Youth

Sharon Horgan plays Alex, a freshly-50 divorced mom in London trying to figure out sex, dating, and what she actually wants, while her parents get older and her adult-ish son refuses to leave the house. Eight half-hour episodes on HBO Max. Rupert Friend, Sharlene Whyte, Aran Murphy, and Robbie Gee fill out the cast. Horgan wrote it, stars in it, and calls it the third in her unofficial trilogy after Pulling and Catastrophe.

Horgan doing Horgan. She's been writing this specific woman — smart, horny, exhausted, catastrophically honest — for twenty years now, and Alex is the version who got a mortgage and a teenage son. The scripts have that Catastrophe rhythm: two people sniping at each other in a kitchen until one of them says the true thing by accident. Rupert Friend shows up and plays hard against his usual leading-man stiffness, which is a real trick, and it works. The parenting-your-parents-while-still-parenting-your-kid material lands because Horgan doesn't cheat it. The ailing-parent scenes aren't sad music cues. They're jokes that hurt.

This is Horgan's third pass at variations on the same character, and if you bounced off Pulling or Catastrophe you'll bounce off this too. The horniness-as-thesis-statement can feel a little belabored early on — the show is very sure it's saying something fresh about middle-aged women wanting sex, and it says it kind of a lot before it settles down and just tells the story. Rupert Friend's Patrick is written thinner than Alex; he's a foil more than a person for stretches. And the chatty London-media milieu of these shows has started to blur together. You've seen this kitchen. You've seen this friend group.

Made for the Catastrophe crowd first, Fleabag second, anyone who tolerated Motherland third. If you watched Nobody Wants This and wished it were meaner and less earnest, this is the meaner version. Who quits in episode two: viewers who need a plot engine, viewers who dislike English social-cringe comedy, viewers who find Horgan's default register — mortified, verbal, tired — grating instead of funny. The rhythm is chatty. The stakes are small until they aren't.

WORTH IT because the writing is doing actual work. Horgan isn't shouting a thesis about age or gender at you; she's writing a specific woman making specific mistakes in a specific week, and letting the meaning come out of that. The show has a clear point of view about midlife dating without pausing the story to underline it. The jokes carry the argument. Direction is unflashy in the good way, staying out of the performances. It's not top-shelf Horgan — Catastrophe still wins on structure and stakes — but it's assured, it's funny, it's mean where it needs to be, and it doesn't waste its half-hours. Passable-plus television from a writer who knows exactly what she's doing, which around here is enough to clear the bar.