This article contains spoilers for Youth Season 1 Episode 4.
“When did it all stop being fun?” is the all-important question at the centre of this week’s episode of Youth. For Alex (Sharon Horgan), the answer seems connected to the fact that nothing in her life is working the way she wants it to. Michael (Tim McInnerny) is still asking after her, Patrick (Rupert Friend) remains the man she cannot let go of, and Sam (Sharlene Whyte) is beginning to question whether Alex can be trusted with the future of the business. Even when things appear to be going well, Alex finds a way to make them more complicated than needs be – a protagonist after my own heart and one that makes for entertaining television.
Much of that complication comes from Patrick, though Alex is hardly helping herself. She tells Sam that she is not interested in Michael because she is not done with Patrick – Michael’s age has a lot to do with it – which becomes apparent when she turns up at Patrick’s flat just as he is waving Cara (Nadia Parkes) off. Alex pretends she is in the area for pizza, though Patrick immediately asks whether she came to see him. He tells Cara that Alex is an old friend, giving the situation a level of awkwardness that only becomes worse when Sam sends Alex Michael’s number and she accidentally calls him after dropping her phone.
Horgan and writer Ailbhe Keogan present a masterclass in cringe comedy, reuniting after working together on Horgan’s Apple TV series, Bad Sisters. Alex meets Michael anyway, but Patrick is never far from the conversation. He later texts to say that she looked upset when he saw her, explaining that Sam told him about Lars (Steve Windolf) and that he assumed Alex had moved on. Despite the continuous back and forth that would be exhausting in your twenties, never mind your fifties, it’s hard to not root for them, even if you want to shake some sense into both. Alex wants Patrick to understand what she wants from him, but she also refuses to say it plainly, while Patrick seems equally incapable of deciding what he wants from her, allowing her to take the blame for their underexplored connection.
For anyone without Alex’s debilitating avoidance, I imagine Michael certainly makes a convincing case for himself. He tells Alex to lean on him because he has time and wants to spend it with her, even though Alex is repeatedly finding reasons not to kiss him. She invites him to dinner at hers rather than accepting his sauna invitation, uses an approaching bus as an excuse to avoid another kiss, and later has her parents and Ruari (Aran Murphy) join them at dinner to avoid being alone with him. When Michael finally tells her that he does not want to be someone she just relies on, Alex is more upset to lose her sounding board than a man she could have legitimately dated. Perhaps it’s cruel, but it’s a hilarious depiction bound to make you laugh in an era where comedies on television rarely fall under the genre.
Her professional life is not much easier. Alex meets Rachel Lash (Vivienne Acheampong), a psychologist with a column in The Times, to discuss signing her, only to spend much of the meeting talking about Patrick. She has convinced herself that his new relationship is fundamentally wrong for him and assumes that, at 47, he is with a woman in her twenties solely because he wants to have a baby. Before she can embarrass herself further, Sam steps in, meaning Alex must leave without resolving any of the things she has brought to the meeting. She later takes Rachel to a Goblin Seed reading, apologising for the awkwardness of their first encounter and salvaging a potential client. It’s another example of the muddled boundaries between Alex’s personal and professional life – lines she and Sam blur too often – with Horgan finding humour in how incapable she is of keeping the two separate.
The bigger conflict, however, comes when Alex tells Sam that she wants autonomy by becoming a partner. Sam is unimpressed, reminding her that she has spent 30 years building the business while Alex has just lost Malcolm (Douglas Hodge), then salvaged a meeting she helped mess up in the first place. Alex eventually asks to become a junior partner, though the conversation makes clear that the tension between them is only beginning. Whyte continues to be a highlight, boasting a screen presence that is hard to look away from. She’s commanding, sharp-witted, and a performer that suits the cynicism of Horgan’s comedy well.
Ruari, meanwhile, is dealing with a crisis of his own. Murphy continues to play the teenagers discomfort well, finding a heartbreaking vulnerability underneath the character’s increasingly strange behaviour. A painful conversation with Michael about practicing the art of restraint, followed by a fight involving friends of Bridget (Scarlett Rayner), leads to another devastating scene with Alex where he opens up to her about how impossible it feels to be a man. While it is easy to roll your eyes, incel culture and the social messaging influencing boys and men are rampant issues, but Youth is to yet explore the subject with the severity it deserves. Its tendency to introduce a new aspect of the storyline each week means Ruari’s struggles with masculinity risk being left underdeveloped.
Episode 4 ultimately brings Alex’s personal and professional problems together in much the same way as the previous episodes have done. She wants independence from Sam while still needing her, and wants Patrick despite having no idea whether he can give her what she actually needs. However, it’s Alex’s foray into dating that gives the episode much of its humour, as Horgan once again reminds audiences why she is the autofiction auteur, relying on awkward and cringe comedy that is as unflinching as Alex’s self-destructive tendencies. The episode is consistently laugh-out-loud funny, with Youth shaping up to be the best TV series on air right now that you are probably not watching.
