Sharon Horgan's 'Youth' tackles midlife dating, aging and the sandwich generation

Sharon Horgan has spent two decades writing television about the specific texture of women's lives at different ages. She started with the chaos of her twenties in Pulling, moved through the sudden parenthood of her forties in Catastrophe, and documented the overwhelm of motherhood in Motherland. Now, at 56, she has turned her attention to what comes next: the peculiar squeeze of midlife, when you're still raising children, still working, still trying to have a romantic life—and your parents are beginning to need you too.

Her new HBO Max series, Youth, which debuts September 21, centers on Alex, a 50-year-old woman navigating exactly this terrain. Alex works in publishing, a job that demands her attention. She has a teenage son who needs her. She has aging parents who are becoming fragile. And she is newly single, trying to figure out how to date again after divorce. This is what sociologists call the sandwich generation—people caught between the needs of the young and the old, with their own lives still very much in motion.

Horgan wrote the show after completing Apple TV's Bad Sisters, returning to an idea she had been mulling for some time. She wanted, she says, to write about "this particular time in a woman's life" through the specific lens of mothering a son, and she wanted the story to be "post-divorce and menopause adjacent." Most importantly, she wanted it to be funny. "There's a lot that's very funny about our bodies failing," she says. The show is built on that tension—the comedy and the pathos held in the same frame, which is what her audience has come to expect from her.

When asked how much of Youth draws from her own life, Horgan is candid but careful. She is divorced and has two daughters. She has aging parents. She has lived through the particular disorientation of midlife. "There is a chunk of my life in there, an autobiographical element for sure," she says. "But the good thing about writing autofiction is that no one really knows which bits are real and which bits aren't, except the people in it." What matters to her is not whether a scene happened to her, but whether it feels true—whether it captures something a woman watching will recognize in herself.

That commitment to authenticity has been central to Horgan's work for two decades. She spends time, she says, trying to make things as real and accurate as possible, and she deliberately writes in her own faults as a parent, her mistakes as a woman, her anxieties and insecurities. "I try to put all that in there and hope that's a universal feeling because it's really madly important to me that women, especially, watch it and see themselves reflected back." This is not a show about women who have it figured out. It is a show about women still figuring it out, which is closer to how most people actually live.

One of the things Horgan wanted to explore honestly is how women relate to their own aging bodies. Alex has a slight obsession with sagging skin—a detail that will resonate with many viewers. "It's really weird watching yourself age on screen because that's not fun," Horgan says. She wanted to depict "an honest portrayal of someone having a complicated relationship with ageing." She has come to a better place with it herself, she notes, but she understands the insecurity. "I think it's OK to age any way you want to age. And we're insecure about it for a reason. And that's because it's shoved down our necks that we need to look a certain way, especially within the entertainment industry and in magazines."

The same honesty extends to sex and desire in midlife. Horgan says the insecurities shift as you age. "You think about angles, you think about the shapes you make and how to be sexy as an older woman. And lighting comes into it." But she also knows women who feel liberated by midlife, who see it as a new era of freedom. What she wanted to show was a woman with a complicated relationship with her body who nonetheless puts herself out there—not because she has resolved her insecurities, but because she wants to find someone to grow old with. That desire doesn't disappear; it just gets more complicated.

Sharlene Whyte, who plays Alex's boss and best friend Sam, says the show fills a gap. "We should see more of it—women who are later on in age, who have been privileged to get here later on, who are still killing it and are still beautiful and sexy and funny." She notes that women in their fifties are becoming more visible on screen, and there is more work available for women in later life. Yet Youth is not just a show for and about midlife women. It is, as Whyte describes it, "an inter-generational watch." Alex's teenage son, Ruari, played by 19-year-old Aran Murphy (son of actor Cillian Murphy), has his own storyline. He struggles with his relationship to his absent father and with the confusion of finding his way as a young man in the world today. In one scene, he reflects on how important it is to have good people around you, and how easy it is to end up with the wrong answers when you don't have that foundation. When asked what he hopes young viewers will take from the show, Murphy says simply: "You don't have to have it all in place at 18. Everyone is still kind of just pretending they know what they're doing." It is a line that applies equally to his character's mother, and to the audience watching her try to navigate her fifties with humor, honesty, and the knowledge that nobody really has it figured out.