Riot Women Review 2026 Tv Show Series Cast Crew Online
You will be hard-pressed in 2026 to find a better television series than Riot Women, the latest slice of perfection from Sally Wainwright (Gentleman Jack, Happy Valley). It is borderline unfair how wickedly talented she is, and genuinely frustrating how much of her work has remained just out of reach for American audiences for so long. No offense to anyone, but I want to call in sick for a month, lie in bed, and binge every Sally Wainwright series I’ve somehow missed. I am fully smitten.
Riot Women (now streaming on BritBox) is her latest, and dear Lord in baby Jesus’s heaven, it is an absolute marvel. It is a force of creativity, a force for television, and a force for women in their 40s, 50s, and 60s. It celebrates music, found families, and the radical act of being seen at an age when society has a bad habit of looking right past you. I love this show. I love Joanna Scanlan, Rosalie Craig, Lorraine Ashbourne, and Tamsin Greig, and most of all, I love Sally Wainwright for cutting the sweetness with lemon and for understanding that joy is infinitely more satisfying when it’s earned.
Riot Women could have been one of the bleakest shows on television if it weren’t also so deeply, defiantly joyful. The pain these characters carry lands harder precisely because we love them, root for them, and desperately want them to topple the effing patriarchy and sing their ever-Courtney-Love-ing hearts out.
On the surface, Riot Women is about a group of older women who form a makeshift punk band for a charity talent contest in Hebden Bridge. But that description barely scratches the surface. This is not a Full Monty-style crowd-pleaser where everything neatly snaps into place. It is messy, dark, and real. It wrestles with the kinds of weighty issues women of a certain age actually face, and it does so without condescension or cutesy framing. These are women whose husbands have left them, who are lonely, navigating menopause, being steamrolled by their adult children, and watching their own parents decline … or worse.
So they make a band. They write songs about it. They scream and laugh and exorcise their anger. More importantly, they find one another at a moment in life when the losses are piling up. The music and the friendships carry them through some of the hardest years they’ve known, because women do not stop living at 50 or 60, no matter how determined society is to pretend otherwise.
I could go on about Riot Women, but I don’t want to say too much, because it deserves to be experienced rather than explained. I’ll only add that the first episode takes a moment to set the table, but once Rosalie Craig’s Kitty Eckersley belts out her first Hole song, everything snaps into place. By the end, it feels like Pump Up the Volume for the same generation that grew up with it, only louder, angrier, and wiser.
