October is spooky season, and sometimes it feels like there is nothing spookier than aging. Especially if you’re a woman.
I’m not sure, however, if Sharon Horgan’s Youth, currently streaming on HBO, is meant to be quite as horrifying.
The cheeky title is a reference to the 50s being the “youth of middle age,” not that this is any comfort to Horgan’s heroine, 50-year-old literary agent Alex.
In the very first episode, a man Alex finds physically repulsive (a very game Tim McInnerny, I hope they cut him a big check) tries to go down on her, for God’s sake. What is this beautiful woman doing? What am I doing watching this?
The following episodes are a bit more forgiving, and funnier too, but I’m still not sure if Alex’s lack of regard for herself is humorous or tragic.
“The busy mom who must take care of everything” trope is endearing, but there is a fine line between self-deprecation and self-abasement, and Youth doesn’t so much as straddle it as plop on top of it and cheerfully bleed everywhere.
(Yes, there is an obligatory bleeding-during-sex sequence. As much as I appreciate the demystification of the process by which the female body transitions from child-bearing to menopausal, I still can’t decide if this sequence was comedy or mockery.)
“Poor old mom! How does she do it all! While still occasionally getting laid!” I guess it’s progress that we have decided that moms do occasionally get laid, but I feel like there are a number of shows, American shows in particular, that do it better. Or maybe I’m just too American for the show? The Guardian’s Rhik Samadder loves it, and his takeaways are much more positive than mine so far.
Youth really shines when it skewers the publishing industry and the various monsters that work there. An early nemesis of Alex is her former client, a self-important, self-published romantasy writer whose Goblin Seed, a book about having sex with goblins, becomes a smash hit on TikTok.
Alex knows the book is trash, but sales numbers are sales numbers. Forced to try and win the fledgling Goblin Seed franchise back, Alex must smile along when such lines as, “The goblin seed was gold, and soon the sheets were glittering,” are being read out loud. (There is a great joke here if you remember Twilight’s glittering vampires.)
Alex’s relationship to her son, played by Cillian Murphy’s own son, Aran Murphy, is also wonderfully portrayed. Murphy the Younger is a terrific actor, and as much as Sharon Horgan captivates on screen (even when she’s bleeding while trying to have sex in a bathroom at a party – no, I have yet to get over that, please give me time), he goes toe to toe with her in every scene they share.
While Alex is grappling with middle age, her son Ruarí is grappling with trying to be a young man in a culture where nothing a young man seems to be enough, and someone always seems to be filming or otherwise documenting your every wrong move. Ruarí’s dad, a wanker of an actor, is nowhere to be seen, for the most part.
The ease with which such fathers simply peel away, like soggy beer-bottle labels, is acutely painful even in a comedic setting. Alex shoulders that pain alongside her child with cheerful anger.
Then of course there’s Patrick, the man Alex really wants. Except she isn’t sure. And he also isn’t sure if he wants her. And has a much younger girlfriend, whom he does not treat like a girlfriend, except that she is very sure that they are dating.
And then there are Alex’s parents, who are slowly disintegrating before her eyes (and I do mean that literally – diabetes is a cruel bitch).
And then there is Alex’s boss, a perceptive and intelligent and powerful woman, but also someone Alex just might have outgrown as an agent.
All in all, it’s a wonderful London mosaic. It just feels a little unforgiving, in a way that, say, Horgan’s Catastrophe series, co-written with the wonderful Rob Delaney, did not. I like Alex a lot, and I also want her to unwind herself just a little. Maybe Delaney is a bit like the McCartney to her Lennon, softening her up as a writer when she needs to be softened up.
Either way, you know I’m going to keep on watching Sharon Horgan. She’s too beautiful, and too punishing, for me to ever be able to stop.