Pop Culture Happy Hour - Youth

Episode Date: October 21, 2026

We all love actor/writer Sharon Horgan, and she’s got a new show on HBO called Youth. Horgan stars as Alex, a 50-year-old divorcée who finds herself at several simultaneous personal and professional crossroads. But where does this new show fall in the Horgan canon? Is it essential, or is it more of a vestigial Horgan?Looking for more TV and movies about navigating mid-life?  Check out these episodes:‘The Invite’ is a marriage comedy with sex and heartA twisty scam goes haywire in the fun 'Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed'In Tina Fey’s ‘The Four Seasons,’ marriage is far from a vacationIn ‘Rooster,’ Steve Carell makes some college admissionsConnect with Pop Culture Happy Hour:Letterboxd / FacebookOur weekly newsletterSupport public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

If you appreciate the nuance and context, we bring you here at Pop Culture Happy Hour, look into NPR Plus. When you join, you're supporting the kind of deep dive storytelling that makes shows like Pop Culture Happy Hour possible. You also get perks like early access and bonus episodes for a wide variety of NPR shows. Join us at plus.npr.org.org. Look, you love Sharon Hogan. We all love actor-writer Sharon Horgan. Whether you know her from Catastrophe or Bad Sisters or somewhere else, well, let the word go forth from this time and place. Karen Horgans got a new show on HBO.

It's called Youth. She created it and stars in it as a 50-year-old woman who finds herself at several simultaneous personal and professional crossroads. But where does this new show fall in the Horgan Canon? Is it essential or is it a more vestigial Horgan? We're all just going to give us a moment to kind of sit in that, marinate in that for a second. Okay.

I'm Glenn Weldon. And joining me today on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour is Barry Hardiman. She's a senior editor for NPR's Investigations. Hey, Barry. Hi. Hey. Also with us is Vulture TV critic Roxanna Haddadi. Hey, Roxanna. Hello.

Hello. Let's get to it. In youth, Sharon Hogan plays Alex, a 50-year-old literary agent in London. She's divorced. She's got a kid headed off to college. He's played by Aaron Murphy. And she's trying to negotiate work in motherhood and sex as they all change around her. I need someone to fall in love with me now.

So there's a bit of time left with this me before our old me is like, I'm here now. For sex, Alex looks to Patrick, who might be someone she could build a life with, or he might be a trifling hymbo. He's played by Rupert Friend. Meanwhile, her son Rory is dealing with a whole world of stuff on his own. Eight episodes of youth are airing on HBO and streaming on HBO Max. Barry, where are you? Are you a Horgan grinder?

Where are you on this? Are there any more left in there for you? Just that's it. I regret nothing. Good. Well, I am very much, I love Sharon Hogan. I have so enjoyed both catastrophe and bad sisters and, you know, she's enormously charismatic and fun to watch and to listen to talk. And I loved this.

This has been, was very, very fun to watch. I will say I felt as a personal affront I turned 52 weeks ago, and this is not a spoiler to say that there is an introduction of several of Maya Angelou and Jane Goodall and like how important the decade 50 to 60 is. and I immediately, you know, felt like I was going to throw up and... Spoke to you. Spoke to me. But also it was very much like grabbing me by the lapels and or by my lengthening earlobes and yelling at me. So it's very charming. You know, she is herself both, you know, stunning and charismatic and kind of messy.

And, you know, if there is a problem for me with this show, which, again, like, I do find it to be sort of emotionally satisfying. She's very much in the sandwich generation. She's got parents that are aging and a son who is meant to be going to university and is having his own troubles. And, you know, she's trying to sort of find herself. And, you know, I think if we've learned anything from Miranda July and the last five years of the culture, it is that we are in a moment to talk about middle-aged women in this particular coming-of-age moment. You know, this is the sort of, are you there, God, it's me, Sharon Horgan's moment. if I have a problem with it to get back to that thought, there is something a little bit, the trope of the sort of messy woman who kind of can't get it together but is also impossibly gorgeous, even, Sharon Hogan is like very much a Hollywood 56. She's on the Jennifer Lopez protocol of that decade. I do find myself sort of wishing for something, you know, everybody else in this cast sort of. gets to be more themselves, you know? Like, it does seem that the sort of the men that come in and out of

her life from her son, Rauri, who's played by Killeen Murphy's son, Aaron Murphy, like all of these men sort of get to be more themselves and more messy and more real than the women do on the show. And so it doesn't stand out for me in the pantheon of shows about middle age. It's sort of, it's not doing anything really very new for me, but it's still quite enjoyable. And I love her clothes. In summary, I love her clothes. All right, Roxanna, we can table her clothes. We can put clothes aside. Or we can talk about her clothes. Yeah, her clothes are like a whole other episode's worth of content. I'll see you there. Yeah. I am coming from the place of loving Sharon and I think I am

staying in the place of loving Sharon and enjoying this show. But I think I'm enjoying it for Sharon and less for the show itself. Because There's a lot about the show that feels how to describe this. Like, I'm watching the show. I'm enjoying the show. A day later, I'm not sure I could tell you what happened in an episode. There's sort of like a little bit of formlessness, I think, to the episodic structure, which then makes me think of like the slightly more cliched things that are happening

are what are sticking with me. So, you know, Alex has this big question of like, now that she is in this stage of her life, what is the relationship that is going to take her through death? And I guess I was looking for like a little more nuance to that rather than like she doesn't want an older man because he looks really old. Exactly. There's a lot of, he looks really old comedy. And so I'm having a entertaining time.

But there are certain parts of the show, like a lot of the content about her work as like an agent and the ins and outs of the publishing industry. I really like that part of the show and I wish that was more of the show. But really what it comes down to is I think the show is being sold as a sex comedy. And I don't think it's a sex comedy. I think it's a parenting comedy. And so I think my expectations were different from what the show ended up being. And I'm still having a hard time sort of realigning what I expected with what the show actually is. Sure.

That makes sense. I think we're all grappling with this show in slightly different ways. I mean, there's so much to recommend here. I mean, we have here. For my money, one of the most intelligent and clear-eyed and unsentimental, which is a big deal for me, writer-creators working now. And she's making a show about something that doesn't, we don't make shows about. Like women at a time of life that's historically gotten ignored. and I think she's approaching it with the same specificity

she brings to a lot of her stuff. So it feels like personal experience, even if it isn't. I mean, she said it's based on her own divorce, but also the lives of her friends. So, you know, we talk about this all the time on this show. Specificity feels like universality, right? If you go specific enough, you're going to hit some universal truths. And I identified with her even when she was making stupid choices,

which she does a lot. Often. The biggest trick this show pulls off is somehow, as you mentioned, Roxanna, I mean, this show is set in the world of publishing in book publishing, and it still feels fresh. Because it's not like the 1995 rom-com book publishing. She's kept your ear to the ground. You know, she takes a few shots at Romanticy, and they're cheap shots, but they're funny.

You know, I'm not going to begrudge of that. And I do think the show is called youth, not because it's like an abfab farce where she's like grasping and Botox and all that kind of stuff. It's called youth because suddenly a lot of the relationships in her life feel like high school again. Like, why is my friend mad at me? Does this guy like me or not? And that tracks for me.

That's what happens when your life jumps the track you thought it was going to be on forever. Yeah. Unfortunately, the show is also called youth because maybe 30, sometimes 40% of it revolves around her son. In a show that I think goes out of its way to avoid cliche, that kid is the most stereotypical surly TV teen. And everything surrounding him is just. It's not dramatized. It's not specific enough. At one point, he finally tells his mom what's going on with him.

And it is the most boring, generic, TikTok-coded, male loneliness, epidemic, toxic masculinity like BS. And of course, I want to say, I get why he expresses it the way he does. He's a kid. He would express himself in this kind of pat, predigested social media meme speak language. Doesn't make me want to watch it. doesn't make it interesting. It's like she created this very detailed landscape painting. I'd put a stick figure in the middle of it. Yes. It's not the performance. The kid's good. It's the writing. But Barry, let me check in with you first because I'm on record for hating the surly TV teen as an archetype. So I worry I'm overreacting. You got two sons. Some of these things must be top of mind for you. Yeah, I live with archetypes. How does worry strike you? He seemed to be sort of an avatar for all of the desires that have gone under. met with her. And so you end up being bounced immediately back to her, which I'm kind of like, that's fine. I'm done thinking about my kids. Like, whatever. You are correct to say that his interior

life, I almost, you know, it's funny. There's a moment where he's scrolling around and looking at a comedian Mitch Hedberg, and he searches him and sees that he died, you know, obviously quite young. I thought, oh, maybe we'll get sort of a sensitive, interesting way of like what it means to sort of back around into that piece of the web that we now sort of call the Manosphere. But it was sort of the last moment of it. And as a result, he sort of felt more like a, you know, the sort of an emotional purse that she was carrying around rather than a real character. Do you know what I mean? Exactly.

And so for me, like, I don't, it's funny that it made an impression on you guys because to me it literally didn't. You know, I literally. And again, maybe it's because I'm like out here, you know, I live with bro, ma. You know, so maybe I was just like, I don't need to. but it just, it did not make an impression on me. Yeah, we've got more thoughts about youth after the break. Welcome back. Roxanna, let's pick up with you.

I know you have thoughts on this. Yeah, I think for me, this is the most frustrating part of the show by far. And maybe it's because I recently watched Cape Fear, Apple TV's Cape Fear. And there is a very similar problem for me within that show, which is that there is a teenage son character who all. also has sort of a situation that occurred at school with another student. And he doesn't know what that means about his identity and who he's going to be. And his parents are unfailingly supportive. And it doesn't feel like the show really knows what to say about, like, teen boy loneliness.

Neither of these shows knows what to say, I don't think. And in Cape Fear, that character is played by Joe Anders, who is. Kate Winslet's son. In this show, it is played by Aaron Murphy, who is Killian Murphy's son. So there is this like Nepo Baby's son's thing happening in the presentation of these characters and who is playing them. But I feel like this is like an influence of adolescence. Like we understand that this is a problem and we don't know what there is to say about it. Past, it's a problem. And the show stays in that register, youth stays in that register, too long, I think. And so there is this huge portion of the show.

Yeah, Glenn, it's like 40% of the show, I would say. I think so right. Feels like it is about this like teen boy Rory and what he's going to do and how he views himself and all of this stuff. And I'm like, where's Sharon? Where is Sharon? And what's going on at the publisher? Because I am perhaps this is incredibly callous. I am very unmoved by this specific type of storytelling if it is not told with the finesse of adolescence.

And I just don't think it's told with the finesse of adolescence. Can I ask, does this feel to you that the sort of the Manosphere storyline has become what the sort of sexual assault in the past of a woman was in the 90s? Yes, sure. That it is now the shorthand for teen boys. And it is like the interior life, you aren't actually getting a personality. You're just getting that storyline. Right. To me, I was just like, I can't really see her behind the purse.

Yeah. It's a very reactive way to write a character in a show that is otherwise, I think, fairly proactive in showing what Alex wants from her life and how she is dealing with her aging parents and her responsibilities at work. The balance is not quite there for me. And I think that is what adds to my sense of when an episode is over, I'm like, I had a nice time, I don't know if I need to watch the next one. Yeah.

That's something that I sort of kept grappling with while watching this show. I think the balance is being thrown off because the kids, the center of gravity when he shouldn't be. I mean, this is a Sharon Hogan show. You can't fault the casting. You can never fault the casting in a Sharon Hogan show. We got Freddie Fox as a rival agent. Blissful.

Harriet Walter. Yeah. No, I mean, there's a parade of people. Harriet Walter makes everything better. I mean, and I didn't recognize Freddie Fox if it wasn't for that jawline because I think Underneath those glasses, and is that a wig? No, I think that's the hair. But also Tim McEnany, who Americans might not know the name unless they are Britcom nerds like I am,

but he was, you know, on Blackadder in a lot of different incarnations back in the day. And to see him, because I grew up on this guy, seeing him playing a guy in his 60s that Alex is dating is kind of a yikes. But here's where I think we're all talking to this. The rhythm is off here. Yeah. I watched the show with my husband, who bailed after a few episodes. And I was like, why are you bailing? You love Sharon Hogan.

Look at the hair. Nothing else. Look at the best hair on television. 100% when Connie Britton is not on television. Let's be clear. That's true. He said, I thought it would be funnier. Yeah, exactly right.

He's not an idiot. He knows it's not a sitcom. It's not a punchline-driven show. He knows it's character-based. And he knew that going in. But he said catastrophe was funnier. Bad Sisters was funnier. This show, he said, is humorous.

Mm-hmm. Ooh. Then he dropped the mic and left. It has situations that you recognize as being funny. Yes. Yeah. Yes. Oh, she dropped a burger. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that to me, that joke, which is in the poster, is to me exactly what's wrong with the comedy. Like, oh, no, I'm a messy woman. I dropped this and now I'm going to eat it off the floor. Like, that too has become a shorthand for like menopausal life. But again, that said, you know, it is fun to watch. I wasn't, while it was happening, I was engaged. Exactly right. You know? It's just I got up and then, you. flip their magazine. It's such a strange thing to talk about because we all had an enjoyable time

watching each episode. But then it sort of came time to, you know, if we had been watching this week to week, I don't know if each of us would have stayed with it week to week. I would have forgotten to go back. See, this is the thing. We all experienced it because we got screeners of the first seven episodes as kind of a long movie, but the folks who are not going to experience that way, I wonder if they're going to stick around. I mean, I'm going to watch the eighth episode when it airs. Agreed. You are, too.

Okay. Well, I'm curious now because I want to know what you two thought. All right. Well, this is not the classic PCH-H-Ringing endorsement, but it is certainly a don't avoid it. I mean, like, check it out. It's Sharon Hogan. She's like pizza.

Yeah. Even not great Sharon Horgan. Still Sharon Horgan. Still pretty good. Still pretty good. Yeah. Okay. That brings us to the end of our show.

She's better than pizza. Roxanna Haddadi, Barry Hardiman. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Thanks. This episode was produced by Hafsa Fathema, Liz Metzker, and Mike Katzif, and edited by our surerunner, Jessica Reedy, and Hello, Kim, and provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Glenn Weldon, and we'll see you all next time.