There’s nothing particularly “youthful” about turning 50—at least not according to Sharon Horgan’s new HBO series Youth. But that’s precisely the point.
Created, written and executive produced by Horgan, who also stars as Alex, Youth is a funny, messy and unexpectedly poignant look at a woman caught between generations, confronting aging parents, a child growing up, a demanding career and the increasingly complicated business of figuring out what she wants from love and life.
The eight-episode series premieres Sept. 20 on HBO and HBO Max, with the cast and Horgan discussing the show a few days earlier at a press conference.
For Horgan, the idea for Youth came from a very personal place. “I just woke up one morning and I just had this overriding feeling that I was gonna die alone,” she said. “And then I thought, oh maybe there’s something in that.”
She began writing the series before Bad Sisters, drawing on changes happening in her own life. Her children were getting ready to leave home, her parents were getting older, and she found herself thinking about what it meant to be a woman in her 50s still looking for love.
“I wanted to write about that, someone in her 50s out there looking for love and everything just being really, really difficult, just life conspiring against her,” Horgan said.
The result is a series that combines the emotional honesty of aging with Horgan’s trademark ability to find the absurdity in uncomfortable situations. After moving from the half-hour comedy world of Catastrophe and Pulling into the darker territory of Bad Sisters, Horgan wanted to return to comedy—but with considerably more room to play.
“I knew I wanted to go back to that, the half hour. I wanted it to be funny,” she explained. “But with this, it was like those shows on steroids because you have HBO behind you, allowing you to shoot in Frankfurt. It just felt like we could go further and make it bigger.”
Finding that balance between humor and emotional reality, she said, happens throughout the entire filmmaking process. “The tone thing is all about, it’s in the writing, but it’s also in the directing and it’s in the casting of it and the choices you make in the edit after that. You’re kind of figuring out tone all the way.”
At the center of that story is Alex, a successful woman who works in the literary world but finds herself questioning how she is perceived—and whether she is truly seen or desired—as she moves through middle age.
Horgan deliberately placed Alex in publishing because it offered a world she hadn’t seen explored much on television. She initially considered making her an agent, but eventually settled on the literary business because it was “glamour adjacent” thanks to its connections to film, television and intellectual property.
The more she researched it, the more she discovered a perfect comic setting.
“They’re all nerds, but like they really party hard,” Horgan said. “And I just saw all the good characters that would come out of it, like the authors and the egos.”
Alex’s professional world also provides the backdrop for her friendship with Sam, played by Sharlene Whyte. Their relationship is one of the show’s most compelling elements: They are close friends, but Sam is also Alex’s boss, creating an ever-shifting dynamic between personal loyalty and workplace hierarchy.
Whyte said she spoke to people who actually have friendships with their bosses to understand how they navigate those boundaries.
“I think it’s real. It happens,” she said. “We just decide that at work, these are our boundaries and then we can always go and get pissed later. But for now, when we’re in the office, let’s just focus on the work.”
Whyte also praised the specificity of Horgan’s writing, particularly when it comes to female friendship.
“I think Sharon’s writing is just so nuanced and just perfection that it just jumps out of you,” she said. “The reality of the relationships is so authentic that you have no choice but to play it for real.”
The show also takes a refreshingly frank approach to female desire. Horgan said one of the biggest misconceptions about women is that desire somehow disappears with age.
“That it’s not, you know, rampant and necessary,” she said. “Especially as you get older, you’re kind of, I don’t know. I think that there’s a, they think like it switches off in some way.”
Instead, Youth puts women’s sexuality front and center—including the awkward, funny and occasionally disastrous reality of sex later in life.
Asked whether she actually enjoys filming sex scenes, Horgan didn’t hesitate.
“Absolutely not. They’re awful, aren’t they? They’re terrible,” she said, adding that the show deliberately avoids presenting sex as polished fantasy. “I think what I tried to do in the show was show the reality of it and that it can be messy.”
She wanted to portray a woman in her 50s “absolutely looking for love and a relationship, in and out of messy situations.”
And, naturally, she wanted it to be funny.
“I would be mortified if it was just an out and out sexy scene,” Horgan said. “It has to be a bit, go a bit wrong or just feel real, smelly, you know, awkward sex.”
That honesty extends to Alex’s relationship with Patrick, played by Rupert Friend. At 47, Patrick appears far less concerned about the passage of time than Alex, a gendered difference that becomes an important part of their relationship.
Friend described Patrick as someone who has simply never considered that time should be part of the equation.
“There is a lot of men who have never even considered that time should be in the equation,” Friend said. “It’s just when I feel like it.”
Patrick could easily have become an obnoxious Peter Pan figure, but Friend said the writing makes the distinction between someone who is selfish and someone who simply finds himself at the center of his own narrative.
Horgan agreed that Friend’s performance was crucial to making the character work.
“He’s also, you’re extremely charmed by him because that’s how Rupert played him,” she said. “Who he was on the page and who he became, I mean the same with all of these guys.”
For Alex, however, the relationship raises deeper questions about whether she believes she deserves to be loved and desired.
“To begin with is, she doesn’t believe that she’s worthy of that love or would be necessarily wanted or desired by him,” Horgan said.
Without giving away the series’ later developments, Horgan revealed that the relationship takes a darker turn. What begins as “a really hopeful romance” eventually becomes “something a lot sadder.”
That mixture of comedy and melancholy is very much intentional. Horgan doesn’t write characters who remain static simply because they happen to inhabit a comedy.
“I like the idea that characters can change their point of view over the course of a season and surprise you,” she said.
That is particularly true of Alex, whose attitude toward aging and time evolves as the story unfolds.
The title Youth itself reflects that tension. Horgan explained that it comes from the saying “50 is the youth of old age,” while also referring to Ruari, the 18-year-old played by Aran Murphy.
Ruari provides the show’s other generational perspective. Rather than presenting him as a stereotypical brooding teenager, Horgan and Murphy explore the strange ways an 18-year-old can absorb ideas from social media and the internet without necessarily understanding what they mean.
Murphy actually mined his friends’ phones for material, asking them to send him “the worst shit that you’ve seen on your phone.” Some of that material—or versions of it—eventually found its way into the series.
Horgan joked that the production had to recreate some of the more bizarre social-media clips because tracking down the original creators proved nearly impossible.
Murphy was particularly drawn to the fact that Ruari isn’t simply another moody teenage character.
“I was just really intrigued by an interesting 18-year-old who is going through shit, but isn’t just dealing with it in the typical ways that you see on screen,” he said.
Horgan also deliberately made Ruari relatively quiet, a challenge she worried might not translate from the page.
“I did worry the first few drafts, seeing it on the page, I was like, are people going to get this character?” she said. “And then Aran walked into our lives and he’s so good at doing very little and just, you know, you read his inner world.”
Murphy agreed that the character’s minimal dialogue felt authentic. “It’s very true to 18-year-old boys,” he said. “There’s not a lot of talking until there is.”
While the series deals with aging, parenting and desire, Horgan is also interested in the peculiar position occupied by women who are simultaneously caring for children and aging parents while dealing with changes in their own bodies.
“It is a really rich period of time to write about, because it’s so hard,” she said. “You think you just get to switch off for a bit. Oh no. No, there’s no, no switching off.”
And, as Horgan sees it, that makes middle age particularly fertile territory for comedy.
“Very ripe for comedy as well as anything else.”
The show’s supporting cast brings its own comic and emotional dimensions. Whyte enjoyed seeing Sam take charge professionally—and getting the chance to live out a few fantasies along the way.
“What I enjoyed seeing was myself with a proper job,” she said. “Being a boss and telling people what to do.”
Then there was the yacht.
“I also enjoyed seeing myself on a yacht. That was fun,” Whyte added. “So a lot of things were like, bringing my childhood dreams to life.”
Robbie Gee, who plays Frank, pointed to his on-screen chemistry with Whyte as one of his favorite parts of seeing the finished series, while Friend and Murphy recalled jumping off the yacht as one of their more memorable experiences.
The series even finds room for a memorable Damian Lewis cameo. Horgan said she met Lewis at Wimbledon and simply asked him if he would read the script.
“He came in, and what, it was hilarious,” she said. Whyte agreed, calling the experience “so funny.”
Horgan laughed that Lewis “just went for it with such gusto.”
There is also Goblin Seed, the fictional book-within-the-show that gives the series another running joke. Horgan and the writers created sample pages for the imaginary novel, which is apparently every bit as filthy as its title suggests.
Horgan said the production eventually discovered that the fictional book’s “romantasy” genre is, in fact, very real—and very lucrative.
“It was only after we came up with this sort of Malcolm Hammond character and the ‘Goblin Seed’ of it all, that I was like, oh my God, this is an actual thing and it’s very popular and it makes a lot of money,” she said.
Perhaps the most important thing about Youth, though, is that it refuses to treat getting older as a story about becoming invisible.
For Horgan, telling stories about mature women isn’t merely a creative choice; it’s something she personally wants to see.
“It just feels like a huge privilege,” she said. “And also like needed and necessary because I need those stories. When I watch TV and film, that’s what I want to see reflected back at me.”
She cited Pamela Adlon’s Better Things as an example of the kind of representation that can make viewers feel less alone.
The show’s opening montage makes that mission clear, setting up the enormous pressure placed on women to somehow make their 50s the “best decade ever.”
Horgan said it was one of the first things she wrote because she wanted the series to announce what it was about immediately.
And ultimately, that is the trick Youth pulls off: It is about aging without being an “aging” show. It is about motherhood without being only about motherhood, about sex without reducing its characters to their sex lives, and about work, friendship, family and romance without pretending any one of them exists in isolation.
Horgan said that after months in the editing room, the greatest satisfaction came from watching all those pieces finally come together.
“You just wonder, how on earth does it all come together?” she said. “There’s so many people with completely different jobs, and it’s the same when you’re in the post-production process.”
The final result, she said, comes from seeing “all those little bits of VFX and the music choices and the grading, and it’s seeing all the performances and everything just sort of work together.”
And then comes the moment every creator eventually faces: letting go.
“You don’t necessarily feel relief until you show it to an audience and then it’s sort of theirs,” Horgan said. “It’s not yours anymore.”
