Keeley Hawes’s new Channel 4 and Prime Video drama, The Assassin, introduces a premise that feels both bold and overdue. It follows Julie (Hawes), a menopausal woman, overlooked and emotionally stalled, who worked as a hitwoman in her youth and unexpectedly comes out of retirement to return to the profession.

It’s pulpy, stylised and laced with dark humour. But beneath the genre trappings lies something more striking – a cultural pivot in how menopause and midlife womanhood is being written and visualised on British television.

Historically, menopause has been television’s silent transition. Onscreen, it was something female characters either didn’t have, didn’t talk about, or, when acknowledged, were mocked for. Sitcoms of the 1980s and 1990s, such as Birds of a Feather or Absolutely Fabulous, played menopausal symptoms for laughs.

In drama, menopause tended to arrive invisibly: women stopped being protagonists, were subtly phased out of storylines, or returned only as wives, mothers, or medical cases.

Television has always been shaped by industry ideas about youth, sex appeal and marketability – ideas that left little room for midlife women unless confined to supporting roles – or contained within the domestic, ensemble structures of soap operas.

While shows like New Tricks (2003), Last Tango in Halifax (2012) and Call the Midwife (2012) gradually shifted the dial, menopause itself remained offscreen: considered either too niche, too biological, or too awkward to dramatise.

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What The Assassin offers is not just a menopausal character, but midlife as premise. Rather than sidelining her life stage, the show lets its rhythms – emotional turbulence, internal chaos, flickers of disorientation, flashes of wit and a deep, simmering strength – seep into the storytelling itself.

The story ties her hormonal shifts to emotional volatility, a sense of personal invisibility, fractured family life and existential grief. And then she snaps. But it’s not collapse; it’s re-ignition. She becomes lethal — not in spite of midlife, but because of it.

I research the way midlife female protagonists are presented in British television drama. I’ve recently written about Russell T. Davies’ work in particular, arguing that his dramas (such as It’s a Sin, 2021, and Nolly, 2023) reclaim neglected figures by placing their emotional complexity and cultural marginalisation at the centre.

Nolly offered a compelling reappraisal of Noele Gordon (played by Helena Bonham Carter), the soap star unceremoniously dumped from her own show – a decision now widely understood to be rooted in sexism and ageism. Davies refused to let her disappear quietly, instead making her menopause-era strength and defiance the dramatic core of his show.

The trailer for The Assasain.

Similarly, my work with Professor Kristyn Gorton on Sally Wainwright’s series Happy Valley (2014) explores how Catherine Cawood (played by Sarah Lancashire) embodies emotional realism, grief, rage and midlife fatigue – not as flaws, but as substance. These female characters don’t just react to events; they are the story. Their emotions are not incidental but generative, propelling the narrative, shaping its tone and demanding audience recognition.

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The Assassin fits this trajectory. It joins a growing body of British TV that blends genre hybridity with emotional and political resonance. Like Killing Eve (2018) or I Hate Suzie (2020), it uses the structure of the thriller to think critically about gender, ageing and identity.

The menopausal hitwoman is, of course, a metaphor as much as a plot. She is rage personified: a woman no longer governed by the social niceties that often temper female representation. She’s also funny, erratic and uncontained.

A menopausal reckoning

Importantly, The Assassin doesn’t simply celebrate her transformation. It stages it as messy, uncomfortable and morally complex. This is menopause not as a redemptive arc but as a reckoning, with a body that’s changing, a past that won’t stay buried, and a society that prefers women neat, young and silent.

There’s still work to do. British television remains far more comfortable exploring middle-aged male protagonists than women in the same life stage. But what’s changing, and what I frequently explore in my research, is the tone and ambition with which female midlife is now being scripted. Where menopause was once a punchline or absence, it’s becoming a story. And not just any story, but one shaped by genre, irony, feeling and risk.

Thanks to its long-form, visual medium, television can explore the ordinary in ways that resonate deeply, from the exhaustion of grief to the frustration of being dismissed. Menopause, long under-explored, offers rich dramatic territory: emotional volatility, bodily transformation, the redefinition of self. What The Assassin understands is that these aren’t signs of decline. They’re tools of narrative power.

By giving us a menopausal character who is central, subversive and narratively in control, The Assassin signals a broader shift. It reminds us that midlife is not an endpoint, but a site of potential – for drama, for comedy and for cultural critique. British television is, at last, beginning to give menopause the storylines it deserves.

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Beth Johnson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.