If you're a midlife woman who recognises the monumental struggle of being sandwiched between the needs of your children and your ageing parents, all while being banjaxed by the menopause, then BBC One's Riot Women is for you.
Even if you don't identify with being a midlife, menopausal woman, Riot Women is still for you - so few of this demographic are represented on our TV screens, the show will offer an interesting insight into an invisible group who need to work extra hard to be whoever they want to be.
The six-part series is out now for your viewing pleasure, and for writer Sally Wainwright, the show is very personal. On a basic level, Riot Women is about five menopausal women who form a punk band to help them yell through their difficult emotions.
On a deeper level, there's just so much to see on screen that women relate to. Predominantly, the sheer rage of being ignored, forgotten about and being abandoned by the people who should be supporting these issues jump out of the screen and smack you in the face
Society hates raging women and they always have done. Yet, it's a perfectly normal reaction to everything a certain generation are forced to face, especially at a time hormones are raging along with the actual rage.
Besides the sheer anger that jumps out of the screen at viewers, the series is an almost direct portrayal of Sally's own menopause experience and midlife juggling. Along with the realistic snapshot of the unseen challenges faced by women of a certain age, there's some excellent original music thrown in for good measure.
According to Radio Times, Sally's husband left her after 29 years of marriage, just after her mother was diagnosed with dementia. She cared for their two sons, who were on the brink of major decisions relating to their education at the time, and she looked after her mother until she died six years after her dementia diagnosis.
It's her experience with looking after somebody with dementia that inspired Sue Johnston and Anne Reid's characters in the show - they both play mothers of band members whose minds are slowly deteriorating.
If you're worried that Riot Women might be slightly downbeat and leave the peri or non-menopausal women out there terrified of what 'the change' might bring, don't worry - it's not like that at all.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Women's Hour, Sally reassured viewers, "It's just about midlife - menopause is just an aspect of that - and I wanted to find a way of writing about this part of your life in a way that was uplifting and engaging and interesting."
She explained that through the midlife juggle, the menopause starting in the middle of it all was almost one thing to balance too many for her at the time.
Amid hot flushes, poor memory, and a low mood, the writer experienced a "low self-esteem that you don't expect". She added, "It just seemed well worth writing about," and she put the script together instead of getting therapy.
Although her own menopause experience provided a lot of material to use for the Riot Women characters and storylines, Sally admits to not being very musical - although she did go full method and learned to play the drums in solidarity with the actresses in her show.
Real-life Brighton band ARXX [Arrows in Action] were brought on board to write the original music for the series - they penned the song, Seeing Red among others. We've also caught up with a real band of midlife women, who shared how the power of music has helped them.
Sally also took HRT for the first time, to experience its effects firsthand in a further act of solidarity. Sally concludes, poignantly, "As ARXX wrote in Seeing Red, if the menopause happened to blokes, we’d be getting HRT from Tesco."
