{"id":133214,"date":"2026-01-14T13:17:09","date_gmt":"2026-01-14T13:17:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/133214\/"},"modified":"2026-01-14T13:17:09","modified_gmt":"2026-01-14T13:17:09","slug":"riot-women-review-rockin-middle-aged-menopausal-women","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/133214\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Riot Women’ review: Rockin’ middle-aged, menopausal women"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Sally Wainwright, the creator and writer<\/a> of \u201cHappy Valley\u201d<\/a> (policewoman story), \u201cGentleman Jack\u201d (historical lesbian drama), \u201cLast Tango in Halifax\u201d<\/a> (septuagenarian romance) and last year\u2019s \u201cRenegade Nell\u201d<\/a> (period action fantasy) has created and written a new series,\u201dRiot Women,\u201d about some friends, new friends and not-quite friends \u2014 most \u201con the wrong side of 50\u201d \u2014 who come together to form a band to play at a talent show. What begins as a lark turns serious and opens the door to a drama-infused comedy \u2014 or perhaps a comedy-flecked drama \u2014 whose busy first season resolves much but, in its final moments, opens the door to an already scheduled second.<\/p>\n

Set in a West Yorkshire city that functions narratively as a small town, it folds some of Wainwright\u2019s themes into a kitchen-sink feminist musical soap opera on the themes of friendship, family, maternity, misogyny and age. As a story of unlikely people coming together in an unlikely project, it recalls such films as \u201cThe Commitments,\u201d \u201cThe Full Monty\u201d and \u201cCalendar Girls,\u201d though it might also be seen as a middle-aged version of \u201cWe Are Lady Parts,\u201d minus the South Asian specificity. It\u2019s aspirational, as all such stories must be to make them worth telling, but tense; one worries things might go seriously wrong, even as the implied promise of the series is that they might not.<\/p>\n

This is true from the opening scene, in which Beth (Joanna Scanlan), whose husband left her a year before; whose married son, Tom (Jonny Green) ignores her calls and texts; and who, feeling invisible in the world, sets out to hang herself. She\u2019s interrupted twice by phone calls. The first is from her brother, angry that Beth sold their mother\u2019s house to pay for her round-the-clock care; he wants his future inheritance. The second is from Jess (Lorraine Ashbourne), who runs a pub. She\u2019s been fooling around on the drums and has had the idea to form a rock band to play at a local talent show, \u201cfor a laugh.\u201d She wants Beth, who can play the piano, to join \u2014 suicide at least temporarily averted. (The rope \u2014 blue, so you can spot it \u2014 will stick around.)<\/p>\n

Beth visits a music store to buy a digital keyboard. \u201cI\u2019m in a rock band,\u201d she tells the clerk. \u201cPunk-ish, mainly \u2026 We sing songs about being middle-aged and menopausal and more or less invisible. And you thought the Clash were angry.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou don\u2019t normally get keys and synths in punk bands,\u201d says the clerk, but, considering, comes up with Devo, Atari Teenage Riot and, surprisingly, L.A.\u2019s own the Screamers. And though this is possibly the result of Wainwright googling \u201cpunk bands with synthesizers,\u201d the thought that this obscure yet seminal band from \u201870s Hollywood resides in the consciousness of a music store clerk in 2025 West Yorkshire is rather delicious.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Kitty (Rosalie Craig), a drunk woman in a leopard-print coat is going mad in a supermarket, grabbing kitchen knives and boxes of pain relievers and guzzling vodka from bottles snatched off the shelf, while Garbage\u2019s \u201cOnly Happy When It Rains\u201d blasts on the soundtrack. This brings to the scene police officer Holly (Tamsin Greig), whose last day of work it is, and her partner, Nisha (Taj Atwal).<\/p>\n

Holly: \u201cPut the knife down.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kitty: \u201cI haven\u2019t got a knife.\u201d<\/p>\n

Holly: \u201cYou\u2019ve got a knife. In your hand \u2026 The other hand.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Two <\/p>\n

Kitty (Rosalie Craig), left, and Beth (Joanna Scanlan) connect after a drunken karaoke session.<\/p>\n

(Helen Williams\/Britbox)<\/p>\n

Holly, it will transpire, has already committed to playing bass in Jess\u2019s band, bringing along her uptight sister, Yvonne (Amelia Bullmore), a midwife, to play guitar \u2014 neither has any experience \u2014 and Nisha, who also brings a friend, to sing. After an argument over whether they should perform a cover of ABBA\u2019s \u201cWaterloo\u201d or, as Beth hopes, something original to express themselves, she (feeling unheard once more) leaves, only to encounter, of all people, Kitty, released from custody, karaoke-singing Hole\u2019s \u201cViolet\u201d<\/a> in a bar, expressing the sort of rage Beth wants to express. (Craig, a powerhouse, and comparatively young at 44, is a musical theater star.) Exhilarated and inspired, she bonds with Kitty, who will remember none of it when she wakes up the next morning at Beth\u2019s, including the song they wrote together on the drive home. (\u201cJust Like Your Mother,\u201d based on an accusation by Beth\u2019s husband \u2014 one of three originals provided by the Brighton punk duo, Arxx<\/a>.) Kitty has a lot of baggage, including the area\u2019s most famous criminal for a father, but Beth, who enlists her for the band, will help her unload it.<\/p>\n

There will be bumps along the way, steps forward and back, because \u2026 that\u2019s the story. Their grown, but not exactly adult, children will doubt them \u2014 \u201cTraditionally, there is talent involved,\u201d says Jess\u2019 daughter Chloe (Shannon Lavelle), of her mother\u2019s talent show plan. They will doubt themselves. With a couple of exceptions, the men they know or meet do not come off well, tending to be selfish, childish, weak, dishonest, dismissive, greedy or violent. (Reacting to the news on television, Jess catalogs the woes of the world: \u201cBombs, rocket attacks, refugees, poverty, inequality, exploitation, hunger, anger, shooting, torture, hatred, abuse, misery \u2014 and do you know what\u2019s behind it? \u2026 Men. Every time it\u2019s men.\u201d) They complicate the drama, yet are somewhat beside the point.<\/p>\n

The band, which will be called the Riot Women, is the spine to which the stories are attached without particularly being the story itself. (All the characters have separate challenges.) But much as it\u2019s exciting to watch the group come together, and exhilarating in the good old-fashioned let\u2019s-put-on-a-show way to see them succeed onstage, it\u2019s a pleasure just to watch the actors at work. Often the women are shown close-up, in long conversations; it gives you time to take them in and makes the series feel intimate. \u201cRiot Women\u201d is real; not so much in its narrative, with its backstage musical tropes, pointed points and a coincidence that would make Dickens think twice, but in its character details, and in the contracting and expanding space between the players \u2014 the tales within the tale.<\/p>\n

Rock on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sally Wainwright, the creator and writer of \u201cHappy Valley\u201d (policewoman story), \u201cGentleman Jack\u201d (historical lesbian drama), \u201cLast Tango…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":133215,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[11416,68166,1576,36992,4264,68168,68170,68167,48,52,51,47,50,49,1555,6316,68169,68172,68171,68173,315],"class_list":{"0":"post-133214","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-band","9":"tag-beth","10":"tag-friend","11":"tag-holly","12":"tag-husband","13":"tag-jess","14":"tag-kitchen-knife","15":"tag-kitty","16":"tag-la","17":"tag-la-headlines","18":"tag-la-news","19":"tag-los-angeles","20":"tag-los-angeles-headlines","21":"tag-los-angeles-news","22":"tag-man","23":"tag-mother","24":"tag-policewoman-story","25":"tag-riot-woman","26":"tag-sally-wainwright","27":"tag-talent-show","28":"tag-time"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133214"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133214\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/133215"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}