Warning: Spoilers ahead Who will the 40-something, divorcée Liza (played by Broadway star SuttonFoster) select as her happily-ever-after soulmate? If you’ve been following the show from the beginning, you probably can already guess that her likeliest suitors are either Charles (PeterHermann)—Liza’s on-again-off-again love interest, who proposed to her in the Season 6 finale—or her ex-boyfriend Josh (NicoTortorella), the much younger tattoo artist who mistook her for a fellow 20-something back in the series premiere, when she was faking being 10-ish years younger (get it?) in order to launch a publishing career after splitting from her husband. With Season 7’s first four episodes now available to stream, let’s take a look at everything we know about how things might play out amid this love triangle. Because, as Liza might say, we want this drama in our life!
What happened after Charles proposed to Liza on Younger Season 6?
Charles may have proposed to Liza in the Season 6 finale, but up until now, we still didn’t know her answer, as the episode ended on a cliffhanger. But in the opening scene of the Season 7 premiere, Liza’s answer to Charles’ “will you marry me? isn’t “yes,” but just “I love you,” prompting him to withdraw his question so that she can propose to him when she’s ready. Later on in the episode, she proposes something different: That they remain “happily unmarried” ever after. Charles, our traditional hunk, wants to make things official. Unhappy with her proposal, Charles ends their relationship right then and there.
Will Charles and Liza end up together at the end of Younger?
They definitely go their separate ways after the split. But that doesn’t mean they won’t find their way back to each other later on in the season. Hermann hinted at this when he called Liza and Charles’ romance “complicated” in an interview with Us earlier this month. In the same Q&A, Hermann also dropped major hints about another storyline that develops over the course of Season 7’s first four episodes: Charles winds up feeling romantic sparks with the duplicitous Quinn (LauraBenanti)! “Things might be thrown at televisions when we go down that road,” Hermann joked about how fans might react to the Charles-Quinn storyline. “I think that for Charles, [Quinn] is steady. She seems so much more, in a sense, oddly, she seems so much safer than Liza…After heartbreak, he moves towards that, but all will be revealed.” Not one to rest on her laurels, Liza also gets her rebound on during the start of Season 7 by having a sex-filled romp with an Aussie surfer hunk after he signs with Empirical. So what does all this mean about Liza and Charles’ future chances? Author PamelaRedmond, who wrote the 2005 novel Younger on which the series is based, revealed back in 2017 that she’s “Team Charles”—even though that character didn’t appear in her book, but was instead introduced only when the story was brought to the small screen. One more thing: Hermann has revealed that the last scene he and Foster shot together was just the two of them, alone on a Manhattan sidewalk at 5 a.m. Could that mean they’re the twosome who’s still standing at the end?
Or does Liza end up with Josh on Younger?
The Season 7 premiere also finds Josh unexpectedly learning of Charles’ impromptu proposal to Liza—news he reacts to by coolly declaring he’s “not interested.” Soon after, though, Josh and Liza run into each other at Lauren’s 30th birthday party and earnestly insist to one another, “I want you in my life”—even if exactly how remains undefined. Later on in the season, Josh starts up a fling with a pop star’s assistant, but it seems there’s still hope for him and Liza to reunite. How do we know? Because there’s a moment in the Season 7 trailer (that isn’t part of the first four episodes), when Josh appears to ask Liza, “If I would’ve said something sooner, would it have made a difference?”—suggesting that he might make a play to win her back this season. And if you still think the Younger books are a good source of clues, you should know that Redmond put out a sequel back in September 2020 called (what else?) Older, in which a now-50-something Liza considers reigniting her romance with Josh. Despite dropping some hints in interviews, the cast and crew mostly keeping mum about how everything will play out. Series creator DarrenStar told ET this week that the hourlong series finale “gives all the characters such great, satisfying conclusions.” He also promised that the ending will reflect “exactly what [the writers] talked about a year ago” and will be packed with “twists and turns until the very, very last moment.” And Foster similarly told TV Line, “When I read the ending, I felt incredibly satisfied and realized, ‘Oh, there was no other way it could have ended.’ I mean, I guess it could have ended a million ways, but the way they ended it, I [gasped] and realized it was the perfect ending.”
Where to watch Younger’s final season
The first four episodes of Younger’s 12-episode final season premiered on April 15 on Paramount+, with the rest of the season’s episodes dropping weekly on Thursdays after that. (Episodes will also be available on Hulu, following the same timeline.) The entire seventh and final season will begin airing weekly on TV Land starting with the season’s first two episodes airing back to back on Wednesday, July 7, at 10 p.m. ET/PT. Like Younger? You’ll love Emily in Paris.
