Keeley Hawes’s new Channel 4 and Top Video drama, The Murderer, introduces a premise that feels each daring and past due. It follows Julie (Hawes), a menopausal girl, overpassed and emotionally stalled, who labored as a hitwoman in her early life and rapidly comes out of retirement to go back to the career.
It’s pulpy, stylised and laced with darkish humour. However underneath the style trappings lies one thing extra placing – a cultural pivot in how menopause and midlife womanhood is being written and visualised on British tv.
Traditionally, menopause has been tv’s silent transition. Onscreen, it was once one thing feminine characters both didn’t have, didn’t discuss, or, when stated, had been mocked for. Sitcoms of the Eighties and Nineteen Nineties, similar to Birds of a Feather or Completely Fabulous, performed menopausal signs for laughs.
In drama, menopause tended to reach invisibly: girls stopped being protagonists, had been subtly phased out of storylines, or returned handiest as better halves, moms, or scientific circumstances.
Tv has all the time been formed via business concepts about early life, intercourse attraction and marketability – concepts that left little room for midlife girls except confined to supporting roles – or contained throughout the home, ensemble buildings of cleaning soap operas.
Whilst displays like New Methods (2003), Final Tango in Halifax (2012) and Name the Midwife (2012) steadily shifted the dial, menopause itself remained offscreen: regarded as both too area of interest, too organic, or too awkward to dramatise.
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What The Murderer gives isn’t just a menopausal personality, however midlife as premise. Fairly than sidelining her lifestyles degree, the display we could its rhythms – emotional turbulence, interior chaos, sparkles of disorientation, flashes of wit and a deep, simmering energy – seep into the storytelling itself.
The tale ties her hormonal shifts to emotional volatility, a way of private invisibility, fractured circle of relatives lifestyles and existential grief. After which she snaps. However it’s now not cave in; it’s re-ignition. She turns into deadly — now not regardless of midlife, however on account of it.
I analysis the way in which midlife feminine protagonists are offered in British tv drama. I’ve just lately written about Russell T. Davies’ paintings particularly, arguing that his dramas (similar to It’s a Sin, 2021, and Nolly, 2023) reclaim ignored figures via striking their emotional complexity and cultural marginalisation on the centre.
Nolly presented a compelling reappraisal of Noele Gordon (performed via Helena Bonham Carter), the cleaning soap megastar unceremoniously dumped from her personal display – a choice now extensively understood to be rooted in sexism and ageism. Davies refused to let her disappear quietly, as a substitute making her menopause-era energy and defiance the dramatic core of his display.
The trailer for The Assasain.
In a similar fashion, my paintings with Professor Kristyn Gorton on Sally Wainwright’s collection Satisfied Valley (2014) explores how Catherine Cawood (performed via Sarah Lancashire) embodies emotional realism, grief, rage and midlife fatigue – now not as flaws, however as substance. Those feminine characters don’t simply react to occasions; they’re the tale. Their feelings don’t seem to be incidental however generative, propelling the narrative, shaping its tone and important target market reputation.
The Murderer suits this trajectory. It joins a rising frame of British TV that blends style hybridity with emotional and political resonance. Like Killing Eve (2018) or I Hate Suzie (2020), it makes use of the construction of the mystery to suppose seriously about gender, growing old and identification.
The menopausal hitwoman is, after all, a metaphor up to a plot. She is rage personified: a girl not ruled via the social niceties that frequently mood feminine illustration. She’s additionally humorous, erratic and uncontained.
A menopausal reckoning
Importantly, The Murderer doesn’t merely rejoice her transformation. It phases it as messy, uncomfortable and morally advanced. That is menopause now not as a redemptive arc however as a reckoning, with a frame that’s converting, a previous that received’t keep buried, and a society that prefers girls neat, younger and silent.
There’s nonetheless paintings to do. British tv stays way more comfy exploring middle-aged male protagonists than girls in the similar lifestyles degree. However what’s converting, and what I steadily discover in my analysis, is the tone and ambition with which feminine midlife is now being scripted. The place menopause was once as soon as a punchline or absence, it’s turning into a tale. And now not simply any tale, however one formed via style, irony, feeling and possibility.
Due to its long-form, visible medium, tv can discover the peculiar in ways in which resonate deeply, from the exhaustion of grief to the disappointment of being pushed aside. Menopause, lengthy under-explored, gives wealthy dramatic territory: emotional volatility, physically transformation, the redefinition of self. What The Murderer understands is that those aren’t indicators of decline. They’re equipment of narrative energy.
By way of giving us a menopausal personality who’s central, subversive and narratively in keep an eye on, The Murderer indicators a broader shift. It reminds us that midlife isn’t an endpoint, however a web page of possible – for drama, for comedy and for cultural critique. British tv is, ultimately, starting to give menopause the storylines it merits.
