Howie Mandel has a joke/observation he told years ago that has stuck with me. In it, he is talking about being out on the town with his wife, who is dressed immaculately, interacting with guests and having fun. All this, he says, while she is menstruating.
“If we were the race that was menstruating, we wouldn’t go anywhere,” Mandel opines. “There would be no nights out. Your buddy could call you, ‘Do you want to come over for a beer?’ ‘No.’ ‘No? Why not?’ ‘Because my crotch is bleeding!'”
I couldn’t help but reflect on Mandel’s remarks while I watched the first episode of Small Achievable Goals because it plays a major part in world-building and character development.
Airing Tuesdays at 9 p.m. on CBC and streaming on CBC Gem, Small Achievable Goals follows the adventures of Julie (Jennifer Whalen, top left) and Kris (Meredith MacNeill, top right), two women trying to navigate different stages of menopause. When they’re forced together to produce a podcast, Kris and Julie help each other through workplace challenges and office politics, dating disasters and relationship drama, health concerns and parenting woes. The project reunites co-creators Whalen and McNeill, who CBC viewers last saw on the award-winning Baroness Von Sketch Show. Whalen recalls how the pandemic caused her to reflect on her own menopause experiences and that a TV show could be made around it.
“I started to realize that some of my existential crisis was not actually just the pandemic,” she says. “Maybe I was in some stage of [menopause] and I realized that I knew nothing about it and what I did know was relentlessly bleak. I thought, ‘I can really use a laugh about this. I’m sure other people could.'”
The result? A series that is hilarious, shocking and touching. The first episode features Kris experiencing sudden, heavy perimenopause bleeding moments before she’s to participate in a photo shoot to promote her podcast … while wearing white. Kris’ emotions are already heightened thanks to learning a younger woman will be her podcast co-host (to pull in a younger audience, she is told), and furtively asking for help securing a tampon. The scene’s final, bloody conclusion may be shocking for some, but it’s about time the plight of half the population was shown on-screen. So too of Julia’s experience in that first episode, dealing with menopause hot flashes as she’s told she has, once again, been passed over for the top producer gig in favour of someone younger and, it should be said, male. What took it so long for this kind of storytelling to be shown?
“I think it is a function of our patriarchal society that it does feel like menopause is this dividing line that if you’re no longer fertile, you’re no longer a value to our society,” Whalen says. “And I think that a lot of people didn’t want to talk about it because you have a lot to lose by talking about it publicly.”
Ironically, CBC’s Son of a Critch is exploring a similar storyline. Season 4 of the veteran comedy, airing Tuesdays at 8:30 p.m. on CBC and CBC Gem, and based on Mark Critch’s award-winning, best-selling memoir about growing up in Newfoundland, is all about pursuing one’s passion. And for the character of Mary (Claire Rankin), that means entering a new stage in her life.
With sons Mark (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) and Mike Jr. (Colton Gobbo) older and relying less on her, Mary is experiencing a loss of identity. Is she still a mother? Yes, of course. But what else? Upcoming storylines follow Mary as she goes back to school—igniting her passion for a possible career—and experiencing her first steps into menopause. The growth of Mary’s character came at the suggestion of Rankin herself.
“After the first season, Mark basically came to me and said, ‘You know, if you have any ideas please sort them out,'” Rankin says. “[I said] she’s going to need a menopause story, something that actually tells that journey.”
And, like Small Achievable Goals, Son of a Critch explores ageism through Mary’s eyes. An ego-boosting trip to have her pictures taken at a Glamour Shot-esque mall kiosk gets the wrong reaction from husband Mike (Critch) and her first college class results in trepidation until she’s called upon by the teacher.
“There’s still this unattainable standard that we’re somehow supposed to constantly be striving for in the sense that we even created a term ‘aging gracefully,'” Rankin says. “Do we use that for men? No. Guys are just allowed to age. They’re allowed to look rugged and wrinkles are kind of sexy in an older man, and so is gray hair”
“And yet we are somehow supposed to maintain this bizarre sense of looking 25 when we’re in our 50s.”
Son of a Critch airs Tuesdays at 8:30 p.m. on CBC and CBC Gem.
Small Achievable Goals airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. on CBC and CBC Gem.
Images courtesy of CBC.
