Youth is full of women running out of time. Alex (Sharon Horgan) is a divorced, 50-year-old literary agent with a college-age son. At this moment in her life, she’s either at the end of her rope or at the start of a new era—it’s often hard for her to tell which. Sometimes, the ticking clock manifests in ordinary ways. At a book fair in Germany, Alex has a distracted meeting with an editor who reminds her that she’s “a bit stretched for time.” Later, as Alex regales a potential client—a psychology advice columnist—with the trials and tribulations of her love life, the client warningly interjects, “I only have an hour.”
More often, Alex’s time crunch has an apocalyptic bent. When Patrick (Rupert Friend), an old flame who’s recently reappeared in her life, asks if it’s the right time for her to start a relationship, she replies indignantly, “It is the right time, it has to be the right time, because another time’s gonna be too late.” Later, when Alex briefly explores a relationship with Michael, a much older man, the problem of time becomes fatally strange. Describing his mother’s passing, he tells Alex with a look of profundity, “Her last words to me really stuck: ‘I’ll be dead tomorrow, and so will you.’” Alex recoils, but he explains, “Yeah, she meant live every day like it’s your last.” Alex, a mother herself, is skeptical about Michael’s extraction of such a neat moral from such a bizarre final utterance. “Did she?”
Youth, which airs on HBO, is one of several extraordinary series Horgan has created on the subject of motherhood. Time is each show’s most deranged and deranging element. In Catastrophe (2015–2019), time moves too fast. In each of its four seasons, Sharon (also played by Horgan) is either pregnant or the mother of a small child. The time jump from season one to two takes her from a newlywed in the process of delivering her first child to a soon-to-be mother of two. Motherland (2016–2022), which Horgan co-created but does not star in, focuses on the harried, endless grind that characterizes being the parent of school-age kids. From managing schedules to managing feelings, the time moves impossibly fast, but it also drags. When Julia (Anna Maxwell Martin) loses the childcare she has relied on up to now (her own mother, who flatly quits), an avalanche of new duties falls on her, impeding the orderly forward motion of her life.
At the center of Youth is the period of parental life that critic Nina Renata Aron recently named “middle motherhood.” The world of culture, Aron argues, is filled with compelling, dramatic narratives of new motherhood, which she describes as “a time to swoon, and also to rage and cry.” That world is not similarly filled with narratives of mothers whose children have, to some degree or another, grown up, whose motherhood is no longer new, raw, exciting, rupturing. These motherhood narratives, if and when they’re even recognized as motherhood narratives, are few and far between. And yet, their fast-approaching but glacially unfolding temporality makes them rich stories to tell. “I can actually feel myself occupying a new developmental phase,” Aron writes of her own middle motherhood, “taking a different place in the generational order.” Stories of new motherhood are about being caught up in the rush of a new biological current; middle motherhood stories are about finding a new place in history.
Youth is a story about this transitional state, and it’s told by a writer and performer very much aware of the way such stories remain often unseen, unheard, untold. With her characteristic fizzing wit, blinkered charm, and soulful realism, Horgan has opened up a new stage of her own career. When I think back to Michael’s recounting of his mother’s last words, what strikes me is not so much that Michael extracts a trite maxim from her enigmatic phrase; it’s that Alex understands immediately that that’s not really what she said. This woman, at the end—not the beginning or even the middle—of life, of motherhood, of womanhood, said something way weirder than carpe diem. You just have to listen.
It is something of a reductive synopsis to say that Youth is just a show about motherhood. Indeed, the first episode presents us with a woman who is ready and eager to send her son off to college and explore the world as someone who is no longer defined by being a parent, no longer constrained by the demands of raising her son. Her ex-husband, a middling actor, has lived his life heedlessly, leaving all the child-rearing to Alex as he remarries a younger woman and prepares to leave the country for a sci-fi pilot shoot. As her son, Ruarí (Aran Murphy), gets in the car to drive off to school, Alex runs desperately after it only to burst out laughing. She sets to transforming his old room into a yoga studio, alternately collapsing into sobs and rising up with giddy glee. Later that week, she brings a man home for a successful fling, only to find Ruarí—surly, upset, uncommunicative—has reclaimed his bed. Alex would love her story to have stopped being about motherhood any longer; Youth is about the uncanny disappointment of finding out that hasn’t happened.
So, Youth is not a narrative of the disappearance or recession of motherhood from Alex’s identity so much as it’s a narrative of its eccentric reassertion. Rather than a series about the liberation from motherhood or a wish fulfillment tale of Alex getting her groove back in her perimenopause era, the show thinks about the different, weird ways motherhood adapts itself to this new stage of life.
The most direct way is through the manosphere-curious Ruarí. When we meet him, he’s seemingly embarked upon a self-destructive spiral. He stages a cheeky, disruptive protest at his high school graduation ceremony; he squeezes burrata all over himself and his family at a celebration dinner; and then there are the circumstances of his sudden return from uni. While it takes a few episodes for us to learn the whole story, it’s immediately clear that Ruarí has conducted himself poorly, and that this has made him unwelcome on campus. Back at home, he retreats into old clips of Mitch Hedberg’s stand-up and videos about semen retention. Alex is both terrified by her son’s sudden sullen mania and ill-equipped to get him to divulge what’s wrong. For much of the season, Ruarí is a mute stranger, haunting her halls. For a show as regularly funny as this one, it’s an upsetting portrait of a seemingly common contemporary phenomenon: a son lost to the online void, now become a man you can’t seem to fully trust.
So, as Alex navigates the physical changes of her age—her ailments range from spontaneous lockjaw to surprise menstruation—she’s also dealing with the emotional ravages of being both thrust back into active motherly service and rejected for that job. The seeming stable solution to these problems is Patrick, her longtime, on-again-off-again, “institutionally single” ex-lover. Alex and Patrick have an easy chemistry—Horgan has always known how to write great, crackling, funny flirtation—but it’s underlaid with a barely unspoken tension. The problem of their relationship is both that Ruarí still takes up too much of Alex’s life and that Alex can’t, and won’t, ever be able to give Patrick children of his own. It’s a banal kind of star-crossed love. What would it mean to accept someone for who they are when they are both too much and not enough of a mother?
“I live with the dim awareness that a tragedy is unfolding,” writes Nina Renata Aron. “The tragedy of mortality, of time passing, of exiting the phase of life where it’s possible to make new life.” Aron acknowledges the sexism of this tragic framing, the idea that women’s aging itself is a kind of death. Youth is nonetheless preoccupied with the sticky feeling of loss that comes with Alex’s feelings of liberation. The challenge of assembling a new life mostly out of available, remaining parts. The judgment that comes with that assertion of continued existence.
Midway through the season, on a holiday in Spain, Alex becomes kind of obsessed with a woman her age or a bit older who seems to breeze through the world with confidence, wisdom, and panache. She dines alone with gusto, her voluminous hair proudly showing its gray. On one occasion, Alex catches her eye, only to start coughing on smoke from her own cigarette. Later, Alex spies her again and tries to express what an inspiration she is, how her small example of living out loud has given Alex strength and courage. “I wanted to tell you, you look great,” she says. “So cool and content and comfortable in your skin, just you by yourself.” But the woman doesn’t speak English. Instead of picking up on Alex’s gratitude, she reads only anxiety and discomfort. The woman calls for help. “I think there’s something wrong with her,” she says, in Spanish.
Youth is a sexy, dazzling, often devastating comedy of middle motherhood. It’s a show with no neat maxims and plenty of weird, wise things to say about being alive, and a woman, and 50 all at once.