Youth

Our Review

Sharon Horgan has made the entire career-long project of getting middle age on television as funny and as brutal as adolescence, and Youth is the peak of it. She plays Alex, a London literary agent, freshly 50, recently divorced, about to launch her son into the world and her parents into decline, with a perimenopausal brain that keeps changing the subject mid-sentence.

The first four episodes set a tone most sitcoms would kill for: unshowy, specific, and mean in the right places. Alex’s rule of thumb that she has ten years left as a sexual person is the kind of line that sounds like a joke for exactly one second before it stops being one. Aran Murphy, Cillian’s real son, is superb value as Ruarí, the leaving-home kid who gets one perfect scene of his own, and the publishing-office satire, agents, auctions, an author meltdown, is drawn with an insider’s contempt.

Where other shows about women in their fifties settle for empowerment, Youth keeps the embarrassment and the appetite. Horgan films desire and its humiliations with the same flat honesty she brought to Catastrophe, and the weekly release, two episodes a week to start, gives the best episodes room to land. New episodes air Sundays through November 8 on HBO and HBO Max.

Our score: 8/10. The best comedy on television right now, and Horgan is only warming up.