A Coming-of-Age Show for 50

Sharon Horgan in Youth.Photo: Colin Hutton/HBO

Sharon Horgan’s Youth begins with a montage of remarkable women over the age of 50. Across footage of Maya Angelou, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Jane Goodall, Diana Nyad, Margaret Atwood, and Yoko Ono, a voice intones, “No decade moves faster than 50 to 60. You have to make every single second of your time count.” These women had more power as they got older. They came into themselves. Youth then cuts to Horgan’s protagonist, Alex, mid–brainless-social-media scroll, watching an AI video of someone giving a cockatiel a haircut. Then there’s a workout video, a salmon recipe, and a woman explaining how the labia minora disappear during menopause. As the videos fly by, Alex’s phone suddenly displays a furious message from her boss. The phone slips and falls on Alex’s face and she sprints out of her apartment in a mad dash to a meeting she has nearly missed. She’s not experiencing an Ono-esque creative unleashing. She is a disaster.

Youth is Horgan’s third amorphously autofictional television project. In the first, the dark comedy Pulling, which debuted 20 years ago and deals with the stress of early adulthood, Horgan’s character, Donna, breaks up with her fiancé the day before their wedding and then has to navigate single life with her friends, handling suicide attempts, mental breakdowns, and stalkers. The second, 2015’s Catastrophe, is a two-hander performed by co-creators Horgan and Rob Delaney, in which their characters (also named Sharon and Rob) grapple with a surprise pregnancy after a brief fling. Horgan’s other series have also tackled specific phases in women’s lives, including Motherland, about the early years of parenting; the HBO show Divorce; and the hit Apple mystery Bad Sisters, a thriller blended with Horgan’s darkly comic point of view. But as Horgan explains in a note sent to critics, Youth is more personal: She began thinking about it “as part three in a kind of trilogy, if Pulling were part one and Catastrophe part two.”

In Youth, Alex feels she should be coming into her own. Her son, Ruari (Aran Murphy, who resembles his father, Cillian Murphy), is going away to college. She has extricated herself from a bad marriage and begun to settle into life as a single person without all the routines and patterns of partnership. Her career is well established — she’s a literary agent with a few blockbuster clients and is close friends with her boss, Sam (Sharlene Whyte). Everything has lined up for a period of renewal and reinvestment in herself. She can date whomever she likes (possibly including an ex, Patrick, played by Rupert Friend). She can sign exciting new literary talent, get her kid launched into the world, and no longer feel beholden to everyone else’s needs and desires.

That’s the vision, at least. Instead, Alex is just as harried and overwhelmed as she has ever been. Ruari’s college days do not go well, and he ends up back in her apartment, withdrawn and sullen, eating all her fancy ham and refusing to answer questions. Her aging parents need more care now, and her ex-husband and his young new wife are no help. Work is somehow even more stressful: While Alex wants to sign authors she feels have real literary promise, Sam cares only about commercial success and is furious with Alex for dropping a particularly obnoxious client who went on to self-publish a surprise best-selling monster-fucking romantasy called Goblin Seed. On top of it all, Alex would like to have another romantic relationship with Patrick or maybe with a new guy Sam tries to set her up with. But the new guy, to Alex’s absolute horror, is old; she can’t stop looking at the folded skin on his neck. She can’t accept that she’s now in the stage of her life when this is the kind of man her friend thinks Alex would find sexually appealing. Youth refuses to turn its title into a saccharine one-note takeaway, to its enormous credit, and it’s just as much a relief that the title isn’t a cynical “ha-ha, she’s old” joke, either. The show sees youth as achingly desirable and also a miserable burden, and at any moment, either of those options couldn’t feel more true.

Alex is painstakingly balanced; she’s funny and harried and a complete mess, flawed and competent in equal measure. Around her, Youth builds an impressively frantic web of relationships and plot snarls. Few sequences begin with relaxed establishing shots of exteriors or end with cute punch lines to transition to the next scene. The 2026 mode of always-on digital contact means every part of Alex’s life perpetually crashes into the others. At a work party, she fields texts from her ex while trying to pitch a new book. On a date, she gets alarming texts from Ruari, forcing her to drop everything and try to track his location. Every new scene feels like Alex has just sprinted into the middle of it. Youth’s use of onscreen phone displays further emphasizes how the mayhem piles up with shots of Alex scrolling through long chains of ignored email threads, while insisting out loud she was never looped into that podcast recording, or with short, choppy scenes in which she opens an email, half writes it, and then saves to draft when another emergency pops up.

Alex being the singular protagonist means that, despite her menopausal phase, Youth feels like a coming-of-age narrative. Even more than any of Horgan’s previous work, Youth is about reckoning with one person’s story of her own life. In Pulling, Horgan’s Donna is one of a group of friends all muddling through their 30s together, and Catastrophe is as much Delaney’s show as Horgan’s. But Youth belongs entirely to Alex, and all its strain and optimism and exasperation surface because she is on her own — the one character who ties all the plots together and keeps all the plates spinning. The humor draws from the enormous tangle of Alex’s life and how often she nearly lets everything fall apart before dragging it back together, just barely.

With a protagonist 20 years younger, it would be a well-built comedy without much to distinguish it from any other “adulthood is hard” TV show. Instead, Alex’s age amplifies everything around her, ratcheting up the cringiness, sweetness, and desperation. It’s a comedy with stakes, thank God, and it’s more than ready to acknowledge how ridiculous this woman can be while remaining beautifully tender toward her. Even when Alex’s friends and co-workers and nemeses and family cause endless angst and joy, Youth triumphs as an unflinching menopausal bildungsroman, one woman’s scatterbrained, misguided, and occasionally brilliant effort to finally become fully herself.

A Coming-of-Age Show for 50-Somethings