‘Youth’ Review: Sharon Horgan’s HBO Comedy Is a Fun, Frisky, Bracingly Honest Portrait of Midlife

Seen one way, the title of HBO’s new Youth is clearly ironic. Its protagonist, Alex (creator Sharon Horgan), is not some bright-eyed 20something making her way in the big city, but a 50something divorcée; her driving concern is not what to do with a future that stretches endlessly before her, but how to make the most of one she fears is rapidly closing shut.

Nevertheless, there’s something of the coming-of-age narrative in Alex’s uncertain flailing through this phase of her life — in her struggles to figure out how to be, what she wants, what she should want. Laced with Horgan’s signature combination of unsparing honesty and sparkling wit, Youth is a fleet and frisky reminder that growing into yourself is a lifelong endeavor.

Youth

The Bottom Line An amusing reminder that you're never too old to grow up.

Airdate: 10 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 20 (HBO)
Cast: Sharon Horgan, Aran Murphy, Rupert Friend, Sharlene Whyte, Robbie Gee
Creator: Sharon Horgan

By all outward appearances, Alex would seem to have it pretty together. Sure, our first glimpse of her is as she’s dropping her phone on her face while scrolling TikTok videos about bird haircuts and “marry me” salmon recipes on her couch. But that couch is situated in a comfortable, tastefully decorated London flat, paid for by a cushy literary agent job she both cares about and is mostly good at. (It helps that her boss, Sharlene Whyte’s Sam, happens to be her best friend.) She shares it with her son, Ruari (Aran Murphy), a sweet-faced teenager about to head to university. By nearly any measure, she’s done just fine for herself.

Still, Alex is haunted by the sense that she’s rapidly running out of time — one not helped by social media posts intoning the importance of one’s “sixth decade,” or by the much younger women hanging off the arms of all the men her age, or by the arthritis she discovers in her jaw after dislocating it during a work meeting. “No more blowjobs for you,” her doctor jokes, but to Alex it’s no laughing matter. It’s yet another reminder that she’s got “like, 10 years left as a sexual person, tops,” before she reaches her dull and loveless twilight years.

Horgan, whose Catastrophe charted the ups and downs of a relationship with painful, hilarious honesty, applies the same frankness to the minor indignities of midlife. Some of them are physical: I can’t think of many other shows that have acknowledged postmenopausal spotting at all, much less made it into a comic plot point during a frantic bathroom hookup, or that might be able to turn the removal of a grody estrogen patch into an unexpectedly intimate gesture by a lover.

But Alex’s bigger challenges are emotional. This should be her time to finally live her life to the fullest, with her son finally out of the house, her parents healthy enough to be mostly independent, and Alex herself still hot enough to snag a man. Except that Ruari quits university just days into the term to move back home without explanation. And her mom’s diabetes and her dad’s “Joe-Biden-second-term-level” Alzheimer’s just keep getting worse. And Alex’s realistic sexual prospects are uninspiring: This date’s so old his very interest feels like an insult, that one’s just a goofy long-distance playmate.

Horgan isn’t one to let Alex off the hook for her own flaws, and Youth often feels both funnier and realer for recognizing how self-involved Alex can be. But its shrewdest, most quietly poignant insight is that being old enough to know better does not, in fact, always mean you act better.

Alex remembering exactly how disappointingly things ended with Patrick, an old situationship, doesn’t keep her from falling back into his orbit (and given how fun and fizzy the chemistry is between Horgan and Rupert Friend, it’s hard to blame her). Alex declaring she’s done with games doesn’t preclude her from playing some of her own, fast-tracking a relationship with one man she dislikes just to have someone to lean on, or dancing around the question of commitment with another rather than just stating what she really wants.

Not that actual youthful naïveté is any easier to navigate, either. Where his mother is terrified of falling into the stereotype of a desperate, sexless old lady, Ruari is petrified by the societal messaging — conveyed much of the time through manosphere-adjacent podcasts — that demands young men be strong but not too “alpha,” sexually confident but never creepy, all without allowing themselves to ever come off as weak or needy.

While I found his arc toward self-actualization to be overly rushed, crammed as it is into the margins of the seven (out of eight) half-hour episodes sent to critics, it’s effective as both a parallel to Alex’s and as a safeguard against any temptation to sentimentalize the time in your life when your knees still worked properly.

The characters around Alex and Ruari are less finely shaded, some for the better and some for the worse. On one hand, while Youth’s send-up of the publishing industry might not be anything radically fresh, it’s still a good time to laugh at caricatures like Malcolm (Douglas Hodge), a sleazy romantasy author described by Alex as a “middle-back toucher” in a deliciously precise bit of phrasing; or Grayson (Freddie Fox), a ruthless rival who barely bothers to disguise his disdain for Alex and Sam, or his eagerness to climb the corporate ladder once an older colleague passes.

On the flip side, it’s harder to get a handle on Sam, who gets more screen time and more depth but not much more consistency. Whyte is a hoot, and her thick-as-thieves chemistry with Horgan a delight. But the character’s hot-and-cold personality seems more a narrative convenience than a thoughtfully applied trait, and her sexually fiery, toxically jealous marriage to bar owner Frank (Robbie Gee) more a cartoonish foil to Alex’s tumultuous singledom than a relationship we can understand, much less invest in.

Critics weren’t sent the finale of the eight-part season, so I couldn’t tell you even if I wanted to whether Alex’s journey ends in happily ever after or in heartbreak, contentment with her station in life or enduring dread about the looming specter of old age. What I can tell you is that the penultimate episode ends on a note that suggests Alex still has plenty of room to learn, to evolve, to readjust her hopes or expectations. Whether Horgan and HBO decide to let us in on the next chapter of her life or not, the first season of Youth already serves a sharp, candid, heartfelt reminder that life’s not actually over until it’s over — no matter what TikTok doomsayers or societal beauty standards might try to tell you.