I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about middle-aged women. At 54 I’ve been one of them for at least a decade. And we middle-aged women are on my mind because it feels like every television show that I’ve been enjoying, there we are. We can point to a lot of terrible things happening in the world, but to have our pick of brilliantly conceived and executed television featuring interesting women of a certain age to choose from is something to put in the Good News Bucket. (You don’t own a Good News Bucket? You need to get one. Mine is half full. That’s how I roll.)
It also feels a bit revolutionary. This is not television specifically made for middle-aged women to watch. No AI algorithm could come up with the subject matter for these shows. It is just fantastic television that happens to feature women in their 40s and 50s and 60s. Women with laughter-induced wrinkles and frown lines often unbothered by Botox, not to mention existential axes to grind. They have, in most cases, very few fecks left to give.
Let me count the ways that middle-aged women are killing it, sometimes literally, on the streamers. For a start, there’s the speculative fiction tour-de-force Pluribus. This is the story of an alien virus that has infected almost the entire human race creating a shared consciousness, where everyone co-operates, there is no racism and all humans are happy, all of the time. It’s virus-enforced hive-mind happiness, but still.
Carol Sturka, played magnificently by Rhea Seahorn (53), is one of the 13 people on Earth who are immune to this virus. A successful romantasy author living in a sprawling house in Albuquerque, she is miserable and misanthropic at the best of times but all of this goes into overdrive when she has to grapple with the new world order.
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Carol is not happy about the loss of individuality, agency and free will. She’s a sweary, booze-addled middle-aged woman on a mission to get the world back to normal, and with all the moral quandaries thrown up by the bold premise, she is scintillating to watch. (One of my favourite things is that whenever Carol gets angry about the situation, she ends up accidentally killing random people. There’s something very on the nose there about the power of a middle-aged woman’s rage.)
The Beast In Me is preposterous and yet compelling television and a lot of that is down to the star Claire Danes (46) who plays the unfortunately but memorably named Aggie Wiggs. Look, this psychological thriller centred around Wiggs and possible serial-killer-next-door Nile Jarvis is kind of bonkers but the middle-aged Pulitzer-winning writer protagonist keeps you watching.
She lives alone, her wife has left and her young son was killed in a car crash, and now she’s decided to write a book about this neighbour to try to unravel his possible evil deeds. Aggie is also fond of a drink and her house, while a mansion in a wealthy enclave of Long Island, is falling apart and delightfully cluttered. The interactions between her and Nile as she is forced to confront her own beastliness and grows closer to uncovering the truth about him are truly chilling.
I mostly watch Loot – starring Maya Rudolph (53) as Molly Wells, an out-of-touch often tone deaf billionaire divorcee and bumbling philanthropist – for the clothes. Oh, the clothes. Pyjamas to die for. Elegant coats with statement sleeves. An endless parade of covetable patterned dresses. Molly/Maya, with her freckles and maximalist attitude to dressing up, gives two fingers to the notion of invisibility in middle-age. You could see Molly from space in some of her rigouts.
Finally, in Down Cemetery Road, there is an embarrassment of mature woman riches. You’ve got the exceptional Emma Thompson (66) playing a sharp-tongued, unapologetically obdurate private detective Zoë Boehm who declares early on, with the self-awareness of deep middle-age, that she’s someone who “doesn’t drink prosecco or bond emotionally”. She’s digging into the dark truths around the disappearance of a schoolgirl after a house explosion on a street in Oxford. Her client is museum conservationist Sarah Tucker played by stunning Ruth Wilson (43) who won’t let her nagging suspicions go. Neither women suffer fools. Another gift of middle-age.
Interestingly, apart from having middle-aged female protagonists, these programmes have something else in common: they were all created by middle-aged men. Pluribus is written by Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan (58). The Beast In Me is by American novelist Gabe Rotter (47). Loot was created by two male collaborators Alan Yang (42) and Matt Hubbard (47) while Down Cemetery Road is the work of Slow Horses writer Mick Herron (62).
And apart from their age, what most of these female characters created by men have in common is that they are wealthy, in some cases obscenely. The key to their appeal though is not their solvency, but their age and stage of life. Their wisdom accrued from bitter life experience, their self-possession and, in Maya Rudolph’s case, their directional dresses.
The optimistic Good News Bucket owner in me hopes that somewhere in the bowels of Netflix, Apple TV, Prime, Peacock and all the rest, some brilliant minds are coming up with stories about middle-aged women who are not affluent but who have tales to tell that are just as compulsive as the ones featuring Carol, Aggie, Molly, Zoë and Sarah. And maybe some of these stories will even be created by middle-aged women. I can’t wait.
