For the past couple years, menopause has been the hot topic among Gen X and Xennials now that they’re in its unrelenting, sweaty grip. Halle Berry and the best-selling memoirist Naomi Watts have been promoting menopause-wellness programs and beauty and health products. And a year after it first hit shelves, readers are still unpacking Miranda July’s critically acclaimed book “All Fours,” the irreverent autofictional portrait of a perimenopausal woman’s voracious sexual awakening.
The havoc that menopause wreaks on bodies and minds can feel nothing short of absurd. But, while it has provided an abundance of great material, can it actually be the basis for an entertaining TV sitcom?
The veteran comedy writers and actors Meredith MacNeill, 50, and Jennifer Whalen, 55, are the creators, executive-producers and stars of “Small Achievable Goals,” a boldly candid half-hour workplace sitcom on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) that depicts two Gen X women going through menopause, much as they are experiencing it themselves. The premise alone is a large achievable goal: selling what Ms. Whalen described as “a joyful comedy about menopause” to Canada’s premiere network, especially amid a culture that is squeamish discussing anything related to the menstrual cycle. Then again, the comedians have a proven track record at CBC, with multiple writing and acting awards to their names.
They’re considered “Canadian comedy royalty,” according to, among others, their castmate Alexander Nunez. Though Canada has exported the comic actors Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy, as a Toronto resident Lisa Levy (no relation to Mr. Levy) explained it, our neighbors to the north do not have an obsessive celebrity culture like Americans do, unless they’re “athletes or Drake,” so there is not, say, a Tina-and-Amy equivalent in Canada (referencing Tina Fey and Amy Poehler). But if there were, these two would qualify.
“Small Achievable Goals” — or “SAG,” as the women appropriately call it — deftly strikes the balance between raucous comedy and heart-rending poignancy as an unlikely work partnership unfolds between polar opposites whose hormones have gone haywire, amid an office full of bewildered young millennials and zoomers. “This is a crazy time of life, but we wanted to make a laugh-out-loud comedy about [menopause] and talk about these things openly,” Ms. Whalen said.
“SAG” introduces Julie (Ms. Whalen), a fastidious, guarded and weary podcast producer of investigative journalism. She recoils at her new assignment: producing “Glow Up,” a makeup podcast for Kris (Ms. MacNeill), a gregarious, irrepressible TikTok beauty influencer who loves to hug and balks at boundaries.
The fictional pair have had to pivot throughout their careers, which gains them footholds only in relevance while they watch their young colleagues leapfrog them for promotions. What’s worse, both middle-aged women are blindsided by the onset of menopause: Julie is suddenly having nonstop hot flashes, mood swings, body odor — and a waning libido, which complicates her otherwise happy marriage. Kris, a single mother, is hit hard by a perimenopausal “tsunami” of bleeding, excruciating cramps and an intense sex drive. While Kris’s manic energy overwhelms Julie, the women eventually unite to confront the various indignities of aging in a culture that resists, even reviles, it.
The eight-episode series premiered on Feb. 25 and quickly became the third-most-watched comedy series on English-language Canadian television, and No. 5 in streaming, on CBC Gem, CBC’s streaming platform. Not surprisingly, 67 percent of those viewers were women. While clips are available here in the United States on social media, the show is not, though the CBC just announced it had renewed “SAG” for a second season.
Rage, Frustration and Shock
Ms. MacNeill and Ms. Whalen are better known in this country for “Baroness von Sketch,” a female comedy sketch show that also aired on CBC, and on the IFC channel in the United States for five seasons (the women decided to end it) from 2017 to 2022. Like “SAG,” it was CBC’s No. 3 comedy, and still ranks among the top 15 most-watched English-language comedies in Canada.
The award-winning series, created with the Second City alums Aurora Browne and Carolyn Taylor, found a cult following in the U.S. among women of a certain age because of its inclusion of all kinds of women, and the precision with which it characterized the seismic shift that happens in your 40s.
It was Ms. Taylor who introduced Ms. MacNeill to Ms. Whalen in 2014 during Ms. MacNeill’s brief writing stint at “This Hour Has 22 Minutes” — a Toronto-based satirical news sketch show, described as “SCTV” meets “The Daily Show.” Ms. MacNeill had just returned to Canada four years earlier from London, where she’d been acting onstage at places like the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Globe Theatre when she became pregnant and moved back in with her parents in Amherst, Nova Scotia. While at “This Hour,” Ms. MacNeill and Ms. Taylor began to toy with an idea for a women’s sketch comedy show.
“Baroness” gave voice to the internal monologues and inside jokes — evoking the rage, the frustrations, the shock, both good and bad — about getting older.
“I felt deeply seen and heard,” said the actress Molly Ringwald, who became an instant fan when her friend, Nicole Manek, the costume designer for both shows, turned her on to “Baroness.” “I love how fearless they are about laughing at the indignities of aging.”
The women often draw on their life experiences in their work — Ms. Whalen is married to the former TV writer David MacKenzie, with whom she has a 16-year-old stepson; Ms. MacNeill has a 14-year-old daughter. Their experiences, and those of the people in their lives, lend themselves well to their mission: “We created things that we wanted to see, what I thought our friends would want to see, because that’s what we weren’t seeing,” Ms. MacNeill said. Added Ms. Whalen: “I want to see women onscreen the way that I know them to be.”
Male viewers were amused, too. “I was shocked by how many men loved the show,” said Ms. Whalen, who had often been the only woman in a TV writer’s room. She recalled one man telling her, “I had no idea women had internal monologues.” “Which was stunning to me,” she said. “Stunning.”
‘A Laugh Is True, It’s Real’
Ms. Whalen — who studied improv at Second City after dropping out of the theater program at York University in Toronto her sophomore year — has a searing, deadpan wit that lends itself perfectly to her frequent role as the cerebral adult in the room: a teacher, a woman in her “statement jewelry years.” Ms. MacNeill is practically feral with her “Baroness” characters, like the scorned woman recounting the details of her unraveling marriage to friends while extolling the virtues of her new dry shampoo. Or the visibly nauseated woman in “Hungover at 40” who insists that hangovers are the same in her 40s as in her 20s, only to barf into file cabinets and snap at her colleagues.
On paper, it may seem strange for a Shakespearean actor who crowdsourced funds to train at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art to be the wildly uninhibited physical comic among the improv-trained women. In fact, Ms. MacNeill, who is as provocative as she is unpretentious, never considered herself to be a comedian until recently. But that formal education appears to only deepen her portrayals of the mercurial, intense emotional life of women entering their middle age, both in performance and on the page.
“A laugh is true, it’s real,” Ms. MacNeill said. “Sometimes women laugh about the surreal details of life. There’s a freedom in it. When I’m with other women, we’ll laugh so hard, I think I might crap myself. But it has to come from a place of truth, which is sometimes really painful.” She added: “[With ‘SAG’] as with ‘Baroness,’ it’s not a laugh a minute when I’m creating. There’s a lot of pain.” And much of that pain comes from focusing her work on shame.
“Meredith taps into rage brilliantly,” said the actress Martha Plimpton, whose love for the sketch show, and the comedians, led her to become a guest star. “She has a true gift for physical comedy, it’s like she’s rubberized. Very few comedians are willing to look like what they feel — she has no vanity about that.”
Ms. Plimpton likens the women’s antic comedy dynamic to a 21st century Lucy and Ethel, with Ethel as a willing accomplice. The women are indeed close — they live down the street from each other. And their creative partnership is symbiotic, according to their fellow “SAG” cast members Mr. Nunez (“Evan,” Julie’s gay Zennial-age boss) and Tricia Black (“Robyn,” a millennial nonbinary podcast producer), who admiringly described them as “work wives.”
“Sometimes they finish each other’s thoughts,” said Mr. Nunez, who also writes for the show. “When you hear them both speak it’s almost like you’re listening to one continuous stream of consciousness.”
Ms. MacNeill said this was partly by design. When they first started working together, she “strategically placed my butt beside Whalen [in the writers room],” said Ms. MacNeill. “My background wasn’t writing. So a lot of the stuff, I had to stand up and do it, which was sometimes frustrating, because my brain just thinks differently. I see it physically, and Whalen was always like, ‘Do it!’”
Ms. Whalen, who can act as a Meredith translator for the network, explained, “Sometimes with comedy, it is really hard to get that tone on the page.”
As the two began work on “SAG,” Ms. Whalen read everything she could about women aging and menopause and quickly became disheartened. “I was like, ‘But this can’t all be negative,’” she said. “‘This is a transformation!’ So much of it is about wanting to stay the same, resist aging. Think about it, the best compliment you get if you haven’t seen somebody for a long time, is ‘You haven’t changed.’”
Not that these thoughts haven’t crossed her mind — after all, they’re baked into our culture. “I’m obsessed with aging — I want to age well,” said Ms. Whalen, citing Rita Moreno and Jane Fonda as positive examples. “A central question I want Julie to answer for herself: ‘Who am I going to become?’ I want her to become the best version of herself. I admit, I have a fear of aging, because our messaging around it is so negative, because you’re not useful anymore.”
But, Ms. Whalen added, the news was not all bad. “The best thing I ever read about it said that when it’s over, you return to the 10-year-old weirdo you were before the hormones kicked in. I’m like, ‘Oh, that would be great.’ I mean, get ready for it, girl. Because when I was 10, all I did was wear my bathing suit 24/7 with my towel as a cape.”
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