HALLIE EPHRON: Seems like I spend a fair amount of time grazing among the various streaming offerings, and occasionally striking gold. Britbox is my favored pasture, and I have just started watching an absolutely fantastic series: RIOT WOMEN.
It "ticks all the boxes": great cast, fantastic acting, and most of all fabulous (funny, wry, believable, ...) writing. And it's been green-lighted for a second season.
No surprise that it comes from the pen of Sally Wainwright.
She's an amazingly prolific English TV writer, producer, and director. She is known for her dramas set in West Yorkshire, such as LAST TANGO IN HALIFAX and HAPPY VALLEY.
She's also the creative behind my all-time favorite British police procedural SCOTT AND BAILEY.
And now three cheers for RIOT WOMEN. It's about five iron-willed women of a certain age, each some version of damaged goods, who come together and form a rock band. A PUNK-rock band! Singing their own material that channels their anger and creativity and can bring tears to my eyes.
Profound stuff when you wipe away the tears of laughter.
It gets off to a roaring start with a failed suicide attempt (life intervenes)... It swings from tense to hysterically funny to insightful to profoundly sad. Always affirming life and hope and sisterhood.
As one of the women (Beth) says of their band: "We sing songs about being middle-aged and menopausal and more or less invisible."
Let's just say that it had me standing up and cheering at my television screen.
Anyone else out there watching RIOT WOMEN? My one advice is: when it seems to be going dark dark dark, hang in there with it.
What else is atop your watch list at the moment?
This does sound amazing . . . I'll have to look for it.
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