Sally Wainwright’s new BBC drama Riot Women opens not with music, but with the sound of ice clinking in a glass and tonic fizzing as it’s poured over gin.

Beth (Joanna Scanlan) calmly prepares to end her life in a beautiful, light-filled room overlooking green gardens and a vista of rolling hills – a quiet, almost idyllic setting for an act of despair. It’s a devastating and deeply ironic beginning, setting the emotional stakes with precision.

Riot Women takes its name from, and subtly reworks, the 1990s Riot Grrrl feminist punk movement. This is no whimsical story of midlife reinvention. When Beth is drawn, almost accidentally, into forming a punk band with four other women of a certain age, the series unfolds as something richer: a fierce, surprising exploration of care-giving, menopause, resilience and the reclamation of voice.

The ensemble cast is crucial. Alongside Scanlan, Wainwright brings together a group of formidable performers including Amelia Bullmore, a frequent collaborator whose presence links this series to the distinctive tone of earlier work such as At Home with the Braithwaites (2000) and Happy Valley (2014-2023).

Lorraine Ashbourne is excellent as Jess, bringing dry humour and sharp, unfiltered observations that cut through the show’s darker moments. Tamsin Greig’s Holly, meanwhile, brings a brisk edge that undercuts sentimentality without ever losing emotional depth. Together, they capture the show’s tonal dexterity – its ability to let humour and anger sit side by side.

Rosalie Craig as Kitty – the youngest member of the group – adds another layer. In one striking scene, a hot flush during a chaotic arrest is portrayed without metaphor or euphemism: menopause as sudden, disruptive and inescapably public. These moments are neither played for comedy nor medicalised. They puncture the narrative with a kind of physical truth.

The decision to focus explicitly on midlife marks a shift. Where other dramas might hint or gesture, Wainwright places it at the centre – structurally, thematically and sonically.

Punk as midlife language

The punk framing is more than a stylistic flourish. The music, written by Brighton punk duo ARXX, is raw and deliberately unpolished. The cast learned to play their instruments from scratch, and their awkward early rehearsals mirror the hesitations and vulnerabilities of finding a new kind of voice.

Punk has historically been the sound of youthful rebellion; here, it becomes the medium for midlife articulation.

The trailer for Riot Women.

The music itself is extraordinary. It’s angry, raw and unexpectedly moving – a sonic expression of rage, frustration and survival that feels both personal and collective. There’s nothing glossy or performative about it: the songs grow out of the women’s experiences of family, work, menopause and friendship, and they hit with a force that’s as emotional as it is political.

Punk becomes not just a genre, but a way of giving shape to feelings that have been contained for too long. Its raw, unpolished energy cuts through irony and self-consciousness, allowing those emotions to be expressed openly and with unfiltered emotion.

Much of that energy is channelled through Kitty, who has only ever sung karaoke before joining the band. On stage, she’s electrifying: her voice is powerful, and she performs with the intensity of someone who has found a language for experiences that have never had an outlet. There’s a raw, unsettling power to her presence – the sense of a past that can’t be fully spoken, only channelled through sound.

Kitty embodies how midlife expression can be forged from pain, anger and survival, becoming something both personal and collective.

This punk-inflected turn also makes sense in the context of Wainwright’s career. As my colleague Kristyn Gorton and I explore in our recent book, Wainwright’s work consistently foregrounds women whose lives and voices fall outside television’s dominant storylines. Riot Women extends that project into new cultural territory.

Riot Women also arrives within a media landscape that has been slow to make space for older women. While there has been an uptick in midlife-centred stories, they are often muted in tone or treated as exceptions. Wainwright – one of the few high-profile British screenwriters consistently placing midlife women at the centre of her work – goes further. She integrates menopause into a broader story about midlife, giving it cultural and emotional weight without letting it define the story.

The series also gestures to the structural pressures shaping these lives: ageism in commissioning, the scarcity of roles for older women, narrow ideas about audience demographics. By weaving these industrial realities into the story, rather than commenting from outside, Wainwright makes Riot Women both a drama and a critique.

Set in Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire, the series carries her trademark sensitivity to place and class. These women are not celebrities or high-powered executives; they’re public servants – teachers, carers and community workers. This rootedness gives the show a political weight beyond its surface premise.

What’s most striking is the show’s tonal balance. The quiet despair of the opening scene isn’t erased by the band’s formation; it underpins everything that follows. Wainwright doesn’t romanticise midlife, but she refuses to render it invisible.

The series is unflinching about the realities of this life stage: divorce, care-giving for both parents and children, suicidal thoughts, bodies that are bleeding and ageing, anger that has nowhere to go and the fragile but sustaining force of female friendship. These are not neat storylines; they are ongoing negotiations with life. By giving these experiences space and weight, Wainwright re-frames midlife as a layered cultural terrain, situating menopause not as an isolated biological event but as part of a dense network of social, emotional and physical changes.

Where Amazon Prime drama The Assassin folded menopause into genre conventions, Riot Women is louder and more expansive. It doesn’t simply include menopause in television drama, it weaves it into the aesthetic, emotional and political fabric of the series. That is both culturally and industrially significant.

By centring midlife experiences in a punk-inflected drama, Wainwright opens a new televisual space for women: neither comic diversion nor medical case study, but fully realised creative protagonists. The series is less about a single transformation than about a shared refusal to stay quiet.

From its first scene, Riot Women makes clear that silence is no longer an option. In turning everyday experiences of midlife into collective, cultural expression, Wainwright has produced her boldest and most necessary work yet.

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This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Beth Johnson, University of Leeds

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Beth Johnson receives funding from the AHRC.