When Sharon Horgan walked into HBO to pitch her new series, Youth, she basically just said “sandwich generation” to them. The main character, Alex, is stuck between a teenage son and two elderly parents. That’s the core setup; the rest—the recent divorce, the dating struggles, the busy creative career full of difficult people—is just extra on top (if you like). Horgan had been developing some of the characters for five years, but “honestly,” she tells me, “I said about three sentences, and a week later, they said yes. I’ve never had that experience before.”
You might think you can guess what it’s like, but Youth is unlike any portrayal you’ve seen of (to put it simply) middle-aged women juggling everything for everyone. It has an urgency and a sense of bravery that comes straight from Horgan’s own life. “Everything just changed for me when I hit my 50s,” she says. “I was really confused, but I had a strong drive to make my time count.” Not every situation is taken directly from her own life after her divorce—she’s also drawing on her friends’ experiences, she stresses—but overall, the pressures, worries, frustrations, surprises, and joys are so vividly captured that even if it’s not Horgan herself, you hope someone, somewhere, is living this in real life.
I caught some of the filming on a windy day in April this year, in east London. Horgan and her co-star Rupert Friend were shooting a key scene. Friend plays Patrick, a bit younger than Horgan’s Alex, somewhat indecisive and a bit of a mess. “He’s not a Prince Charming type. I don’t think I’m the answer to all her problems,” he says, walking around a small park between takes. Patrick wants to be with Alex, but he also thinks he wants kids, and there’s no way she’s going back to that, even if she could. “Sharon flips the usual idea of the biological clock on its head,” he says. “Men think it doesn’t apply to them because they can technically have children at any age. He’s never considered that it’s not his clock.”
Nothing between Alex and Patrick is overdone or even out of the ordinary, unless you count the fact that she gets hit by a cyclist as she walks away. But when it fits into the finished show, it’s, like every other scene, hilarious. I just don’t know how Horgan does what she does—which is what every one of her co-stars says about her. “She could have chemistry with a toaster,” says Aran Murphy (yes, Cillian’s son), who plays her son. “She’s so full of energy.” Rupert Friend highlights her skill: “Sharon is just brilliant at writing. She can balance jokes and deep emotion in a way that I don’t think anyone else can.” But it’s Horgan herself who, in a completely modest way, explains it best: “I’m allergic to sentimentality. I can’t stand anything that’s overly sweet or mushy. But I love genuine emotion. I love making people feel things. As much as I enjoy the laughs, I’d feel like I’d failed somehow if I wasn’t causing people some pain.”
Murphy’s Ruari is a fantastic role, the most believable destructive 18-year-old son you’ve ever seen. Some things he wrecks on purpose (the last day of secondary school), some by accident (his first week at university; his life), but the stakes are painfully high, and his actions all make sense. Horgan has a lot to say about parenting kids this age, “even though I don’t have a son, I have daughters” (Sadhbh, 22, and Amer, 18). “Gen Z has that awful feeling of being the last generation. They’re here at a time when they’re being told everything’s messed up and AI’s going to take your…”Our jobs. Sometimes I don’t know how to get out of bed in the morning, but they’re the ones who care the most and feel things the most.”
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‘Everything just changed when I hit my 50s’ … Sharon Horgan in Youth. Photograph: Colin Hutton/HBO
Murphy is pretty reserved in real life (he talks to me over Zoom from Italy, where he’s on holiday), and the performance he gives is one of the most thrillingly angry teenagers ever. “We really got lucky with Aran,” says Horgan. “There’s nothing about him that isn’t real. It made life so much easier to work with someone you literally can’t see acting.” She wanted Ruari to be “complex but not in a Dawson’s Creek way – a real boy who’s a little bit broken. All Alex wants is for him to normalise. But what’s normal?”
Besides, Ruari is probably saying the same about his mother, who he’s furious to discover still has gentleman callers. Patrick isn’t Alex’s only love interest; there’s also a sex scene with Tim McInnerny (Percy from Blackadder) that I’m still laughing at weeks later. None of the relationships, fleeting or otherwise, are at all a classic love story – Rupert Friend says ruefully, “I’m really the best of a bad bunch, which I am happy to take as the quote for my gravestone” – but the men are drawn so truthfully that you can’t help but love them all slightly (apart from the ex-husband, and even he’s not a bad guy, more of an emotional no-mark).
“When I found myself divorced,” Horgan says, “I genuinely thought I’d be alone for ever. I didn’t even know if I’d ever have sex again. There’s that extreme fear of being alone and being lonely. But at the same time, you think you have a freedom as well. You do suddenly think: ‘My kids have finished school, I’ve got some time to try and get this right.'” Alex’s love life is anything but over, yet this isn’t a “you go, girl” tale where every woman remains perpetually 35 through Botox and force of will. “You put yourself out there in a slightly different way,” says Horgan. “It’s still incredibly difficult, as a woman of that age, to find someone – the men who are left are either institutionally single or they’re divorced or they’re looking for someone much younger.”
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Wrecking-ball … Aran Murphy as Ruari in Youth. Photograph: Colin Hutton
The subplot of Alex’s ageing parents, meanwhile, is so honest it’s exhilarating. Dramedy tends to be respectfully saccharine about the elderly, and skate over the inconvenient bits: the stubbornness, the denial, the endless hospital appointments. But (I’m allowed to say this, being an orphan – Horgan’s mother is still alive, her dad died in 2023), those bits are almost the whole of the experience. “There is a huge amount of non-cooperation there,” she says, “and why shouldn’t there be? Ageing is hard. It’s harder when it begins to affect you mentally. When you’ve always been sharp as a tack, or when you begin to lose your mobility and you’ve always been a fucking go-getter. Losing those basic functions is brutal.”
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But from Alex’s point of view, “all the planning, all the phone calls, it becomes such a huge part of your life. As it goes on, you’ll see how it affects her sibling relationship as well. I wanted to explore that all so much but you run out of time and space. That could have been a whole show.”
Alex works in publishing, and there are some fabulous performances by her authors – Anne Reid, as a grande dame of airport fiction, turning her hand to erotica, alongside Harriet Walter as her ice-cold daughter.”I could talk to you about Anne Reid for the whole interview,” Horgan says. “It’s hard to even bring her up without going on about how amazing it is that she’s 91 and still delivering work at that level, still caring so much.” Damian Lewis, within 30 seconds of appearing on screen, has summed up everything wrong with publishing, celebrity, London, private members’ clubs, and the world. “Everyone who came in to do their parts was shaping the show,” says Horgan. “I was writing it while we were filming, which was a nightmare.” On the bright side, it meant she was building bonds with her co-stars as she wrote, and weaving those connections into the story. Friend remembers deep talks about what love really is. “We discussed how sad it is to think about things in terms of whether they might fail. You know, if you meet someone and immediately think: ‘We could date, but if we date, we might break up.’ Why bother doing anything? Everything has a pessimistic side, and Alex is always dwelling on that, but it’s no way to live.”
Pulling, Sharon Horgan’s comedy from the 2000s, and Motherland, from a decade ago, did the same thing—meaning, if you’d asked: “Do you want to watch a show about three single women? How about a school-gate comedy about anxious middle-class people, Chardonnay, and mini Babybels?” I’d have said: “No, not at all, sounds dull and too close to home.” But when they came out, they were all I wanted to watch. Youth is technically about the tough middle years, when everything gets harder at once, and then your joints start to ache. But really, it’s about the pure joy of being alive when so much funny stuff happens, held together by a dauntingly long to-do list.
Youth is on HBO Max from September 21.
Frequently Asked Questions
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1 What exactly is this show about
Its a comedy series about a woman navigating life and dating after her marriage ends The tone is painfully awkward and honest focusing on the messy uncomfortable and often funny reality of starting over
