In a recent episode of “Your Friends & Neighbors,” Mel Cooper (Amanda Peet) wakes up one morning drenched in sweat. She blows air down the front of her soaked tank top to cool down after a fitful night’s sleep. She goes about her morning, listlessly attempting a strength workout and procrastinating on a writing project by googling “perimenopause symptoms insomnia.” As she scans the hyperlinks — Hot flashes! Irritability! Sexual dysfunction! Night sweats! — her eyes widen in recognition as she clicks on … Rage.
It is a scene many women can identify with. It also reflects an increasing cultural openness about menopause, which eventually affects roughly half of humanity but has only recently become a subject of broad public discussion. (“Menopause is having a moment,” The New Yorker wrote last year.) Peet feels honored to contribute to the growing canon of such portrayals on TV and film.
“I really love the idea that Mel’s inciting incident is the realization that she’s in menopause,” said the 54-year-old actress, whose arc this season, the show’s second, tracks her hormone-fueled unraveling.
“I am in menopause — crazy menopause,” Peet said, adding that she is also taking Tamoxifen, a breast cancer medication that can intensify symptoms. “So it was really great to have that outlet at work.”
It has been almost 40 years since Blanche Devereaux (Rue McClanahan) experienced what she termed, in anguished tones, “The Change” in an October 1986 episode of “The Golden Girls.” Since then, there have been some memorable depictions, including a much–discussed 2019 monologue in “Fleabag” by Kristin Scott Thomas.
“Menopause comes,” her character breathlessly declares to an enamored Phoebe Waller-Bridge, “and it’s the most wonderful [expletive] thing in the world.”
More recently there has been a cluster of series that treat menopause not as a punchline as in days past — think Archie Bunker walking on eggshells around a hormonal Edith on “All in the Family” or the Huxtable children speaking of their menopausal mother in the past tense on “The Cosby Show” — but as a matter-of-fact part of women’s lives. Series like “Riot Women,” “Better Things,” “Too Much,” “Bad Sisters,” “The Change” and “Small Achievable Goals,” among others, have handled the topic with nuance and unflinching realism.
It mirrors a broader cultural surge in menopause discussion and education, said Dr. Sharon Malone. An obstetrician-gynecologist and women’s health expert, she has talked about menopause in podcasts by Oprah Winfrey and Michelle Obama, among other forums.
“This is something I’ve been doing for the past 30 years, but it’s moved out of the little room and now it’s everywhere,” Malone said. “It’s in the big rooms.”
Tamsen Fadal, the author of the best-selling book “How to Menopause” and an executive producer of the 2024 documentary “The M Factor,” said the more modern depictions were notable simply for being both accurate and expansive.
“The best portrayals I’m seeing right now are not about generic hot flashes or about a woman feeling ragey or hormonal,” she said. “It’s about identity. Sometimes it’s about grief; sometimes it’s about power. But I think the most important thing it’s about is the truth, and we avoided the truth for a long time when it comes to women.”
Honesty pulsates through a straight-to-camera monologue about midlife that Sam Fox (Pamela Adlon) delivered on a 2020 episode of “Better Things.” “You retreat, you’re shamed, you’re unseen,” Adlon utters in her signature rasp. “No one has prepared you for it, and no one ever tells women this is going to happen. Our prize in the goody bag, after everyone has had their fill of us, is shingles, thin bones, whiskers and bunions. You’re not viable.”
Adlon, 59, said she was inspired to write the speech after seeing a “gross green pamphlet” about menopause in her gynecologist’s waiting room. The monologue “was really about visibility and women making themselves invisible,” she said, comparing it to a memorable “Inside Amy Schumer” sketch spoofing double standards about attractiveness. But Adlon believes attitudes are evolving.
“This lust for youth, I think, has abated,” she said. “Older women are the new black.”
The actor and activist Naomi Watts helped normalize the conversation around menopause with her best-selling 2025 book “Dare I Say It,” which details her experience with early menopause. (Now 57, she began experiencing symptoms at 36.). She also created Stripes Beauty, a successful menopause wellness brand.
Watts has seen firsthand how her real-life advocacy has influenced her art. “Everyone knows I’m in menopause by now in my industry, because I’ve said it loudly from the rooftop,” she said with a laugh, adding that it’s probably not a coincidence that Lena Dunham wrote a stirring scene about aging for Watts in Dunham’s 2025 rom-com series, “Too Much.” For Watts, it’s a gratifying change from earlier menopause portrayals in pop culture.
“They were just comical or acting crazy, slamming doors, yelling,” she said. “While it was funny, it felt very one-dimensional.”
There is nothing one-dimensional about Sally Wainwright’s bracing “Riot Women,” which follows a group of middle-aged women in Yorkshire, England, who form a punk band and channel their menopausal rage. The concept seems ripe for comedy, and it is. But Wainwright, 60, also goes to dark places — suicidal ideation, anger, depression, invisibility, caretaker exhaustion — giving the show, which premiered in January, a spiky authenticity.
“It didn’t occur to me not to show them angry,” Wainwright said. ”I didn’t worry about whether the audience would like it or not. I just wanted to write about what these characters are going through.”
Similarly, Meredith MacNeill, 50, had a clear goal in mind when she created the brash Canadian comedy “Small Achievable Goals” with Jennifer Whalen. The CBC series, which returned for its second season in January, follows two women in the throes of menopause who produce a beauty podcast together.
“The whole show is about menopause,” MacNeill said. The goal was to take “everyday occurrences that we’re supposed to feel shameful about and put them on television.”
Change has been slower at the movies. A 2025 study by the Geena Davis Institute, which champions equitable representation in media, surveyed the 225 top-grossing domestic films between 2009-24 that prominently featured a woman 40 or older. Only 6 percent mentioned menopause at all. When movies do mention it, it is usually as comic relief. Still, there have been some gems, including Samantha’s breezy “hormone whisperer” list of meds and supplements in “Sex and the City 2” (2010) and Madea’s (Tyler Perry) astute summary of sandwich generation stress in “Madea’s Big Happy Family” (2013).
Watts, for one, couldn’t be happier that more stories centering midlife women are getting made. “Art reflects life; life reflects art,” she said. “It’s great because conversations need to take place everywhere.”
“Whether those conversations are sparked by someone from an older generation, from a TV show, from a joke, it needs to be surround sound, coming from all places,” she added. “We have every reason to be a bit loud right now.”
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