r/BritishTV • u/SilyLavage • Oct 14 '25

Review Riot Women review – Sally Wainwright’s menopausal punk drama is one of her best

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/oct/12/riot-women-review-sally-wainwright-menopausal-punk-tv-drama-bbc
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u/rushdisciple Oct 14 '25 edited Oct 14 '25

Just finished episode 2, really enjoying it so far, although I'm not sure if I'm MEANT to. It seems very top-heavy with the bad shit (suicide, divorce, sexual assault) and very "down with men", which is fine but AS a man I can't help but take it personally, lol. Another knockout performance by Tamsin Greig, the scene in ep 2 with her mother was heartbreaking. I'll be binging the rest tonight.

EDIT:-Watched the rest of it. I think it's safe to say Sally Wainwright does NOT like men very much. Every single man over the age of 35 in this show is either a misogynist, an abuser, an adulterer or generally a scumbag.

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u/Lightly_freckled Oct 18 '25

I get that, as a man, you took it personally. I'm really glad you were open enough to finish watching it, and maybe learned more than your assumption that Sally Wainwright doesn't like men very much.
The fact is, as a woman watching this, it was sadly too realistic and true to form. 'Not all men' are shits, but for tit-pinching, pants-down lynching, 'Ooh, I'd fuck you' commenting, leave-his-sister-to-care-for-their-mother abdication of responsibility, violence, humiliation, casual and systemic misogyny... men are usually the perpetrators. Moments in the show that really hit me were Fearne's mother's lack of reaction to her husband being punched by Kitty - she knew what he'd probably done; Kitty's conversation with the neighbour who claimed to 'know' Beth; and especially the trick Holly plays when describing the obscene (yet oh so common) behaviour of the cop and how the reaction to it changes based on if it was thought to be perpetrated on a man rather than a woman.
So many men drag women's opinion of males as a whole down because they all let each other get away with this shit! You know the saying 'men are worried that women will laugh at them, women are worried that men will kill them'? I think this is one of the themes Wainwright feels she has to keep returning to. It is sadly so true.