Youth

Our Review

Sharon Horgan does for 50 what she did for 40 — makes it funny, messy, and true. In this HBO comedy she plays Alex, a London literary agent, divorced, dating again, and sandwiched between ailing parents and a grown son (played, delightfully, by Cillian Murphy’s actual son Aran). Horgan’s writing has always excelled at the comedy of women who refuse to behave — Catastrophe, Bad Sisters — and Youth narrows the lens to desire and dignity in middle age. The jokes land at the intersection of mortification and honesty: a first date that goes catastrophically, parents who need more than she has, a publishing industry that’s failing in parallel with everything else in her life. It’s a half-hour with actual pathos underneath, the kind that makes you laugh and then quietly breaks your heart two beats later. If it has a flaw, it’s that the supporting cast occasionally sketches where Bad Sisters drew in full. But Horgan remains one of the two or three best comic writers working in television, and this is her most personal gear yet.