Sharon Horgan is back with a new HBO comedy, and this time she is putting a woman in her 50s at the centre of it. Youth opens with a voiceover about the sixth decade of life, and Horgan is not only behind the series but starring in it as Alex, a newly divorced literary agent whose life is starting to buckle.
The reason the project is drawing attention now is simple: it is already in production, with Horgan speaking from the set in London. While an assistant set up a laptop so she could watch a scene being filmed nearby, she described Youth as the kind of story she felt compelled to write once she got deeper into her 50s. She is 56 now, and said she wanted to write about this particular time in a woman’s life because, as she put it, she finally felt she had something to say.
That gives the series a sharper edge than a standard midlife comedy. Horgan has created, written, showrun and executive-produced Youth, and she says the work comes from the load women carry at this stage of life. Alex jokes that she is “a smug bitch, having it all: the partner, the job, the balance”, but the show quickly strips that away. Her teenage son, Ruairí, is struggling emotionally. Her actor ex-husband is about to leave the country with his younger girlfriend. Her parents need care. And the job she wants to dominate is chaotic enough already.
Horgan has spent much of her career mining the same emotional territory, through Pulling, Catastrophe, Motherland, Amandaland and two seasons of Bad Sisters. Youth extends that run, but the setting gives it a different shape. The series unfolds at Old Sessions House in Clerkenwell Green in London, in a building that once housed a magistrates’ court where Charles Dickens placed Oliver Twist. That backdrop suits a story about reinvention, but the central conflict is less literary than immediate: Alex thinks she should be enjoying freedom, and instead she is being pulled apart by family, memory and work at once.
Horgan said the show is about a woman trying to find love again, but that is only part of it. She also said it is about “the load” and about “a point when time begins to move at a different rate” before everything arrives at once to wreck the plan. The series has not been given a premiere date, which leaves the next step straightforward but unanswered for now: HBO still has to decide when this story of a woman in the sixth decade of life will reach viewers.
