Sharon Horgan knew how the first episode of her new HBO comedy “Youth” would end long before she started writing it, she told TheWrap: a mother’s brief taste of freedom, cut short by her son’s unexplained return home.
The series premiered Sunday. Horgan plays Alex, a newly 50-year-old divorced literary agent in London who learns she has arthritis in her jaw and frets that she has a decade left as a sexual person. The episode closes moments after Alex sleeps with her on-again, off-again partner Patrick (Rupert Friend). Her 18-year-old son, Ruari (Aran Murphy), returns from college without explanation and crawls into her bed as Radiohead’s “Everything in Its Right Place” plays.
“It was always going to end like that,” Horgan said. She wrote the Radiohead cue into the script a year and a half ago without any guarantee the production would secure the song. She calls the moment the show’s premise: Alex must worry about her son again, and her freedom is gone. Horgan chose comedy for the beat because it lands harder there than it would at the end of a drama.
She built the series around the idea of a window to find a partner before old age arrives, and she made Alex a literary agent so slow-moving publishing could contrast with fast, bite-sized social media content. Instagram and Google recur throughout the season. Ruari absorbs toxic online messages about how to be a young man, and Alex receives a steady stream about how to look in her 50s. Horgan describes the show as a coming-of-age story for both.
Critics have responded warmly. The series debuted with a 100 percent approval rating among reviewers, and Hollywood Reporter critic Angie Han noted that HBO did not send critics the finale of the eight-episode season. Not every reviewer found fresh ground. One called the premise broadly familiar while crediting the writing’s specific insights.
The show follows “Pulling,” “Catastrophe” and “Divorce,” Horgan’s earlier comedies about love, family and aging, and one critic described it as a spiritual sequel to the first two. Sharlene Whyte co-stars as Alex’s friend and boss. “Youth” airs Sundays on HBO and HBO Max.
