In 2026, menopause went mainstream in a significant way,[1] notably with newly minted menopause militant Melinda Gates propulsing the subject into the public forum in an op-ed piece in The New York Times, emphasizing her struggles being heard and finding treatment, despite having access to the best healthcare in the world (2026). Menopause also featured politically and prominently in two popular US TV programs, Your Friends and Neighbors (AppleTV 2025-) The Real Housewives of Rhode Island (RHORI) (Bravo 2026-), whose producers deployed humor and quirk to weaponize TV’s cultural power as a discourse-inciter in order to provoke conversations, awareness and buzz around this topic, subverting a sort of menopause omerta that exists both in life and in popular culture. Direct depictions of menopause, which often remains enshrouded in silence as real-life women feel ashamed to discuss it, are still rather rare on the small screen, as are complex representations of older women,[2] who are often not particularly visible on a medium whose commercial capitalist imperative to provide attractive and aspirational content often favors the young. Moreover, it is not only in the media that menopause still remains a rather stigmatized and taboo subject, but also in society, medicine, public policy, and academia, as it continues to be understudied, disregarded and misunderstood,[3] something which is perplexingly astounding given that it is a naturally occurring phenomenon that has been affecting approximately half the population since time immemorial, and may now even do so for more than a third of their lives. In this light, Your Friends and Neighbors and The Real Housewives of Rhode Island could potentially read as subversive and liberatory—and TV shows have historically had a role in advancing feminist causes, even if imperfectly so (Brundson et al. 2008). Yet these questions are complex, and media studies scholars like Amanda Lotz note that feminist, societal, capitalist and patriarchal discourses often negotiate, interact and compete with one another—meaning that TV representations of women and women’s issues are often ambiguously socially progressive (2014). Thus, do Your Friends and Neighbors and RHORI truly feature positive female representations that are helpful to an important cause—as was purported to be the case in the media?[4] Or do they actually perpetuate discourses that participate in a “regime of truth,” to use a Foucauldian concept,[5] that women’s hormones—whether due to their periods, maternity or menopause—somehow make them “less than?” Could they be contributing to a culturally conceived and received “truth” that women are hormonal “messes,” and the figure of the older woman as a “crazy witch” and/or “hysterical?” And if so, could they nevertheless concurrently be sites of transgression, resistance and emancipation that unbind and redefine a taboo and undo a sort of omerta?
The ways in which menopause and older women are depicted on TV are not without potential societal consequences. Scholars like John Fiske have underlined the “pedagogical” nature of television (1987), whilst Gerbner et al. have affirmed that the “cumulative effect” of TV’s under-representation of the elderly can affect people’s beliefs (2002). In alignment with the American-British tradition of feminist media studies and feminist TV criticism (Brundson et al. 2008; Lotz 2014), this essay aims to examine some of the internal and external discourses around menopause in Your Friends and Neighbors and The Real Housewives of Rhode Island in order to discern their ambiguities, potential and limits.
A Social Critique Featuring Real-life Middle-Aged Problems and a Woman Driven Over the Edge by Hormones
The series Your Friends and Neighbors not only explicitly and overtly addresses menopause, but it also strikingly and provocatively makes it an important part of an entire season, showing how it affects the life of the main female character, Mel Cooper. The title of an LA Times article proclaims: “‘Your Friends & Neighbors’ Is Unafraid to Tackle the Indignities of Middle Age,” and as menopause is included in the article, it is thus considered to be one such “indignity” (Neophytou 2026). Yet the series itself does something rather rare in featuring the trials and tribulations of people in their late 40s and 50s, rather than concentrating on young, sexually available, single people as many series do, even if this focus is possibly linked to the target consumer group, as middle-aged white-collar workers are desirable consumers who subscribe to and pay for streaming services.[6] The main premise of the series is a bit far-fetched: When Mel’s husband, the main male character, Andy, or “Coop,” loses his job as asset manager, he embarks on a life of petty crime by robbing his rich neighbors to sustain his fancy lifestyle—reasoning that they are so very wealthy and possess so many objects that they could not possibly miss one or two, here or there. Nonetheless, there are many aspects of the series that are quite realistic, especially the depiction of family life in a small town or suburb. The series does not sugarcoat family life, but shows its murkier, darker side: misbehaving adolescents who are rude to their parents, divorce, adultery, relationships with in-laws, awkward middle-aged sexuality, mental illness and death. It also serves as a both a glamorization and social critique of the one-percent lifestyle, with Coop, who was not born rich, sardonically commenting on his success, life and actions in voiceovers, as he goes through what is a mid-life—or possibly an existential—crisis, in a way is perhaps a bit ironic, or even another contribution to a “regime of truth,” that of the aspirational “self-made” man, given that the series is financed by Apple TV, which is an arm of one of the biggest financial and stock market giants.
Menopause hits Mel like a truck in the second season, and the show pulls no punches in depicting her symptoms, the first of which are vaginal dryness during sex and waking up soaked in sweat due to hot-flashes—and depicting a female TV character thus exhibiting and enduring such a state of menopausal abjection—is rare, and almost unheard of, and especially unseen. Then Mel starts to unravel. She is unable to control her emotions and her actions—especially her drinking and her rage—with one of her friends commenting that menopause might actually render her homicidal, associating menopause with becoming non compos mentis. She gets fired, and gets angry with her neighbors because their dog uses her lawn as a toilet. As revenge, she drops a bag of excrement off at their home, and knocks a porta-potty over into their yard that workers had been using whilst building a wall between their respective properties, discharging chemical and human waste onto herself in the process. For this act, she gets arrested and put in jail. She, then accidentally—due to enraged driving—runs the dog over and buries it in the yard.
Thus, hormones are seen as driving an intelligent professional woman—a Princeton graduate and psychologist—completely insane, transforming her into a violent miscreant. Lack of body mastery is often a way of undermining empowered women in popular culture, as they defy the interdiction for women not to make a spectacle of themselves due to the hormonal disruption in their bodies (Sweet 2022). Yet, the actress who plays, Mel, Amanda Peet, who has input into how her character is portrayed, was pleased with this representation and found it to be important, noting in a press article: “I’m excited, like most women my age, that menopause isn’t a dirty word anymore and that we’re seeing more of it on TV. And I thought it was great that Tropper[7] made it funny, that she wasn’t just this sexless couch potato” (Goldstein 2026).[8] This comment illustrates the complexities inherent in TV representations of women, as humor can both attract attention to a problem, and be a site a liberation, even as it can also undermine characters by making them look deranged. Viewers had mixed opinions about the credibility and the veracity of this depiction, with people wondering how a character played by an actress who is her fifties seems unware of menopause and is only now in perimenopause, while others saying parts of it are true to life.[9] Peet’s lack of Botox also seems to be an important part of the discourses surrounding her character. It has been seen as “distracting,” which is an alarming sign of ageism, although a fan neverthless told her she “love(s) her wrinkles” (Goldstein 2026).
In the end, Mel is shown taking supplements and using lubrication to have an affair with a younger man from the neighbors’ worksite, and thus empowers her body and mind to be “normal” again (or like her younger self). However, the solution she finds is not really discussed clinically, even if her conversations with her friends about her issues is a way of opening up and exposing the topic to the greater public, and thus lifting the omerta. Yet there is nothing substantial to really be “learned” from her plotline, as it is very superficial, and reinforces heavily the “regime of truth” concerning the dysfunctional and “less-than” status of the female body. The media portrayal of any hormonal issue is often a double-edged sword. On one hand, highlighting hormones’ potential for creating chaos brings to light health issues that may really be bothersome, “normalizes” them, and encourages people to get help, as Mel’s friends advised her to do. On the other hand, rather than being depicted as a natural life phase, menopause is being shown as ruining a woman’s life. Moreover, when TV or film representations dare to show older women as fully flushed out characters, or any women as main characters, they are often white and privileged, and represent the concerns of the affluent classes associated with “white feminism,” rather than the true concerns of society at large (Hoerl 2025). For example, how to work in a job that involves physical labor or lead a team meeting when you are having hotflashes with insufficient insurance to cover the treatments? Thus, the “reality” of menopause, both in life and on screen, remains sadly disregarded and unseen.
The Mega-Franchise Featuring Almost Exclusively Older Women Does Some Good?
In contrast, and interestingly enough, the latest telereality addition to the Bravo housewives’ mega-franchise,RHORI, actually handles the topic of menopause rather seriously, and perhaps even more pedagogically than Your Friends and Neighbors, even if it also adds in a bit of humor as well. The Real Housewives franchise is a true mixed bag of empowerment and feminist/patriarchal contradictions. On the one hand, it heavily emphasizes beauty, fashion and unrealizable beauty norms, as so decried by feminists like Naomi Wolff (1991), that involve a lot of body modifications. Yet, the protagonists find their looks empowering in programs that are among the few to focus mainly and exclusively on middle-aged and older women, giving them a voice and platform that often launches them as entrepreneurs or influencers (and increasingly, they are often not truly “housewives” but actresses and businesswomen). Yet, like in Your Friends and Neighbors, the show is concerned with wealthy women, and RHORI is particularly ethnically un-diverse, even if this is not true of the entire franchise.
In the first season’s 8th episode, “housewife” Liz McGraw, a proprietor of a legal medical marijuana dispensary, shows her friend, Dolores Catania how she has begun developing a menopause gummy to deal with aggravating symptoms, as she explains her personal experience and motivations. The women are seen enjoying samples, exhibiting visible joy and relief. They are then shown going to visit Rhode Island State Senator Lori Urso and State Representative Karen Alzate, who explain on camera why Rhode Island is the very first US state to officially make women with menopause a protected class of workers, recognizing that as women go through this life transition they need to work and still have something to contribute to society. RHORI was praised by the Boston Globe for the “spotlight” it shone on the issue (Fitzpatrick 2026), and Urso’s own health issues and battle with menopause, which almost cost her her job, inspired the bill (Hoffman 2025). McGraw and Catania followed up by continuing to nourrish cultural discourses surrounding menopause, notably expressing themselves in the media about what helped them with it (Bido 2026). This of course, to some extent, represents a commercial opportunity for them, but they are also publicly discussing a topic they define as being still rather taboo, and in so doing, oppose themselves to traditional media representations that insist upon youth and “ladylike” language and behavior. The menopause storyline received mixed feedback from viewers, with some disliking the idea that menopause makes you “crazy,” with others asking questions to one another about the topic and even asking for support, which shows that RHORI may have actually helped members of the public.[10] It was handled with more gravitas than is common in the franchise (depending on one’s take on women finding relief in getting high), and was clearly a pointed and politcally inspired message to female viewers. In most episodes, in the Real Housewives franchise women fight and yell, become inebriated, travel, party, wear skimpy clothes, and, use a lot of swear words, often being as crude and lewd as possible—at times potentially empowering themselves through the deliberate appropriation of rage-filled “hysteria” (and getting richer from the resulting clicks). Thus while appearing a bit frivolous and trivial on the surface, the Real Housewives franchise may also represent a site of liberation and fantasy for viewers, a bit like spectators “melodramatic indentifications” with the wealthy and troubled Suellen Ewing in Dallas (CBS 1978-1991) as analyzed by Ian Aeng (1997). Moreover, the Real Housewives franchise is a case in point of the intermingling, negotiating, and inextricably linked captitalist, patriarchal, societal and feminist discourses on screen, and the resulting complexities and ambiguties of gender represenations therein. The “housewives” are affluent enough to “get away” with their rowdy behavior, which attracts attention from the media and the public. Like most famous people, they also hustle as influencers, which means they are always peddling something, including, in the case of Liz McGraw from RHORI, menopause gummies.
In conclusion, the depictions of of menopausal women on Your Friends and Neighbors and RHOBI are sites of subversion and positive deviations from the “norm” of keeping them out of sight. They represent true efforts to liberate menopause, a normal fact of life, from being taboo, even if they are imperfect. Menopause is shown as making women suffer, participating in the “regime of truth” that women’s bodies make them weak. Nonetheless, the issue is complicated, as for many women, there are no symptoms, but for some, it is a truly awful experience—although perhaps not to the extent of Mel in Your Friends and Neighbors, as few seem to get arrested for it. RHORI’s showcasing of Rhode Island’s bill to make menopausal workers a protected class is significant—as researchers lament the lack of public policy or even discussion of menopause in government or workplaces (Dalingwater and Winett, 2025). Yet the concerns of older women on screen, from the Golden Girls (NBC,1985-1992), to Grace and Frankie (Netflix 2015-2022), to the current day, remain too often focused on issues of “white feminism” and played for laughs, which means that important subjects risk not being taken seriously enough, even if humor often removes the awkwardness around or resistance to considering them. One can only hope that these TV programs will pave the way for more inclusive depictions to come and continue to incite the propagation of public discourse that subvert the menopause omerta.
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Dr. Anne Sweet holds a Phd from Sorbonne Nouvelle University (France), an advanced research master’s degree from Paris Cité University (formerly Paris 7) (France), a Master’s of Arts degree from Columbia University (USA), and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA). The French CNU (or French National Council of Universities) has certified her as a researcher in media studies and English-speaking studies (CNU qualifications in sections 71 and 11). She is a lecturer at L’École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées and IGENSIA in France. Her research focuses on feminist media studies.
Contact: acsweet@orange.fr ; back-up/secondary email: anne.sweet@uwalumni.com
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-anne-sweet-phd-914b088b/
Bibliography
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Bido, Tatiana. “RHORI’s Dolores Catania and Liz McGraw Talk Menopause.” NewBeauty, 17 May 2026, https://www.newbeauty.com/view/rhori-sdolores-catania-and-liz-mcgraw-talk-menopause. Accessed 12 Aug. 2026.
Brunsdon, Charlotte, and Lynn Spigel, editors. Feminist Television Criticism. 2nd ed., McGraw-Hill Education, 2008.
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Fitzpatrick, Edward. “‘Real Housewives of Rhode Island’ Spotlight Menopause Bill in R.I.” The Boston Globe, 11 June 2026, https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/06/11/metro/real-housewives-ri-menopause-bill/. Accessed 11 Aug. 2026.
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Goldstein, Jessica M. “Amanda Peet Knows a Thing or Two About Losing It.” Marie Claire, 5 June 2026, https://www.marieclaire.com/culture/tv-shows/amanda-peet-your-friends-and-neighbors-season-2-finale-interview/. Accessed 11 Aug. 2026.
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Neophytou, Nadia. “‘Your Friends & Neighbors’ Is Unafraid to Tackle the Indignities of Middle Age.” Los Angeles Times, 4 Aug. 2026, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/awards/story/2026-08-04/your-friends-neighbors-season-2-apple-tv-jon-hamm-amanda-peet. Accessed 11 Aug. 2026.
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Footnotes
[1] As announced notably in The New Yorker, see Mead 2026.
[2] See, for example, Sweet 2022, who analyzes both the way women’s hormonal issues are represented on TV as well as the representation of mothers.
[3] See, for example, Dallingwater and Winett 2025, who research societal discourses around menopause and public policy.
[4] See; for example, Neophytou 2026 or Fitzpatrick 2026.
[5] See, for example, Foucault 1980.
[6] See for example, the potential link between middle-aged consumers and streaming content in Sweet 2018; see also Hoerl 2025.
[7] Jonathan Tropper, series creator.
[8] Peet has actually been a real-life advocate for women’s health issues, creating awareness about breast cancer by writing about and publicly discussing her own strugggles with it (Peet 2026).
[9] See for example, the following Reddit discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/Menopause/comments/1sicl3l/menopause_portrayed_in_your_friends_and_neighbors/ (accessed August 11, 2026).
[10] See for example the discussion at https://www.reddit.com/r/realhousewives/comments/1uhdrrj/perimenopause_the_secret_ingredient/(Accessed August 12, 2026).
