大象传媒

By , Instructor, PUB 800/Fall 2020

If you aren鈥檛 watching it already, Younger is a romantic comedy/drama series, based on , now heading into its seventh season. The premise: a 40-something woman attempts to reenter the book publishing world after taking a hiatus to raise her family, and finds she鈥檚 better received when she presents herself as a millennial industry neophyte. So she commits to the lie.

Younger鈥檚 ostensible focus is its love triangle (#TeamJosh all the way), but it鈥檚 actually a Trojan horse for plotlines ripped from the headlines of Publishers Weekly; Jia Tolentino, writing for The New Yorker, described it Publishing personalities who've been lampooned include George R.R. Martin, Karl Ove Knausg氓rd, Marie Kondo, John Green, Kathryn Stockett, and Jeff Bezos (). There are knowing nods to trends (colouring books! hygge! influencers-turned-authors!) and scandals (bulk-order bestsellers! plagiarism! #MeToo!); with a, the show feels firmly grounded in reality. Empirical Press, the venerable yet scrappy book publisher where the show is set, is hopelessly cash-strapped鈥攑erhaps in part because their publisher, Charles Brooks, is a self-professed romantic better at making speeches about how 鈥済reat literature will survive, because we need great stories,鈥� than he is at publishing said stories. Empirical is forever courting investors, considering a merger, or else being bested by Amazon鈥攐r, ahem, 鈥淎chilles.鈥� Like I said: the verisimilitude is there.

Sure, there are quibbles. There鈥檚 the episode where the team decides to go to the Frankfurt Book Fair...the week before the Frankfurt Book Fair, or the instant-book pace with which every new acquisition hits the market, or the fact that there seems to be only one literary agent in this version of New York City. And the show is sorely , which you could say is actually a little too accurate for a show depicting book publishing today.

Still, I鈥檓 predisposed to like any series with a publishing angle, and Younger offers those of us in the trenches an escapist rendering of the industry, where the untenable P&Ls and the massive returns happen off-camera. Even real-world publishers are getting in on the fantasy: Simon & Schuster published , the roman 脿 clef written by in-show character Pauline Turner Brooks. Besides, it鈥檚 been a few years since the CBC鈥檚 Being Erica, where the perilous trade was always more of a backdrop to the protagonist鈥檚 time-travelling journey to self-actualization. And Gilmore Girls, for all of Rory鈥檚 bookishness, never quite got it right: remember the Yale prof who confidently asserted, about the assignment of her own book as course text, "I get full royalties whether you buy the book new or used"? ()

If you鈥檙e enrolled in my PUB 800 seminar this fall, we鈥檒l talk about how publishers accumulate, deploy, and signify cultural and economic capital, publishing鈥檚 colonial roots, and the future of the book, among other topics. And I look forward to those spirited discussions. But, if I could add a 鈥渞ecommended binge watch鈥� to my syllabus, it would be Younger, which has some surprisingly trenchant commentary on publishing to offer as well. As Rachel Syme observed, writing for 鈥淧ublishing, at its heart, is about trying to capture and disseminate the zeitgeist; many of the conversations that the characters end up having on Younger are about how best to shepherd these new stories into the world and about the bumps they hit along the way.鈥� May publishing provide enough industry gossip to sustain the show for years to come.

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