When Sharon Horgan walked into HBO to pitch her new series, Youth, she basically just said “sandwich generation” to them. Alex, the protagonist, is squished between a teenage son and two elderly parents. That’s the classic; the rest of it – the recent divorce, the dating hell, the busy, creative professional life full of pricks – is the icing on the sandwich (if you like). Horgan had been incubating 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 imagine it, but Youth is unlike any portrait you’ve ever seen in the gallery of (for brevity) menopausal women doing everything for everyone. There’s an urgency and valour to it that is very much drawn from Horgan’s own experience. “Everything just changed for me when I hit my 50s,” she says. “I was very bamboozled but I really had a hunger to make time count.” Not every situation is lifted directly from her own life, post-divorce – she’s also borrowing from her friends, she emphasises – but in general terms, the pressures, the worries, the outrages, the surprise and the delight are all so exquisitely drawn that even if it’s not Horgan herself, you hope someone, somewhere, is living this in real life.
I caught some of the shooting on a blowy day in April this year, in east London. Horgan and her co-star Rupert Friend were filming a crux scene. Friend plays Patrick, slightly younger than Horgan’s Alex, a little indecisive and shambling. “He’s not a Prince Charming character. I don’t think I’m the answer to all her ills,” he says, walking around a little park in between takes. Patrick wants to be with Alex, but he also thinks he wants children and there’s no way she’s going back there again, even if she could. “Sharon flips the proverbial biological clock on its head,” he says. “Men think it doesn’t apply to them because they ostensibly can make children all the way through. He’s never considered that it’s not his clock.”
Nothing passes between Alex and Patrick that’s overstated 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 slots into the finished show, it is, like every other scene, hilarious. I just do not 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, son of Cillian), who plays her son. “She’s so fizzing with energy.” Rupert Friend puts the emphasis on her agility: “Sharon’s just brilliant at writing. She’s able to do that dance between jokes and pathos in a way that I don’t know anyone else can do.” But it’s Horgan herself who, in an absolutely unboastful way, explains it best: “I’m allergic to sentimentality. I can’t abide anything that is sweet or schmaltzy. But I love genuine emotion. I love to make people feel things. As much as I love the laughs, I’d feel like I’d failed in some way if I wasn’t giving people pain.”
Murphy’s Ruari is a gift of a part, the most believably wrecking-ball 18-year-old son you’ve ever seen. Some things he wrecks on purpose (the last day of secondary school), some he wrecks by accident (his first week at university; his life), but the stakes are agonisingly high and the actions all plausible. Horgan has a lot to say about parenting kids this age, “even though I do not have a son, I have daughters” (Sadhbh, 22, and Amer, 18). “Gen Z have that awful feeling of being the last generation. They’re here at a point in time where they’re being told that everything’s fucked and AI’s going to take your jobs. I sometimes 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.”
Murphy is pretty reserved in real life (he speaks to me by Zoom from Italy, where he is on holiday), and the performance he turns in 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 be working with someone who 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 is 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 am 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.”
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 entirety of the interview,” Horgan says. “It’s hard to even mention her and not just wax lyrical about being aged 91 and still delivering work on that level and still caring so much.” Damian Lewis, within 30 seconds of arriving on screen, has distilled everything that is bad about publishing, celebrity, London, private members’ clubs and the world. “Everyone who came on to do their bits was influencing the show,” says Horgan. “I was writing it at the same time as making it, which was hell.” On the upside, it meant she was building relationships with her co-stars as she wrote, and incorporating those connections. Friend remembers deep conversations about what love actually is. “We talked about how heartbreaking it is to think about things in terms of if they fail. You know, if you meet and immediately think: ‘We could date, but if we date we might break up.’ Why do anything? Everything has a pessimistic possibility, and Alex is always considering it, but it’s no way to live.”
Pulling, Sharon Horgan’s 00s comedy, and Motherland, a decade ago, did the same thing – which is to say, if you’d asked: “Do you want to see a show about three single women? How about a school-gate show about neurotic middle-class people and Chardonnay and mini Babybels?” I’d have said: “No, not at all, sounds drab and also too close to home.” But then when they landed, they were all I wanted to watch. Youth is technically about the grinding sandwich years, when everything gets harder at once, and then your joints stop working. But it’s really about the sheer bliss of being alive when so much happens that is funny, stitched together by a fearsomely long to-do list.
Youth is on HBO Max from 21 September.
