Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Change’ On BritBox, A Comedy About A Woman Finding Herself As She Starts Menopause

I will never know what it’s like to go through “the change,” but the people we know who have gone through it definitely react like something is ending. But a lot think of it also as a new beginning. A new BritBox comedy is about a woman who uses menopause as the kick in the pants she needs to try to find herself.

THE CHANGE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Black-and-white scenes of a festival, and an eel being taken out of a tank and thrown.

The Gist: As the eel flies through the air, it changes into a sausage, landing in a man’s mouth. Linda (Bridget Christie) is sitting in her backyard, at a 50th birthday party her family and friends are throwing for her, though it seems like she put it all together and her husband Steve (Omid Djalili) is hijacking all the attention. Linda’s teenage daughter is horrified by her mother’s loud swallowing, and her sister Siobhain (Liza Tarbuck) hates her boring stories.

Linda goes in to clean up, starting and stopping a timer on her watch. She writes down the time it took. She’s done this for many years, keeping a ledger of all the time she’s spent doing tasks that keep her household running.

When she forgets what a cake cutter is called, she goes to her doctor to complain of a myriad of symptoms. The doctor, still wearing his bike helmet after pedaling to work, is pretty sure Linda is starting “the menopause.” After a cupboard full of unmatched containers and lids rains down on her, she has a revelation as she puts a Hulk bandage on her head.

She packs up, dusts off the Triumph motorcycle that she used to ride in her youth and decides to get back some of the time she’s logged over the years. She thinks about a box she hid in a tree when she was a child, and she wants to find that box. She tries to tell Steve what she’s doing but he zones out, so she leaves a note instead. She instructs Steve not to text or call her, mainly because he’s just going to want to know where things are in the house.

When she rides in the town where the tree is, Linda rents a filthy trailer from Carmel (Monica Dolan) and Agnes (Susan Lynch), two backwoods sisters who serve eel and mash at their restaurant. She refuses to clean it, but does it anyway. When she writes down how long it took, she decides to set fire to the paper, contemplate the woods, and read a book alone at a local pub.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Created and written by Christie, The Change reminds us of Daisy Haggard’s series Back To Life.

Our Take: There’s no massive plot to The Change. It’s simply about a woman who feels she’s given over too much of her life to a life she didn’t bargain for and wants some of that time back. Along the way, Linda is going to meet interesting and somewhat strange people, like the “eel sisters” that rent her the trailer. But she’ll certainly figure out what she wants and doesn’t want out of her life.

We see just enough of Linda’s infuriating domestic life to get an idea of why she wants to break out. The motorcycle, and the helmet and leather pants she dons before she leaves, implies a much more daring life when she was in her 20s, before marriage and kids and all of those little bits of time took a toll on her sense of self.

Christie seems to transform Linda almost immediately from a woman whose inner life is so boring that she puts her sister to sleep with her stories of rude customers at work to someone who takes chances and verbally parries with local pubgoers. It may seem like an artificial transformation, but just getting on that bike might have unlocked something in her that was always there, but just dormant. We’ve all seen it happen in real life, sort of like the way your spouse is with their old college friends versus how they are at home.

What we want to see is more of Linda finding herself and less of Steve trying to figure out how to “survive” until she gets back. That’s typical inattentive husband material that’s as old as dirt. Linda’s transformation, essentially coming of age at 50, is the more interesting story.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: After having a funny interaction with a pubgoer who at first sits at her table to hit on her, Linda gives herself a little smile.

Sleeper Star: Monica Dolan and Susan Lynch are funny as Carmel and Agnes, the sisters that serve eel and mash to customers and rent the tiny trailer to Linda.

Most Pilot-y Line: When the sisters tell Linda that no one’s been in the trailer since their dad died, Linda replied, “he’s not still in it, though?”

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Change is a funny show with a simple premise, which works mostly because of Bridget Christie’s winning performance.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.