One thing I like about Sharon Horgan is that her characters have jobs--and the scripts take more than a few seconds to pay attention to the jobs.
In "Catastrophe," the Horgan character is a teacher. Various subplots concern her return from maternity leave, her inability to reach one particular student, her ambitions for "dean-tier" status, her role in a poorly planned assembly. The other grade-three teacher stops by to joke about her dream of an early death, her wish for a 10am bottle of Merlot. It's an image of teaching that is absent from most other shows.
"Divorce" follows the owner of a gallery--her fantasy of reconstructing the gallery is a kind of "counter melody" for the fantasy of reconstructing her own private life.
"Youth" is new in the sense that a Horgan job setting has never been *more* important. A substantial part of the story happens at or around the office. The co-lead is an employer of Horgan/Alex; her name is Sam. The main supporting character, Ruari, becomes an intern within Sam's company. Many of the major crises--a shattered detente with a George R.R. Martin figure, a failed attempt to "manage" a bawdy Judi Dench-adjacent novelist, a moment of unprofessional conduct in a "courtship" meeting with a podcaster--are crises of work. Horgan uses the publishing setting to smuggle in some of her own thoughts on storytelling. "This person took the hardest moment in her life and made art from that--it's the best thing a writer can do." "An ideal draft would subtract maybe eighty to ninety percent of the text that is specifically focused on secret plantation-era anal-sex encounters...."
I imagine that Horgan--a literary veteran--has many stories about what has (and has not) occurred at HBO. Horgan has outlasted many corporate attempts to torpedo her own work. I'm happy to see her making use of this material in "Youth."
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