WHEN DID LIFE stop being fun? That’s what Alex, the star of Sharon Horgan’s latest series, is wondering as she enters her 50s.

Alex – who’s played by Horgan – is trying to navigate a life that’s full to the brim with responsibilities. She’d love to spend her evenings quaffing wine or on a date, but her parents are elderly and need more attention; her son Ruairi (Aran Murphy, son of Cillian) is off to university but secretly struggling; she has a situationship (Pat, played by Rupert Friend) that she’s confused about; and she’s trying to navigate her career in a literary agency run by her best friend Sam (Sharlene Whyte).

Life is chaotic, and she’s conscious that she wants to make the most of her remaining decades.

But if you thought this would all combine to create a high-pressure, morbid series, let’s not forget this is Horgan at the helm. She’s already brought us life in your 20s in Pulling, and marriage and parenthood in Catastrophe, and proved herself to be a skilled and astute chronicler of life’s aches, pains and joys.

So can we trust that she’ll turn her lens to the next phase of life in a similarly accomplished and extremely enjoyable way? You betcha.

Fun and games

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Anyone who’s a fan of Horgan’s work knows that humour is a key part of her storytelling arsenal, and it’s deployed to magnificent effect here.

For example: The series opens with a montage of women in their 50s, 60s and older winning awards and taking part in extreme challenges. A voiceover details how important the decisions a woman makes in her 50s are. Cut to Alex lying on her couch scrolling through social media, flicking past a video about facelifts, an AI budgie getting a haircut, and a clip of a woman claiming that women’s labia minora shrink in menopause.

It’s the latter video that understandably gives Alex a fright so bad that she drops her phone onto her face. But she’s already late for work, so she runs to the bus (with a cut on her lip from said phone-dropping incident), and makes a holy show of herself once she gets on board.

In just five minutes we get a sense of Alex as she is: an ambitious, stylish woman who can sometimes get in her own way. And who among us hasn’t spent time scrolling when we should be doing something better? Who in their 40s or 50s doesn’t know what it’s like to contemplate the horrors of ageing – and then get distracted by an Instagram Reel? Already we’re endeared to this character.

Modern life

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But will Alex ever cut a break? Throughout Youth the answer is usually: not really, sorry! She’s seeking ease in her world, but responsibilities keep calling. Yet thanks to Horgan’s smart, cutting dialogue and embarrassingly spot-on observations about modern family life, her trials and tribulations become moments injected with a levity that highlights just how bizarre life can get. 

The series keeps the storylines fairly lean, yet there’s depth to them all. Aran Murphy is excellent (and unmistakably a Murphy progeny, taking after father Cillian) as the grumpy Ruairi. Horgan and her son love each other deeply, but that doesn’t mean they don’t find each other annoying or even baffling.

At the beginning of the series, Ruairi acts out in some odd ways, but the series is sympathetic in how it shows that underneath this weird behaviour are some very modern concerns affecting young men. It holds great empathy for Ruairi, who wants to be a man yet isn’t quite sure what being a man really means. 

In her work life, Alex is trying to convince her boss and best friend Sam that she deserves to be made partner. But she’s turned down a romantasy series that ended up being a huge hit, which makes her feel stupid. The romantasy author is an odious twerp who wants to make Alex pay for her lack of foresight, and is one of several fairly idiotic men who Horgan clearly had delicious fun creating. 

Among them is Alex’s fairly useless ex-husband, Lorcan (Owen McDonnell), who she has in her phone as ‘dick for brains’. He’s an actor who’s not a particularly great dad – she describes him at one point as “father-ish, at best”. 

Across eight half-hour episodes, Horgan explores what it’s like to be a woman past midlife: the menopause concerns (several scenes even show period blood, which is strikingly unusual on telly), feeling like part of a sandwich generation, and wondering if your career will ever take off. Through the other characters, we see that it’s not just Alex who’s struggling. Everyone’s got crap that they’re trying to wade through. At no stage in life – when you’re a young adult, a parent, a boss or a grandparent – are things easy.

But Horgan’s gift is to highlight the absurdities that make life both strange and wonderful. There’s something sweet about the moment where her elderly dad whips out an iPad to take a photo at a family gathering. It’s lovely to watch Pat offer to peel off the sticky residue from Alex’s HRT patch on her thigh. And while Alex and her pal Sam are extremely glamorous, capable women, they’re also frequently floored by the annoyances that life chucks at them. Plus, they love getting drunk together. This makes them both aspirational and relatable.

We don’t see enough of this life stage for women explored on screen, or in such specific and loving detail. Alex is trying to create a life of her own, but it means contending with the whims of her body and other people’s wishes too. And if she’s never going to get to a point where everything is easy, how can she live a life she enjoys?

Being 50 in 2026 is not the same as being 50 just a few decades ago. Alex does have choice and freedom, but she also has to accept that she can’t keep holding on to whatever her version of youth was. In Youth, Horgan brings us a new vision of midlife that’s smart, sexy, absurd and at times sad (though she doesn’t dwell on the difficult parts, perhaps conscious that she doesn’t want to burden us).

She seems to be saying to us in Youth: yes, life is difficult, but if we can’t laugh at the odd things that happen, are we really living? There might not be as much fun after 50, but we can also acknowledge that life is both short and precious (something the characters have to do in one particular episode).

So Youth shows us that we must do our best to live our lives as we want to, but we also have to accept that we will never be able to shrug off all of our responsibilities. All we can do is live, cheering when things are on the up and wringing humour out of it when the mud is flying at us.

Youth doesn’t try to placate us. It wants us to feel seen – and to laugh at ourselves while we’re at it. And that’s why Horgan is such a genius at making TV shows that feel like that first sip of Pinot Grigio: refreshing, necessary and deeply familiar.

Youth is streaming on HBO Max now.