Youth review: Sharon Horgan follows Bad Sisters with an HBO show at 96% on Rotten Tomatoes
Alex is 50, divorced, a London book agent, and she has just done the actuarial math on her own romantic future. By her count, there's roughly a decade left to find someone before, as the show frames it, the Old You arrives — so she's dating with the focused energy of a woman clearing out an inbox.
That's the engine of Youth, the new HBO half-hour Sharon Horgan created and stars in, which premiered Sunday night. And given that this is the woman behind Catastrophe and Bad Sisters, the only real question is whether the streak holds. I sat down with the premiere ready to be disappointed, purely for variety.
The premise, and why it's personal
Naturally, the universe immediately complicates Alex's plan: her son Ruairí (Aran Murphy) drops out of college and moves back home, her jaw develops arthritis (a real thing that can happen to you! delightful!), and Rupert Friend shows up as Patrick to scramble the whole spreadsheet. Damian Lewis cameos in the opening pitch meeting, because apparently everyone wants in.
Horgan has been very candid about where all this came from:
"I was so scared of not meeting someone and sort of ending up a much older woman, kind of out there looking for geriatric love," Horgan said.
And on the show's signature move — the joke that turns on you:
"I love the way you can write a comedy and really have a lot of laughs in it and then just knock people around the back of the head."
Consider my head knocked.
The verdict, and the receipts
The streak holds. Infuriatingly, gloriously, the streak holds — and the critics agree: the show is sitting at 96% on Rotten Tomatoes, having opened in the high 80s and only climbed as more reviews landed. The praise clusters around a few things:
- It does for midlife what Catastrophe did for relationships — honest to the point of indecency, and funnier for it
- Critics are throwing around words like "frisky," "beautifully tender," and "spit-takingly funny," which is a range most comedies would kill for
- It treats being 50 as a coming-of-age story, not a crisis — the body fails, the self doesn't, and the gap between the two is where every joke lives
The Horgan of it all
This is what makes the run so absurd. Catastrophe. Motherland. Bad Sisters, twice. And now, fresh off Apple's murder-adjacent Irish gothic, she pivots to HBO with a sex comedy about mortality and lands her best reviews in years. New episodes drop Sunday nights on HBO and HBO Max, and I'll be watching with an ice pack on my jaw. Preventatively.
Previously we wrote: Is Jon Hamm's American Hostage worth streaming? Our MGM+ review
