Sex and the City creator Darren Star has a knack for making lively, sexy, engaging TV shows featuring strong women characters juggling professional challenges, romantic complications, and female friendships in the modern world. This half-hour romantic comedy, based on the novel by Pamela Redmond Satran and created for the cable channel TV Land, adds a new twist to the genre. This fun-loving title would be very appealing to female library customers.
Liza Miller (Sutton Foster), a 40-year-old single mother of a teenage girl, passes herself off as a 26-year-old to get a job at a small New York publishing house. Liza has the experience, the credentials, and the talent but must keep up the illusion once she lands a position as assistant to a senior editor (Miriam Shor), a woman who fought her way through a male-dominated business, and becomes best friends with Kelsey (Hilary Duff), an ambitious and perceptive junior editor who has the pulse of the millennial audience.
It also complicates romance. Over the course of seven seasons, she is torn between her twentysomething boyfriend Josh (Nico Tortorella), a tattoo artist who inadvertently inspires the charade when he mistakes her for a twentysomething, and publisher Charles (Peter Hermann), an old-fashioned romantic who resists his attraction to Liza because of age and position… at least for the first few seasons. The romantic melodrama kept fans of the show guessing all the way to the end (are you Team Josh or Team Charles?) but the show's foundation is built on her relationships with Kelsey and Maggie (Debi Mazur), a queer artist, and Liza's longtime best friend. She's the only one to know Liza's secret at first, but lying to her new millennial buddies becomes more emotionally difficult as they grow into treasured friends and she widens the circle of trust over the course of the series.
This is a light, sexy romantic drama but it also uses humor to gently address issues like ageism, sexism, sexual misconduct, and harassment in the workplace. As with Starr's Sex and the City, the show was filmed in New York City and makes great use of distinctive cityscape in location shooting. It also draws much of its guest cast from the New York theater world, which adds to the show's flavor.
Rated TV-14 for sexuality and adult situations; there's no nudity or foul language but these characters are sexually active and talk about sex a lot. All seven seasons and 84 episodes on 10 discs, along with deleted scenes and bloopers. Highly recommended for media librarians looking to expand their TV collections.