There are plenty of shows that could have been titled Youth. Most have casts in their teens and 20s. One of these is called Adults, the joke being that its postcollegiate characters are more like children—playful at best, feckless at worst. HBO’s Youth, a comedy premiering Sept. 20 about a divorced 50-year-old sandwiched between her college-aged son and declining parents, sounds like it might be similarly ironic. It isn’t, really. As in everything its creator and star, Catastropheand Bad Sistershitmaker Sharon Horgan, does, the title’s rueful humor conceals an emotionally complex truth. This is a perceptive, spit-takingly funny show about clinging to the most desirable aspects of youth while also craving comforts that can only come with age and experience.
If youth is, as the saying goes, wasted on the young, then Horgan’s Alex is a character actually equipped to savor what little she has left of it. “I have 10 years left as a sexual person,” she determines in the premiere. With the petulant son, Ruarí (Aran Murphy, a near-clone of dad Cillian), whom she raised with minimal help from her ex-husband Lorcan (Owen McDonnell) packing up for uni, she’s resolved to end a long celibate streak. This search for not just a sex partner, but also the enduring love that has so far eluded her should be aided by Alex’s genuine youthfulness. But with guys like Lorcan and another former flame, Patrick (a rakish Rupert Friend), dodging adulthood with girlfriends decades their junior, the dating pool seems sparse. Set up on a blind date with a patient 67-year-old (Tim McInnerny’s Michael) who looks like he could be her dad, she can’t hide her disappointment. She treats him atrociously. Then again, the double standard that dictates she’s now too old for men her own age is also pretty atrocious.
At work, meanwhile, Alex is longing to be treated like the accomplished veteran literary agent she is. The trouble is, her boss, Sam (Sharlene Whyte), is also her best friend. They have a great, funny and foulmouthed and in many ways candid, rapport. But the more we see of this perceptively drawn relationship, the clearer it becomes that Sam doesn’t quite consider Alex an equal. In the office, she questions Alex’s judgment. Outside of it, Sam fails to keep her friend’s secrets, with real consequences. It’s a delicate problem for our protagonist to navigate. If Sam were simply toxic, Alex would simply need to realize it and free herself. Instead, Sam is a pragmatic businesswoman with trust issues rooted in her marriage. Which means it may be worth the hard work it would take to save the friendship as well as the professional relationship.
No one working in TV is better than Horgan at writing—or playing—selfish and self-sabotaging characters that, like members of our own families, we love all the more for how much they frustrate us. She’s been doing it since her first series, Pulling, a portrait of faintly desperate single women at that age (30ish) when everyone else seems to be marrying, starting families, and getting serious about their careers. Ruarí can be infuriating; he rots in bed watching manosphere videos and treats his mother like a servant. Yet, thanks in large part to Murphy’s sensitive performance, there’s tenderness in him from the beginning. He’s earnestly confused about how to be a man in the world. As well he should be.
Horgan is not the kind of TV creator who makes half-hour dramas with the occasional awkward beat and calls them comedies, though. Her shows, even the one about murdering an abusive husband, will always make you laugh out loud, and Youthis no exception. Sometimes it’s pure physical humor; one episode makes an unexpected, perimenopausal period into a running joke (“Apropos of nothing, she’s back”). Sometimes it’s the pleasure of witty banter or a ridiculous sentence that makes perfect sense in context: “If I send you my dad’s number, can you help him turn his IRA podcast off?” (I do wish Horgan had made a bit more space to flesh out Alex’s parents, played by Bríd Brennan and David Hargreaves.) Alex and Sam’s work yields a menagerie of delightfully ghoulish literary-world types, from a snakey rival agent who greets them as “sluts” and “lesbians” (Freddie Fox) to a creepy author (Douglas Hodge) who self-published a terrible yet depressingly popular romantasy novel after Alex dropped him as a client (title: The Goblin Seed).
In interviews, Horgan has said she sees Youthas a complement to Pullingand Catastrophe, the mid-2010s Prime Video comedy in which her character and a guy who was supposed to be an anonymous hookup (Rob Delaney) decide to build a family around a surprise pregnancy: “There’s a small element of autobiography to it.” The tones are certainly similar, though the range of emotions has broadened with proximity to life’s hard deadlines (fertility, mortality). “I just don’t know if there’s anything left in my life that I like anymore,” Alex admits. She and Sam and Patrick could all be characters from the previous two shows, 10 or 20 years on, with more residual mess than they’d expected to be cleaning up by middle age. Youthsuggests that, in fact, disorder springs eternal; if it isn’t a canceled wedding, it’s an elderly parent losing toes to diabetes. Every new stage of life is another form of youth. How exciting. And terrifying. And funny.
