“Are you uncomfortable?” It is the essential question of punk rock, which seeks to confront the listener with the outré and the taboo. It’s also a lyric from “Seeing Red,” a punk rager about menopause by the eponymous band of “Riot Women,” which arrived Wednesday on BritBox with a sensibility as pointed as a safety pin.
And for the neophyte punk rockers of the series, there is no subject society finds more taboo or uncomfortable than middle-aged womanhood.
We first meet the creative duo behind the band engaged in differing acts of self-destructiveness. Beth (Joanna Scanlan), a teacher and pianist whose husband has left her and whose grown son rarely sees her, is getting ready to hang herself. The phone rings — it’s her brother, grumbling about the cost of long-term care for their mother with dementia. Then it rings again — it’s her pub-keeper friend, Jess (Lorraine Ashbourne), asking if she wants to form a band for a charity talent show.
Beth leaves the rope unused; her life, as Lou Reed sang, was saved by rock ’n’ roll. (Beth later jokes that she’s like Uncle Vanya: “I can’t even kill myself properly.”)
Beth, soft-featured and suburban, is nobody’s idea of a punk. Kitty (Rosalie Craig), swaggering, volatile and running from a traumatic past, decidedly is. We meet her on a bender in a market aisle, swigging vodka and popping paracetamol, just before she confronts the police while chomping on a chef’s knife.
The resulting injury — an angry red slash from the corner of her mouth — gives her the look of a punk front woman even before Beth finds her onstage at a dive karaoke bar, yowling a feral cover of Hole’s “Violet.” Beth recruits Kitty as the band’s singer, and they become unlikely songwriting partners.
This might sound like the setup for a wacky musical comedy about late-in-life amateur rockers. But “Riot Women” comes from the writer and director Sally Wainwright (“Happy Valley,” “Gentleman Jack”), which tells you two things: It will take place in a gloomy corner of Yorkshire, and there will be more to it than its high-concept premise.
While the series has more humor than the dark “Happy Valley,” it is not a comedy — nor is it, at least not exclusively, about making music. Instead, it’s about how characters have been shaped by circumstance and how their shared experience leads them to, well, band together.
For Beth and Kitty’s bandmates, also including Holly (Tamsin Greig), a police officer about to retire, the group is at least initially a lark. For Beth and Kitty, it’s a way to raise a voice: for Beth, about her feelings of invisibility, for Kitty, about her anger at a lifetime of abuse.
Womanhood, in the conceit of “Riot Women,” is punk rock. It’s rage, rebellion, horror and blood. (A lyric Kitty writes about childbirth uses an evocative metaphor involving a pineapple.) It’s having a story that people won’t listen to unless you crank it up to 10.
There are elements here of other recent themes in TV. CBS’s “Matlock” built its premise on the idea that women become invisible after a certain age; the female Cold War spies in Peacock’s “Ponies” gain cover from the fact that women are regarded as “persons of no interest.” In “We Are Lady Parts,” Muslim women voice their frustrations and passions through punk; “Girls5Eva” used the pop music business to explore how the culture looks at middle-aged women (or doesn’t).
“Riot Women,” however, sticks closer to the realistic social drama of Wainwright’s past work. Tonally, it is somewhere between the grimness of “Happy Valley” and the sentimental late-life romance of “Last Tango in Halifax,” with a tartly funny streak.
Here, the crime story involves the culture of misogyny on the police force. The driving relationship is the unlikely alliance between Beth and Kitty, who are connected both by music and by elements in their past. Kitty shows Beth a means and a voice for expressing her own rebellion; Beth, Kitty says, gives her a feeling of “what it’s like to be normal. Relatively normal.”
Craig, who has worked largely in theater, is arresting as Kitty. She has a commanding stage presence, even when slurring drunk or smashing up an ex-lover’s car. There is something of the skittish wild animal about her, quick to lash out and skeptical of good treatment. But she also reveals an intuition and self-awareness as she comes to — slightly — let down her guard.
The conflicts in “Riot Women” are not always as nuanced as those in Wainwright’s past series. Its characters are flagrantly and frequently wronged — imposed on, taken for granted, dismissed, harassed — and our sympathies are rarely called into question. The subplots sometimes veer into melodrama. A lack of subtlety is no vice in punk rock, but it can wear in a six-episode drama season.
Fortunately, Wainwright is too curious about her characters to sketch them in their simplest terms. By the end of its first season (a second one has already been ordered), the series has expanded beyond its putting-on-a-show premise to map out a rich network of the women’s family and social relationships. In the end, “Riot Women” is about community, which after all is what a band is.
James Poniewozik is the chief TV critic for The Times. He writes reviews and essays with an emphasis on television as it reflects a changing culture and politics.
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