Younger Team Puts the Love Triangle to Bed: 'We've Always Been Team Liza'

With Younger‘s final season at last upon us, it’s time to start saying goodbye to your favorite characters — and a certain love triangle.

For the past six seasons, fans have vocalized (and occasionally flip-flopped on) their feelings about Liza’s love life. More specifically, should she end up with hot young tattoo artist Josh, or distinguished publishing giant Charles?

Younger‘s seventh season premiere, in which Josh told Liza that he only wants what’s best for her (even if that means Charles), formally put the nail in their romantic coffin. But if you ask the show’s cast, the triangle has been long dead — if it was ever really alive at all.

“It was never a ‘Team Josh’ vs. ‘Team Charles’ situation for us,” Nico Tortorella (aka Josh) tells TVLine. “That was definitely a genius marketing device that was built to get the show hype. Love triangles have existed since the beginning of television, but it was never that for us. I think I worked with Peter [Hermann] maybe two times over seven seasons. Charles just kind of didn’t exist in Josh’s world, in so many ways. And we’ve always been Team Liza.”

Adds series creator Darren Star, “We always wanted to move beyond the binary choice for her, ‘Team Charles’ or ‘Team Josh.’ I think the show is ultimately more than a choice between two men. In terms of how that sort of happened and how it got so identified that way, that was a surprise to me. I feel like the audience decided that there were teams here. I didn’t even really think about it that explicitly.”

Even as Liza and Charles struggle to find common ground — she wants to remain “happily unmarried” to him, while he still believes in marriage as an institution — Peter Hermann (aka Charles) insists that her happiness as an individual is paramount.

“We all just want a happy Liza, and I think that’s where both men are coming from,” Hermann says. “We want what’s best for her.”

Besides, it seems like Season 7 will be all about Liza and Charles finding their way back to one another — no matter how long that takes.

“There are things he wakes up in her that would be missing if she was with somebody else, anybody else,” Hermann says. “There are things in him that keep drawing her back.”

Your thoughts on the first four episodes of Younger‘s final season, currently available to stream on Paramount+ and Hulu? Drop ’em all in a comment below.