An evening with the man who brought iconic leading ladies, such as Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw and Beverly Hills 90210’s Annie Wilson, to television.
One of the most successful television producers in the country, Darren Star, visited Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus early last week to promote his latest project, TV Land’s Younger. In addition, Communications and Media Studies professor James Jennewein mediated a Q&A with Star, discussing his career journey and personal experiences within the industry.
Star’s hit television series’ Melrose Place and Beverly Hills 90210 turned the spotlight on west coast living in the 1990s. In the following years, Star worked on HBO’s Sex and the City, a show that came to define the young, independent New York City single woman of the 2000s. For his new series, Star once again focuses on the women of New York. Starring the talented Sutton Foster, Younger tells the story of a 40-something mother returning to the urban workforce after spending 15 years raising her daughter in the suburbs of New Jersey. Once in the city, Foster’s character, Liza, discovers that she is unable to find work at her age. Thus, Liza lies about her age, claiming that she is in her late 20s, lands a gig in publishing and starts dating younger men.
A New York Times review calls the series a “lighthearted but wistfully knowing look at the gender imbalances and generational rifts that make life hard for even fabulous women.” Fordham’s own James Jennewein stated that he thinks Younger “hits on the grand question of what is it to be a woman in today’s society and the barriers at the intersection between sex, age, and work.” After watching the screening of Younger, I feel that the show captures the same humor and sass that Star’s former series embodied. It is that same sense of personality and charisma that makes Star’s work stand out from the other shows out there and keeps audiences coming back for more.
But how did he become one of the most well-known producers in America? Jennewein led the Q&A with this question. Star explained that he attended UCLA, studying Creative Writing, which landed him a job as a PR assistant after graduation. Even though working as a PR assistant was not his dream job, he was able to meet and connect with important people within the screenwriting field. Through these connections, Star was then able to pass along some of his work to his boss and other people within the business.
October 4th, 1990 marked Star’s first real breakthrough. It was this day that his show Beverly Hills 90210 first aired on Fox. The show chronicled the lives of a group of young adults living in the star-studded, glamorous community of Beverly Hills, California. The drama series ran for a total of 10 seasons with 293 episodes including its finale in May of 2000. Melrose Place, another one of Star’s television series masterpieces, aired roughly two years after 90210 was launched—July 8th, 1992. The American primetime soap opera followed down the same path to fame as 90210, continuing for 7 seasons with a total of 226 episodes and millions of loyal viewers. This show, much like Star’s 90210, came to a close in the spring of 2000.
Desiring a change from the west coast in 1995, Star wrote and produced Central Park West, a primetime television soap opera set in the affluent area of Central Park West in Manhattan. Unfortunately, the show, as Star put it, “tanked” on CBS and was taken off the air the following year. It seems that Star quickly recovered from the series’ failure, however, pitching the idea of turning Candace Bushnell’s book Sex and the City into a television series to HBO productions. The show ran for six years after its initial debut in 1998, and received multiple Emmy, Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Award nominations. Sex and the City also received recognition from Time Magazine, identifying the series as one of the 100 best TV Shows of All-Time.
Star talked about his work on Sex and the City, specifically how challenging it was to write the second season. The first season of the show, in Star’s opinion, did not really “hit the resonating nerve with the audience.” “I think of the first season kind of like the way I look at [Younger], no one really knew about Sex and the City in the first season,” but after the second and third seasons, “it just grew and continued to grow over many years.” Star explained that, now, having experienced both failure and great success with his work, he learned that writing and creating shows has to be carried out, first and foremost, for oneself and hope that audiences like it. In his career, he has seen many screenwriters pitch ideas designed around audiences’ specific interests, but because the underlying passion for the story line isn’t there, the series will not succeed.
Now, Star has once again exercised his creative talents in producing his new series, Younger. “What’s fun about doing this show is just the idea of any person in their past-40’s having to live in a 20-something world and the whole idea of how the generation gap and the associated differences are now more pronounced, especially today with social media.” Star developed Sutton Foster’s character as someone “living in a 20-something situation with the knowledge and awareness of being 40.” The show, playing with the perceptions of age and the role that age plays in one’s own identity, makes viewers consider “if you had to live your 20s over again, how would you do it?” Younger is designed to be this type of “fun, wishful, fantasy fulfillment” for all audiences.
Professor Jennewein followed this with a question about the show’s modern feel, and how Star connects his series to today’s society. “We have a group of writers, some are old some are young and in their 20’s, and we pump them for ideas all the time… but it’s more about how the characters are behaving rather than what they are saying,” Star responded. “TV, in general, has to reflect time in a current way and say something new.” Modern Family, he says, is a great example of this—a show that “takes on a fresh point of view to something familiar.” His series is structured in this same way, while also being accessible on multiple platforms. “The social media part of Younger, I think of it and I’m like ‘wow’… there is material that I have nothing to do with that is constantly happening to engage the fans of the show.” Embracing digital platforms, Star believes, is a crucial component to the survival of television today and in the future.
Lastly, Star added that he is grateful to Younger for putting him back on the streets of the city that he loves, New York. “There is nothing like filming in New York City,” Star said. “It’s an exciting city for everybody… anywhere you point your camera there’s something to look at.” In his work, the city really plays its own character. Star believes New York City to be “incredibly dynamic,” and considers it “the great city that everyone can relate to.” Luckily for us at Fordham, we live here for at least 8 months of the year and, hopefully, take advantage of it every single day.
Be sure to tune in to TV Land on Tuesday, January 13th at 10/9C for the season premier of Younger!