Why Is Nicole Kidman Always on My TV Now?

How embracing the menopausal years is giving some of our greatest actresses the best roles of their lives on the small screen. And how we can still do better.

Nicole Kidman, Jean Smart, Kathy Bates, Bridget Everett and Kathryn Hahn are among the over-40 actresses finding their best roles on TV. (Netflix/Max/CBS/Disney)

On the TV series Ugly Betty, magazine empire matriarch Claire Meade dares to launch her own magazine for menopausal women, Hot Flash, after she gets out of prison for murdering her husband’s mistress. This is treated as a joke and a major corporate liability. “Oh my God, look at this!” Regis Philbin quips during an interview meant to promote the magazine. “‘Brittle and horny? Afraid your bones will crack in the sack?’ Been there, done that!”

This was 2008, and things were different then.

Suddenly, menopause is everywhere. My friend Pauline texted our group chat recently, “Does menopause have a new publicist?” The New York Times has celebrated “the Menopause Queen” and wondered, “What Could a Menopause-Friendly Workplace Look Like?” The Washington Post declared that “Perimenopause is having a millennial moment” and documented the ways that famous and powerful Gen X women are using their platforms to speak out about “the change,” as it used to be called, from Samantha Bee to Halle Berry and Drew Barrymore, all of them clearly flabbergasted that it hasn’t been addressed openly and without shame by previous generations. Naomi Watts started a wellness brand, Stripes Beauty, to help women with the transition, recognizing, correctly, that perimenopausal women are a vast untapped market. Miranda July’s bestselling novel All Fours, Demi Moore’s body horror movie The Substance, Pamela Anderson’s acclaimed turn in The Last Showgirl, and Amy Adams’ motherhood satire Nightbitch are among recent works that address midlife women’s unique problems.

But TV has become a unique refuge for midlife-or-older women: Elsbeth, Agatha All Along, Hacks, Somebody Somewhere, Matlock, The Diplomat, Girls5Eva, Bad Sisters, and the rollicking British menopause comedy The Change. Gen X women (and those elder Millennials) are refusing to slink away quietly just because their fertile years have begun to wane.

Kathryn Hahn, who is 51, told me it was “thrilling” to be journeying down the Witches’ Road in Agatha All Along with three other coven members who are women over 40 (a fourth, played by Sasheer Zamata, is 38). “And to have it be Marvel,” she says. “The whole thing felt very radical in the best way.”

Hahn has found that midlife women are, indeed, gaining visibility in Hollywood, as evidenced by the roles available to her. “It just seems like people are waking up to the fact that that is the audience—the audience that stays home to watch,” she says, “and also that there's such incredible storytelling there.”

Though over-40 actresses in general are having a better-than-usual year, the fact is that TV reigns supreme in terms of showcasing older women, especially when compared to movies. In movies like Maria, the Angelina Jolie biopic about Maria Callas, The Last Showgirl, The Substance, and Nightbitch, the characters are all wrestling with issues connected to oppression that stems from the patriarchy. But television feels like a place where men and patriarchy don't have the same primacy. What matters the most on shows like Hacks, and Agatha, and Bad Sisters are the relationships between the women.

I wrote a piece for BBC Culture in 2022 declaring that “the coolest female characters on television” were midlife women—and wishing we could have more. Since then, we’ve lost a few of the greats, like Sam Fox on Pamela Adlon’s Better Things and, just a few weeks ago, Bridgett Everett’s Sam Miller on Somebody Somewhere. Men are still allowed to age on television far more than women: About 53% of male characters on TV were over 40, according to the 2023-24 Boxed In report from San Diego State University, while only 35% of female characters were middle-aged or older. But the numbers have improved a bit over the past few years; when I wrote that BBC piece, women over 40 made up 30% of female speaking roles.

The representation we do see has also gotten broader and better—from mainstream series like CBS’s Matlock to the Marvel Universe and Apple TV’s Bad Sisters and The Morning Show. The 57-year-old patron saint of menopausal ladies, Nicole Kidman, alone brought us Perfect Strangers, Lioness, and The Perfect Couple, as well as the Netflix May-December romantic comedy A Family Affair, all this year. These aren’t all stellar depictions, but that’s actually a good thing; the more of a range we have, the less we’re counting on any one series to do it all. Thank goodness, too, because And Just Like That is absolutely not shouldering the load.

The key to the best of them, however, is that they are created by middle-aged women, reflecting authentic experiences and anxieties. They bring us women who are quirky, witchy, sexy, funny, angry, brilliant, driven, and brave. Most of these women are prized for special skills, talents, and abilities: casting spells, performing comedy, singing, solving crimes. They may be mothers, but they’re not relegated to just that role; they are allowed to have their own dreams and struggles and to show us that life doesn’t stop just because you don’t need to buy tampons anymore. They are, remarkably, largely free of romantic entanglements, and I mean “free” literally. Male love interests and husbands may flit into and out of the frame, but these women don’t seem that concerned about them.

That's likely why so many older A-list actresses like Kidman are flocking to TV. If you look at this year's Golden Globe nominees for actresses’ performances in limited/anthology/TV movies, it's nearly all made up of former Oscar winners or nominees over 40: Cate Blanchett, Jodie Foster, Naomi Watts, and Kate Winslet. Movies are still playing catch-up. Hopefully TV will push them farther along, though it’s unclear if that will happen, given movies’ continuing dependence on major franchises and action.

In the wonderful memoir I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself, Glynnis MacNicol, an unmarried, child-free, 46-year-old New Yorker, heads to Paris for a few months to, yes, enjoy herself. That’s it. That’s the radical plot. She will eat, drink, hang out with friends, and have unattached sex with no regrets about any of this, nor about her broader life choices. At one point she waxes rhapsodic about a cozy Australian show called Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries that she likes to watch on Netflix when she’s in Paris. Of the main character, who is played by 40-year-old Essie Davis, she says:

Amazingly, it took me some time to realize the reason I loved Phyrne, and continually returned to her, was not just the exquisite clothes, or the perfect Louise Brooks hair, or the fact that no matter how many times I watched an episode I could never remember the plot and so it always somehow seemed new. It was because she was a grown-up. She was not getting married. She was not having children (“I don’t understand the appeal,” she likes to say). Her power was not in her potential to be matched up. Her power was her. Full stop. It was so satisfying.

This is the power of a middle-aged woman. And this is why it’s so meaningful to see them on TV.

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Ministry Book Corner 📚

Here at MOPC, not only are we pop culture writers, we’re also authors! Every Monday, we’re going to recommend each other’s work. And if you’d like to check out all of our books, visit our bookstore at Bookshop.org.

Saul Recommends…Jennifer’s Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted

Funny story: I did not know Jennifer when this book came out. I did not know Jennifer so much, in fact, that I was assigned to review it for the Boston Globe, where I was reviewing regularly at the time. The book was superb: funny, insightful, deeply respectful of television as a medium and an artform in a way that too many other looks at television history neglected to achieve. Jennifer had clearly done her research: spoken to the actors, the writers, the crew members, and thought deeply about what The Mary Tyler Moore Show meant to the people who loved it, and what it meant to the wider arc of television history.

I had a book of my own coming out at roughly the same time as Jennifer’s, and we ended up running into each other: first at a panel at a Manhattan avant-garde rock club, and then at a similar event in the hastily repurposed kids’ area of a Brooklyn cafe. We got to talk onstage about not only The Mary Tyler Moore Show, but about television as a whole. That was 11 years ago. The conversation is still ongoing.

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