There is a joke that I have started hearing around New York City, in the (admittedly small) publishing circles I travel in: If you hear a good tidbit of gossip, you can almost guarantee it will appear in subtly fictionalized form on the next season of Younger, a sitcom set in the book world. In one episode, rumors circulate that literary authors are choosing to boycott Achilles, a behemoth that resembles Amazon. In another, the Lean In phenomenon becomes Get Real, a philosophy dispensed in Dr. Phil–style sessions by an aggressive woman in a sheath dress. Later, Annabelle Bancroft (Jane Krakowski) serves as a Candace Bushnell–esque sex writer, whose books bear titles like Shedonism and Mantastic. No trend is spared: The show pounces on hygge, Marie Kondo, adult coloring books, Pod Save America, Reese Witherspoon’s book club, and even self-help tomes written by a dog.

Now in its fifth season, Younger airs on TV Land, an otherwise sleepy corner of the Viacom empire, best known for reruns of Gunsmoke and M*A*S*H. It is an unlikely home for a show that has gained a serious cult following since it debuted in 2015, especially within the industry it portrays. If there is one thing that creator Darren Star—the man behind a handful of other high-gloss hits, such as Melrose Place and Sex and the City—knows, it is a winning television formula: Take an insular, aspirational world (an exclusive Los Angeles housing complex or Manhattan before the financial crisis or the petri dish of New York publishing) and blow it up into a glittery cartoon-land where farce and reality are all mixed up. Sex and the City has long been lambasted for its inaccuracies and omissions, but it endures 20 years on because of all the details it got right: At the turn of the millennium, New York really was becoming more selfish, more consumerist, and more focused on the ambitious individual.

Younger shares a large swath of DNA with Sex and the City (including its stylist—the series’ exaggerated outfits spring yet again from the mind of the eccentric costumer Patricia Field, who is not afraid to dress a woman in head-to-toe marabou and spangles), but it reflects a less glamorous world. In the years since Carrie Bradshaw paid her rent with a weekly column, the writing economy has suffered extreme shifts: It has gone digital, collapsed, revived (briefly), collapsed again. Many of the female employees in Younger have to deal with workplace discrimination and the perils of ambition; they labor to keep their industry afloat, even as new technology scratches at the door. (A multi-episode arc in which a tech scion attempts a hostile takeover of a publishing house centers this last anxiety.)

Perhaps Star chose to make a comedy about book publishing because it initially looked luminous and cosmopolitan, but it has become a clever conduit through which to take on a wider range of issues. Publishing, 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. Although launched as a summer show with a fun, outlandish premise, for five seasons Younger has gone much further, offering a sharp critique of how culture gets made.

Let’s get that outlandish premise out of the way: Younger is a show about a 40-year-old woman who pretends to be, well, younger. When the show begins, Liza Miller (Sutton Foster) has recently separated from her husband, and her college-bound daughter is traveling abroad. She once worked at Random House but has been out of the publishing game for nearly two decades, having ditched her editorial goals and languished for years as a New Jersey stay-at-home mom. Embracing her newfound adult freedom, Liza relocates to Brooklyn. She moves into an airy Williamsburg loft—perhaps the least believable element of the show—with her best friend, a vampish lesbian artist named Maggie (Debi Mazar). Still pining for the book world, she starts applying for jobs but finds that, at her age and with her stunted experience, no corporate HR rep will even entertain her résumé, let alone give her any real power.