Turns out, there's a lot to be angry about when you're a woman of a certain age.
"Difficult parents," Joanna Scanlan's Beth furiously tells a friend. "A midlife crisis husband. And your child's still doing your head in. And then the menopause." And the kicker, she adds: "even when you're screaming and shouting, you're invisible."
Good thing, then, that we have Riot Women. Sally Wainwright's newest drama is a battle cry for women who do feel overlooked - ignored by the world, taken for granted by their children and staring down the barrel of old age.
They're not going quietly, though. And they're fed up with being invisible. Instead, they're going to form a punk band and smash up the patriarchy with a mixture of ABBA covers and their own songs. The band's name? Riot Women, of course, though the phrase 'Hot Flush' does get a look-in at one point and arguably sounds just as good.
They have a lot to be getting on with, and none of it is sugar-coated by Wainwright. Worn down by a bitter divorce and absentee son, Beth (Scanlan) begins the show on the verge of taking her own life, while Holly (Tamsin Greig) is trying to cope with her dementia-suffering mother and Jess (Lorraine Ashbourne) is constantly at war with her resentful daughter. All these things are a potent cocktail; as Beth puts it, "and you thought the Clash were angry."
When Jess sees an advertisement for a local talent contest, she doesn't think twice before corralling this motley collection of women into competing with her. And into all of that comes Kitty (Rosalie Craig), a tortured soul with a voice that Beth immediately pegs as that of a lead singer, who also happens to be the daughter of a local mobster and who is hiding a dark past of her own. Hey, it's not subtle. Neither are all the menopause mentions.
After an agonisingly long setup, the group has morphed from an ABBA tribute band into something a lot more raw and angry - which in turn starts impacting their private lives too. Wainwright's always been excellent at fine-line character work, and there's plenty of that on show here.
Some of the show's best moments come when she excavates the details of the women's relationships - Scanlan in particular is terrific as Beth, who grabs onto the idea of forming a band as a way of giving her life meaning - while Craig treats the angry, volatile Kitty with care and compassion. Greig, meanwhile, portrays Holly with such quiet devastation, when she's watching her mother slowly slip away from her, that it yanks forcibly on the heartstrings.
These are all women at the top of their acting game, and though it's depressing to say it, watching them do their thing on screen feels like a breath of fresh air. And though the series does lurch slightly from slapstick to overly serious, watching the characters grow in confidence as the series goes on feels like a win.
Why did we have to wait so long to see middle-aged women portrayed on screen like this? To hell with ageing gracefully; it's far more fun to stick two fingers up at going quietly and roar into that good night instead.