Note: This story contains spoilers from “Youth” Episode 1.
Sometimes, a TV show wastes little time telling you exactly what it is. Such is the case with “Youth,” the new HBO comedy from creator-star Sharon Horgan, which made its debut Sunday night. Within the first six minutes of the series’ opening episode, Horgan’s 50-year-old divorcee Alex has been sent to the doctor to learn she’s developed arthritis in her jaw, which leads to her mishearing her physician’s advice of no more “kebabs, tough meats” as “no more blowjobs.”
A minute later, Alex is nervously telling her friend/boss Sam (Sharlene Whyte), “I need to meet someone now. I think I’ve got like 10 years left as a sexual person, tops.” Combined, these two moments tell you everything you need to know about “Youth” and the midlife crisis that is turning its protagonist inside out.
It came as little surprise then when Horgan revealed in an interview with TheWrap that those two scenes were among the first she wrote when she began thinking about “Youth,” a show she conceived around the idea of “having a window to find someone before the Old You arrives.”
“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. That was just the opposite of where I thought I’d be at,” Horgan explained. “When you get older, your body starts to fail. It really does, and yet you feel so the same. You absolutely feel the same as you did in your 30s in so many ways, but then your body starts to go, ‘F—k you! Your knees are going to creak now, old lady.’”
While Horgan admitted she was worried her character’s locked jaw crisis would come across as “too crass,” it felt key to what she wants to explore in “Youth.” Specifically, she was pulled to “the idea of someone about to put themselves out there. Her son is leaving home. She’s done her mothering, she thinks, and then, you know, her jaw seizes up.”
Alex’s sudden, hyper-awareness of time passing around her is only heightened by her work as a literary agent. Horgan knew all along that she wanted her character’s job to play “a huge part in her life,” and she felt herself drawn to the publishing world because of how little she had seen it represented onscreen before. “The more I looked into it, the more I realized it’s wild,” Horgan said.
“It’s one of those jobs where you have to be a mother to a lot of people,” she explained. “It felt like a good space to deal with time and how we use it. There’s so much social media and bite-sized, very quickly consumed content, and I just felt like the literary world is so different, so slow moving. It takes so long to develop a book, to write it, to publish it. That all felt so at odds with this [world of] fast-paced content.”
Her locked jaw is not the only rug-pull that the “Youth” premiere has in store for Horgan’s Alex. On the contrary, the episode concludes on a complicated note with her 18-year-old son Ruari (Aran Murphy) unexpectedly returning home without explanation from college just moments after Alex has had sex with on-again, off-again situationship partner Patrick (Rupert Friend). The “Youth” premiere then ends on Ruari crawling into his mom’s bed and going to sleep, leaving her to consider her situation while “Everything in Its Right Place” by Radiohead plays, adding a shade of darkness and irony to the episode’s final image.
“Really, that is the premise,” Horgan said of Ruari’s aborted college departure. “I guess it’s downbeat in a way. It’s emotional. But that is the show. Now, she has to worry about him again. The freedom is gone.” For Horgan, the moment gave her the chance to pull the rug out from under not just her heroine but also viewers.
“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, because that scene to me is so much more affecting in a comedy than it would have been at the end of a drama,” Horgan said. “You’ve had lots of really stupid, absurd stuff [in the episode], but then when it comes down to it, you realize that this is what it’s about. It’s about being a mother and it’s about this boy who’s going through some tough s—t.”
“It was always going to end like that,” Horgan added. “It’s always really nice to have an ending before you start writing, and I knew for a long time it was going to end like that. I’d written that it was going to be Radiohead, whether we got [the song] or not. I’d written that into the script a year and a half ago.”
“Youth” viewers will have to wait for the show’s future episodes to learn more about the “tough s—t” Ruari is going through and why he came back home in the first place. One thing they can expect the HBO comedy to explore through both Ruari and Alex, though, is social media. Instagram and Google will be constant presences throughout “Youth,” as Ruari ends up on the receiving end of constant, oft-toxic online ideas about how to be a young man and Alex gets more than her fair share of messaging about how to be a woman in her 50s.
“There’s a horrible industry that targets us all. I’m targeted on a daily basis to fix my face, to correct my body. My daughters are sent the same things. There’s no escaping it, and yet we are all so chronically online that we’re almost doing it to ourselves,” Horgan said. “With Ruari, he is looking for answers and the answers are coming from such a toxic place, but how is he supposed to figure out what’s good and what’s bad messaging? I really wanted to show that with both of them. They’re obviously in such completely different places, but they’re kind of being faced with the same difficulties.”
“Someone said something earlier that’s true, which is that the show is a coming-of-age story for both of them,” Horgan added. “It’s Ruari moving into male adulthood, and I mean, what could be more difficult in this day and age? And it’s Alex moving into this decade where you’re being told, ‘You’re not good enough. You need to change your face if you want to have a chance — or just give up.’”
“Youth” airs Sundays on HBO and HBO Max.
The post ‘Youth’ Creator Sharon Horgan Explains the Premiere’s Emotional Rug-Pull Ending appeared first on TheWrap.
