{"id":605690,"date":"2026-09-04T13:48:11","date_gmt":"2026-09-04T13:48:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/605690\/"},"modified":"2026-09-04T13:48:11","modified_gmt":"2026-09-04T13:48:11","slug":"i-didnt-know-if-id-ever-have-sex-again-inside-sharon-horgans-excruciating-post-divorce-comedy-television","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/605690\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018I didn\u2019t know if I\u2019d ever have sex again\u2019: inside Sharon Horgan\u2019s excruciating post-divorce comedy | Television"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Sharon Horgan<\/a> walked into HBO to pitch her new series, Youth, she basically just said \u201csandwich generation\u201d to them. Alex, the protagonist, is squished between a teenage son and two elderly parents. That\u2019s the classic; the rest of it \u2013 the recent divorce, the dating hell, the busy, creative professional life full of pricks \u2013 is the icing on the sandwich (if you like). Horgan had been incubating some of the characters for five years, but \u201chonestly\u201d, she tells me, \u201cI said about three sentences and a week later, they said yes. I\u2019ve never had that experience before.\u201d<\/p>\n

You might think you can imagine it, but Youth is unlike any portrait you\u2019ve ever seen in the gallery of (for brevity) menopausal women doing everything for everyone. There\u2019s an urgency and valour to it that is very much drawn from Horgan\u2019s own experience. \u201cEverything just changed for me when I hit my 50s,\u201d she says. \u201cI was very bamboozled but I really had a hunger to make time count.\u201d Not every situation is lifted directly from her own life, post-divorce \u2013 she\u2019s also borrowing from her friends, she emphasises \u2013 but in general terms, the pressures, the worries, the outrages, the surprise and the delight are all so exquisitely drawn that even if it\u2019s not Horgan herself, you hope someone, somewhere, is living this in real life.<\/p>\n

\u2018She could have chemistry with a toaster\u2019 \u2026\u00a0Sharon Horgan.<\/p>\n

I caught some of the shooting on a blowy day in April this year, in east London. Horgan and her co-star Rupert Friend<\/a> were filming a crux scene. Friend plays Patrick, slightly younger than Horgan\u2019s Alex, a little indecisive and shambling. \u201cHe\u2019s not a Prince Charming character. I don\u2019t think I\u2019m the answer to all her ills,\u201d he says, walking around a little park in between takes. Patrick wants to be with Alex, but he also thinks he wants children and there\u2019s no way she\u2019s going back there again, even if she could. \u201cSharon flips the proverbial biological clock on its head,\u201d he says. \u201cMen think it doesn\u2019t apply to them because they\u00a0ostensibly can make children all the way through. He\u2019s never considered that it\u2019s not his clock.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nothing passes between Alex and Patrick that\u2019s overstated or even out of the ordinary, unless you count the fact that she gets hit by a cyclist as she walks away. But when it slots into the finished show, it is, like every other scene, hilarious. I\u00a0just do not know how Horgan does what she does \u2013 which is what every one of her co-stars says about her. \u201cShe could have chemistry with a toaster,\u201d says Aran Murphy<\/a> (yes, son of Cillian), who plays her son. \u201cShe\u2019s so fizzing with energy.\u201d Rupert Friend puts the emphasis on her agility: \u201cSharon\u2019s just brilliant at writing. She\u2019s able to do that dance between jokes and pathos in a way that I don\u2019t know anyone else can do.\u201d But it\u2019s Horgan herself who, in an absolutely unboastful way, explains it best: \u201cI\u2019m allergic to sentimentality. I\u00a0can\u2019t abide anything that is sweet or schmaltzy. But I love genuine emotion. I\u00a0love to make people feel things. As much as I love the laughs, I\u2019d feel like I\u2019d failed in some way if I\u00a0wasn\u2019t\u00a0giving people\u00a0pain.\u201d<\/p>\n

Murphy\u2019s Ruari is a gift of a part, the most believably wrecking-ball 18-year-old son you\u2019ve ever seen. Some things he wrecks on purpose (the last day of secondary school), some he wrecks by accident (his first week at university; his life), but the stakes are agonisingly high and the actions all plausible. Horgan has a lot to say about parenting kids this age, \u201ceven though I do not have a son, I have daughters\u201d (Sadhbh, 22, and Amer, 18). \u201cGen Z have that awful feeling of being the last generation. They\u2019re here at a point in time where they\u2019re being told that everything\u2019s fucked and AI\u2019s going to take your jobs. I sometimes don\u2019t know how to get out of bed in the morning, but they\u2019re the ones who care the most and feel things the most.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018Everything just changed when I hit my 50s\u2019 \u2026 Sharon Horgan in Youth. Photograph: Colin Hutton\/HBO<\/p>\n

Murphy is pretty reserved in real life (he speaks to me by Zoom from Italy, where he is on holiday), and the performance he turns in is one of the most thrillingly angry teenagers ever. \u201cWe really got lucky with Aran,\u201d says Horgan. \u201cThere\u2019s nothing about him that isn\u2019t real. It made life so much easier to be working with someone who you literally can\u2019t see acting.\u201d She wanted Ruari to be \u201ccomplex but not in a Dawson\u2019s Creek way \u2013 a\u00a0real boy who\u2019s a little bit broken. All\u00a0Alex wants is for him to normalise. But what\u2019s normal?\u201d<\/p>\n

Besides, Ruari is probably saying the same about his mother, who he is furious to discover still has gentleman callers. Patrick isn\u2019t Alex\u2019s only love interest; there\u2019s also a sex scene with Tim McInnerny<\/a> (Percy from Blackadder) that I am still laughing at weeks later. None of the relationships, fleeting or otherwise, are at all a classic love story \u2013 Rupert Friend says ruefully, \u201cI\u2019m really the best of a bad bunch, which I am happy to take as the quote for my gravestone\u201d \u2013 but the men are drawn so truthfully that you can\u2019t help but love them all slightly (apart from the ex-husband, and even he\u2019s not a bad guy, more of an emotional no-mark).<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I found myself divorced,\u201d Horgan says, \u201cI genuinely thought I\u2019d be alone for ever. I\u00a0didn\u2019t even know if I\u2019d ever have sex again. There\u2019s that extreme fear of being alone and being lonely. But at the same time, you think you have a freedom as well. You do suddenly think: \u2018My kids have finished school, I\u2019ve got some time to try and get this right.\u2019\u201d Alex\u2019s love life is anything but over, yet this isn\u2019t a \u201cyou go, girl\u201d tale where every woman remains perpetually 35 through Botox and force of will. \u201cYou put yourself out there in a slightly different way,\u201d says Horgan. \u201cIt\u2019s still incredibly difficult, as a woman of that age, to find someone \u2013 the men who are left are either institutionally single or they\u2019re divorced or they\u2019re looking for someone much\u00a0younger.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wrecking-ball \u2026 Aran Murphy as Ruari in Youth. Photograph: Colin Hutton<\/p>\n

The subplot of Alex\u2019s ageing parents, meanwhile, is so honest it\u2019s exhilarating. Dramedy tends to be respectfully saccharine about the elderly, and skate over the inconvenient bits: the stubbornness, the denial, the endless hospital appointments. But (I\u2019m allowed to say this, being an orphan \u2013 Horgan\u2019s mother is still alive, her dad died in 2023), those bits are almost the whole of the experience. \u201cThere is a huge amount of non-cooperation there,\u201d she says, \u201cand why shouldn\u2019t there be? Ageing is hard. It\u2019s harder when it begins to affect you mentally. When you\u2019ve always been sharp as a tack, or when you begin to lose your mobility and you\u2019ve always been a fucking go-getter. Losing those basic functions is brutal.\u201d<\/p>\n

skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n

Sign up to What’s On<\/p>\n

Get the best TV reviews, news and features in your inbox every Monday<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

But from Alex\u2019s point of view, \u201call the planning, all the phone calls, it becomes such a huge part of your life. As it goes on, you\u2019ll see how it affects her sibling relationship as well. I wanted to explore that all so much but you run out of time and space. That could have been a\u00a0whole show.\u201d<\/p>\n

Alex works in publishing, and there are some fabulous performances by her authors \u2013 Anne Reid, as a grande dame of airport fiction, turning her hand to erotica, alongside Harriet Walter as her ice-cold daughter. \u201cI could talk to you about Anne Reid for the entirety of the interview,\u201d Horgan says. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to even mention her and not just wax lyrical about being aged 91 and still delivering work on that level and still caring so much.\u201d Damian Lewis, within 30 seconds of arriving on screen, has distilled everything that is bad about publishing, celebrity, London, private members\u2019 clubs and the world. \u201cEveryone who came on to do their bits was influencing the show,\u201d says Horgan. \u201cI was writing it at the same time as making it, which was hell.\u201d On the upside, it meant she was building relationships with her co-stars as she wrote, and incorporating those connections. Friend remembers deep conversations about what love actually is. \u201cWe talked about how heartbreaking it is to think about things in terms of if they fail. You know, if you meet and immediately think: \u2018We could date, but if we date we might break up.\u2019 Why do anything? Everything has a pessimistic possibility, and Alex is always considering it, but it\u2019s no\u00a0way to live.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pulling<\/a>, Sharon Horgan\u2019s 00s comedy, and Motherland<\/a>, a decade ago, did the same thing \u2013 which is to say, if you\u2019d asked: \u201cDo you want to see a show about three single women? How about a school-gate show about neurotic middle-class people and Chardonnay and mini Babybels?\u201d I\u2019d have said: \u201cNo, not at all, sounds drab and also too close to home.\u201d But then when they landed, they were all I wanted to watch. Youth is technically about the grinding sandwich years, when everything gets harder at once, and then your joints stop working. But it\u2019s really about the sheer bliss of being alive when so much happens that is funny, stitched together by a\u00a0fearsomely long to-do list.<\/p>\n

Youth is on HBO Max from 21\u00a0September.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Sharon Horgan walked into HBO to pitch her new series, Youth, she basically just said \u201csandwich generation\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":605691,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[146,85,46],"class_list":["post-605690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/605690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=605690"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/605690\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/605691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=605690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=605690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=605690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}