There’s a great TV series being made about a post-menopausal rock band – isn’t it Riot Women | Tiff Packer

THere’s a moment in the first episode of Riot Women, the latest drama from acclaimed writer-director Sally Wainwright, of Happy Valley fame, when a group of postmenopausal women discuss which songs they should cover in their newly formed menopause rock band. Uptight and depressed, Joanna Scanlan’s Beth decides that The Rolling Stones’ Satisfaction (I Can’t Get No) – a 1965 single – might be a great choice for this group of middle-aged rockers who so far seem to have only heard of ABBA.

“Can you imagine being sung about satisfaction Women of a certain age? Isn’t that interesting?” Beth smiles in amazement, as if women over 40 have suddenly forgotten what it means to have an orgasm. “It’s funny because we’re women. It’s touching, like we’re still up for it.” ‘Okay, let’s all sing a song that makes us sound like a bunch of lesbians,’ chimes in Amelia Bullmore’s Yvonne.

If Wainwright had made these women a “bunch of lesbians” we could have had a show rooted in some kind of reality instead of another version of The Full Monty (and not in a good way). Instead of men dancing to hot chocolate, women of a certain age form a grrrl punk rock band.

Writers can write about things they don’t know about, of course, but there definitely has to be a throughline. Riot Women uses a seminal moment in music history as a simple plot device because Wainwright doesn’t know enough about it to skim the surface. Instead, she barely references it at all, the closest thing being the use of Hole-adjacent riot band Violet’s song throughout the show and Kitty (Rosalie Craig) wearing a replica of Courtney Love’s famous Let it Bleed tattoo down the inside of her arm.

While Wainwright’s other shows have a fundamental honesty that oozes television, Riot Women never reaches anything approaching those kind of heights because it feels so utterly superficial. The real thing was anything but. The riot grrrl movement, which began in the early 1990s in the Pacific Northwest of the United States in cities such as Seattle, Portland, and Olympia, was a feminist punk movement that used music and political activism to struggle against sexism, homophobia, misogyny, and racism. It was a scene where girls had to be in the bands and in the front row – at Bikini Kill shows, Kathleen Hanna would urge “all the girls to stand in the front.”

The feel behind the TV show Riot Women, by contrast, feels very straight-laced and traditional, the opposite of the music scene it claims to celebrate. Riot grrrl was founded by women who rejected those same principles. A big part of that was the weirdness of the scene both on stage and in the audience, and there were weird members in riot bands like Bikini Kill, 7 Year Bitch and The Butchies, and in grunge and rock bands that emerged around the same time that were influenced by the sound or politics of the movement, like L7 and Hole.

Lesbians have always been invisible to society, but the riots gave us a voice, gave us a place to go, to feel safe. The spectacle was inclusive, eliminating the gap between audience and artist. A generation of young women have come of age and come out to this music.

In Riot Women, the music that should be at its core is just a flimsy framework for a series about middle-aged straight women upset by the bad men who left them, the adult sons (and daughters) they raised, and the difficulties of dealing with aging parents. They also seem to think that rock music is only for men. “It would have been okay if we were boys,” says Jess, played by Lauren Ashburn, a purple-haired waitress with a heart of gold, whose rock music dreams were crushed when she was young because of her gender. (Patti Smith, Joan Jett, Stevie Nicks, Janis Joplin, Chrissie Hynde and Pat Benatar must have made it to the north of England.)

Wainwright used all the decorations and accessories that suggest an exotic scene. The show is set in the gay Hebden Bridge, with most of the action taking place in a pub filled with pride flags. But the whole thing feels like window dressing because Wainwright couldn’t write a single central queer character despite creating a show around a movement rooted in that history. Instead, she wrote marginal characters like Jess’s transgender daughter, and another daughter who has three children with two men until she runs off with a woman (“She’s not a lesbian!” shouts Jess).

Then there is the younger policewoman turned backing singer who is brutally beaten by a male colleague. Wainwright certainly missed the memo that gay characters have a history of murder and abuse on screen, and we’re fed up with that.

Wainwright often dips her toe into lesbian culture. She created Gentleman Jack, Anne Lister’s “unconventional” story, and then of course Halifax’s beloved Last Tango, about a gay couple. But Wainwright was completely wrong about this. It all feels like a joke, cartoonish and not centered around any emotional realism at all.

I wanted to love Riot Women, I really did, but seeing something so important to the people who lived it reduced to just a joke and a bad costume party left a sour taste. By the end of the show, I was so full of perimenopausal rage, I barely needed anesthesia when I went to the dentist for a root canal. Then again, in Wainwright’s world, you probably needed a good old dose of “hormone replacement therapy.”