I’ve been watching Sharon Horgan’s HBO series “Youth” with equal parts exasperation and rage.
The show, which finished its eight-episode run early this month, centers on Alex, a 50-something divorced woman re-entering the dating world after she sends her son off to college (though he quickly returns home). At the same time, she’s caring for aging parents and managing a career as a literary agent. She’s squarely in what’s come to be known as the sandwich generation, squeezed between life’s responsibilities.
Rich stuff, particularly from Ms. Horgan, who is the mastermind behind such shows as “Catastrophe,” about a couple trying to make a marriage work after a one-night stand results in pregnancy. And more recently “Bad Sisters,” a delightful dark comedy about a group of sisters plotting to kill their abusive brother-in-law. Again and again, Ms. Horgan has brought complicated, intelligent, fully realized, grown-up women to the screen. A heroic accomplishment, particularly as the number of women making shows in Hollywood continues to decline precipitously. It doesn’t hurt that Ms. Horgan herself — 56, powerful, stylish, divorced, dating a younger man — projects an ideal version of what midlife can look like for women.
But with “Youth” she failed us. Instead of a complex, competent grown-up, Ms. Horgan delivers in Alex an immature, insecure woman, inept at her job, consumed with anxiety about whether men will find her attractive or their friends will think she’s smart. In one episode she drinks too much over lunch, takes a sedative and passes out in the back of a cab for an hour. In another, she drunkenly sleeps with a lecherous former client and does a barefoot walk of shame home. It’s as though someone has stuck Bridget Jones in the body of a 50-year-old and said, here, this is adulthood. Or created a coda to the “Sex and the City” episode in which Carrie shows up for a photo shoot late and hung over and lands on the cover of New York magazine, looking haggard under the headline “Single and Fabulous?” Single and Fabulous question mark? agonizes a horrified Carrie at the magazine stand where she purchases her cigarettes. In this case: Single and Grown-Up question mark?
Messy adult women on our screens are not a new phenomenon. Kerry Washington’s Olivia Pope in “Scandal” tossing back her red wine and sleeping with the president. Sandra Oh’s Eve in “Killing Eve,” engaged in a sexually charged cat-and-mouse game with Jodi Comer’s assassin, Villanelle, while her husband (initially) sits at home oblivious. These characters came after years of women over the age of 40 being relegated to the sitcom roles of the good, exasperated and/or tolerant (but always hot) wife. Centering women as complicated, flawed people, equally averse to commitment as men, felt like a necessary pushback.
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