Now that Irish multi-hyphenate (writer-actor-comedian) Sharon Horgan’s most recent shows have aired on big American streamers like Apple TV and HBO Max, is it time to concede that she has transcended her origins on BBC Three and Channel 4 and “gone Hollywood”? You can hardly blame her. Horgan – now 56 – is back with a new show, Youth, a side-eyed look at ageing and finally getting your flowers later in life.
Alex (Sharon Horgan) is a divorced literary agent in her mid-fifties. With her teenage son Ruari (Aran Murphy) about to leave for university, she feels life restarting. “Do you think you can still be sexy when you’re 60?” she asks the universe, pinching her belly fat. A roster of men line up to test that thesis. There’s Michael (Tim McInerney), perfect except that he’s almost 70; Lars (Steve Windolf), a suave German from the publishing industry; and, above all, Patrick (Rupert Friend), a “drunk, institutionally single, 47-year-old manchild”, who also happens to be exceedingly charming. But when Ruari bails out of university, and with work pressures mounting, Alex’s attempt to jump back into the dating pool finds her floundering in the deep end.
Youth, then, is an exploration of life at the tail-end of middle age. Alex is single but still desirable, professionally successful yet struggling to keep up. She is torn between the longing for her son to find his own independence (and offer her some freedom) and the fear of an empty nest. The menopause looms over everything she does. These are themes that many viewers will have dealt with and likely found underrepresented in a TV culture that seems to believe the stages of life are: young and beautiful, parents to young kids, and dying with dementia. It’s a dramatic convention that skips a raft of the human experience, and Youth is well placed to redress that.
At this point, it’s fair to say that Horgan is TV royalty. She’s on a run that started back with Pulling in 2006 and has seen her create a quartet of fine shows: Divorce, Motherland, Catastrophe and Bad Sisters (she also starred in the latter two). If there’s a theme running through her work, it’s messiness. Life is rarely simple and relationships are often unstable. Youth is in some ways the apotheosis of this manifesto. Alex runs from debacle to debacle, constantly fixing her hair while unable to fix her life. She has a grubby ex-husband, Lorcan (Owen McDonnell), and a conflicted relationship with her boss and best friend, Sam (Sharlene Whyte). Everything exists on a spectrum of complication. And while that creates a lot of human comedy, it does sometimes overwhelm the emotional core of proceedings.
The central relationship in Youth is really between Alex and Ruari. It is also the most political, touching (as every show seems to these days) on the crisis in masculinity. “I hate being a man,” Ruari laments. “You have to be strong but not too strong.” The fact that it doesn’t wholly work is part of why Youth, also, doesn’t wholly work. The show presents Ruari as a boy struggling to adjust to manhood, who makes a bad decision that turns him into a pariah. Yet the narrative can’t quite decide whether it wants to show Ruari being drawn into the Andrew Tate manosphere or make him a victim of circumstance. It eschews the harder task of rehabilitating his character by making him gentle and self-aware. But, in doing so, Youth loses its bite. And the show generally, whether it’s talking about sex and adultery or health and mortality, is lacking genuine teeth. It’s messy, sure, but nothing is broken.
Of course, Horgan remains charming company – though it’s hard not to feel like dating in your mid-fifties is probably easier if you look like her – and she’s assembled a great cast. She has an easy chemistry with Friend, who plays Patrick as a surprisingly likeable Scottish rogue. Cameos from the likes of Anne Reid, Harriet Walter and Freddie Fox add depth to the universe (even if some of the characters feel a little cartoonish, a note that contrasts with the realism of Horgan’s own acting). The writing is witty (“don’t worry about the internet giving him anxiety,” Alex reassures Ruari’s dad, “my genetics are taking care of that”) and often knowing (“the world’s not ending,” Patrick informs her, “we have time”). But the jokes are a little sparse, and the parody of the publishing industry feels a touch passé.
With eight 30-minute episodes and a breezy pace throughout, many viewers will demolish Youth in a single sitting. But with a CV like Horgan’s, it is hard not to be compared against your previous work. Youth is missing the pathos of Catastrophe or the nastiness of Motherland. It feels a bit like a big American streaming service has sanded down the edges of her writing, leaving it as warm and human as ever but missing that real spark.
