Sharon Horgan is filming Youth for HBO in London, where the series puts a newly divorced woman in her 50s at the center of the story. Horgan is not just starring in it; she is also the creator, writer, showrunner and executive producer, which means the show is being built around her own control of the material.
Alex in Youth
Alex is a newly divorced literary agent who jokes that she is a “smug bitch, having it all: the partner, the job, the balance”. That line sets the tone fast: Youth is not about reinvention as a clean uplift, but about a life that looks stable until the pressure points start showing.
“I knew I wanted to write about this particular time in a woman’s life,” Horgan said on set, adding that the project grew more urgent as she moved deeper into her 50s. She is 56 years old, and the series begins with voiceover about the sixth decade and the time left on earth, which gives the comedy a harder edge than a simple post-divorce premise would suggest.
Old Sessions House in Clerkenwell Green
Filming took place in May at Old Sessions House in Clerkenwell Green, London, where Charles Dickens once had Oliver Twist appear in front of the magistrates’ court that operated there. Horgan was on set with her assistant setting up a laptop so she could watch a scene being filmed nearby, a small operational detail that fits the larger picture: she is present for the machinery of the production, not just its publicity.
“If you create a show you just end up doing everything,” she said, and that is exactly how Youth reads from the outside — a project shaped by one writer-producer’s fingerprints at every level. Her previous work across two decades includes Pulling, Catastrophe, Motherland, Amandaland and Bad Sisters, so this new comedy lands as another woman-centred series in a body of work already built on domestic pressure, awkwardness and control.
50 to 60 pressure
The contradiction at the center is plain: in theory, Alex should be enjoying her freedom, but her life is coming undone because of her son, her parents, her work and her ex-husband. Her teenage son, Ruairí, is struggling emotionally, her actor ex-husband is about to leave the country with his younger girlfriend, and her ailing parents are adding another layer of care and obligation.
“It’s about a woman trying to find love again, but suddenly her kid is going through this really difficult time, and he doesn’t move out when he’s supposed to, and then her parents need to be cared for,” Horgan said. She also called the decade between 50 and 60 the “youth of old age,” which is the sharpest clue to what Youth is doing: treating a midlife reset as a time crunch, not a soft landing.
HBO now has a series built around that pressure, but no premiere date or release schedule has been set out. For viewers, the practical takeaway is simple: Youth is in production now, and Horgan’s next big move is not a tease or a concept, but a finished comedy waiting to emerge from the edit.
