The British drama “Riot Women” begins with a blackly comic suicide attempt. Beth (Joanna Scanlan), a teacher on what she calls “the wrong side of fifty,” burdened by loneliness, depression, and the incessant needs of others, pours herself a stiff drink and steps up to the noose she’s hung from the rafters of her airy farmhouse. Then the phone rings: her ungrateful brother, making demands. She tries again—another ring, another request, this time from a friend. She plays the piano, doesn’t she? Will she join a group of fellow-amateurs for a charity gig? Twice thwarted, Beth sighs, says yes, and gets on with the business of living.
“Riot Women,” a BBC series now available to American viewers on BritBox, is the latest by Sally Wainwright, who’s made a specialty of stories about iron-willed older women in her native West Yorkshire. The darkness of the opening recalls “Happy Valley,” her acclaimed crime drama about a policewoman (Sarah Lancashire) caring for her young grandson, who is the product of a rape, after her daughter’s suicide. Wainwright followed that show with “Gentleman Jack,” a historical romance about the nineteenth-century diarist Anne Lister (Suranne Jones), who courted a fellow-heiress—and enshrined years of lesbian dalliances in coded writings. “Riot Women,” despite its bleak prologue, has a more crowd-pleasing premise: a bunch of broads, mostly at or near retirement age, start a band. “We sing songs about being middle-aged and menopausal and more or less invisible,” Beth says. “And you thought the Clash were angry.”
The formation of the band brings together a core quintet, several of whom are stretched thin as members of “the sandwich generation”: Gen X-ers managing the care of ailing parents while still looking after immature adult children. A cop named Holly (Tamsin Greig) retires, then finds that wrangling her wayward family is a full-time job of its own. Jess (Lorraine Ashbourne), the owner of a local bar, is a second mother to her three grandkids, who live under her roof along with her daughters. It’s a full, quarrelsome house, but her situation is still preferable to that of Beth, a divorced empty-nester whose son, Tom (Jonny Green), only returns her calls to delay celebrating Mother’s Day for a second time. “They’ve all had the best of me,” Beth says of her ex-husband and her self-absorbed offspring. “And now that I’ve got nothing left to give, I’m dispensable.”
It’s Beth who dubs the band Riot Women, riffing on the riot-grrrl movement, and who discovers its flame-haired singer, Kitty (Rosalie Craig), while she growl-belts Hole’s “Violet” to an indifferent, near-empty pub. Kitty, too, could use the outlet: she’s reeling from a violent breakup that leaves her homeless and a notice informing her that the child she gave up for adoption decades earlier would like to contact her. That the child turns out to be Tom is a soapy coincidence, but Wainwright treats the revelation as a catalyst rather than a twist: Beth and Kitty are forced into thorny conversations at the start of their unlikely friendship. One of the show’s richest ironies is that, though both push the band in an “angrier” direction to give voice to their pain, neither wants to burden Tom with what they’ve been through. It’s the lot of mothers to soften the world for their children—but he can’t understand what they’ve endured if they insist on obscuring it.
Thus bonded, the pair become the band’s Lennon and McCartney, with music fairly flowing out of them after Kitty moves in. (Other members are slower to get to grips with their roles, and with one another: as Kitty tells Holly on their first day of rehearsal, “You were a bit shit, but you’ll get there. . . . It’s only a bass.”) Their lyrics often feature familiar women-of-a-certain-age plaints; one is built around the phrase “Give me H.R.T.,” and another around the hated put-down “You’re just like your mother.” The songs, by the female rock duo ARXX, make cathartic anthems of these grievances. But when the women are done screaming, the stuff they were screaming about remains.
The show’s genius lies in connecting such individual woes to societal failures. “Riot Women,” like “Happy Valley” before it, dramatizes how women pick up the pieces as institutions crumble around them. Signs of decline abound in the series (and, lately, across British TV as a whole). Beth doesn’t trust the N.H.S. to care for her mother, who suffers from advanced dementia; the band’s guitarist, a midwife named Yvonne (Amelia Bullmore), is too burnt out by her overloaded schedule to appreciate the miracle of life. Kitty is taken in by Beth in part because receiving assistance from the municipal housing office could take years. And when Holly tries to remediate the sexual harassment endured by another policewoman (Taj Atwal) by reporting it to the chief, her faith in leadership proves catastrophically misplaced. “Riot Women” ’s zags between feel-good female empowerment and frank depiction of the world’s ills can be jarring, but its intimate, almost confessional discussion of middle age, along with its understated wit, more than make up for its minor faults. Sometimes the dissonance even feels apt: navigating personal joys and struggles against the backdrop of global disaster is increasingly a part of being alive.
The show’s postcard-ready shots of the northern countryside, with its verdant hills and winding roads, are another incongruity, belying the challenges of survival there for those on the fringes. Kitty, whose worldly possessions fit into two plastic bags, is seen repeatedly in the same clothes, and bourgeois hostility to her presence in Beth’s middle-class neighborhood compounds her feelings of worthlessness. Even some of the band’s more gainfully employed instrumentalists have to pursue their new hobby on a budget—a small but thoughtful acknowledgment of the economic realities of artistic self-expression.
Wainwright has crafted her ensemble with similar care. The characters are so finely observed, and their emotional lives so wonderfully textured, that I’d happily have watched them just go about their days. The rant-prone Jess is the sort of personality that feels instantly recognizable: the matriarch who gives and gives and gives, and who expects complete loyalty in return. I couldn’t help smiling at her tendency to talk over the soft-spoken Beth, forever griping about others’ thoughtlessness but oblivious to her own. But the series really hinges on the relationship between Beth and Kitty—two women who believed themselves to be fated for dissatisfaction until they found each other. Scanlan, in particular, is remarkable, her smiles conveying not only Beth’s joy but her relief in discovering that she can still feel so deeply at all. After joining the band, she fulfils another lifelong desire by getting a tattoo. Kitty has one of her own that reads “let it bleed”: a replica of Courtney Love’s self-described “midlife-crisis” tattoo, which the Hole singer once explained as an invitation to “stab me more, motherfuckers.” Embracing misery is one kind of defiance; demanding to be heard is another. ♦
