles.
“I feel like it’s our love story,” Foster says of her and Duff’s characters. “We’ve developed this real friendship and this real team.”
Duff adds, “We trust each other, we listen to each other, we challenge each other. It’s great. But there’s still deceit there.”
Check out our Facebook Live chat with Peter Hermann:
Younger Season 3 premieres Wednesday, Sept. 28 at 10 p.m. on TV Land.