Bridget Christie's The Change: A New Chapter for Midlife Comedy
Who thought a show centered on menopause, a motorbike, and an eel-obsessed village could become one of Channel 4's sharpest comedies? The Change, created and led by Bridget Christie, has done just that—and now it's back for series two, promising even more oddball adventures and ferociously honest laughs.
The story kicks off once again with Linda, played by Christie herself. She’s staring down fifty, dealing with all the wild card symptoms of menopause while questioning every box society has tried to squeeze her into. Instead of shrinking away, Linda cranks the throttle on her Triumph motorcycle and heads straight into the thick trees of Gloucestershire's Forest of Dean. If the first season was about running away from her old life, the second digs hard into what it really means to build a new one—complete with peculiar locals, community drama, and, yes, a town-wide fascination with eels.
Inside The Eel-Filled Community: Characters, Challenges and Cheeky Humor
This time around, the stakes feel higher: Linda’s fight is no longer just internal. She’s battling for her spot among the town’s most colorful characters, each with baggage and quirks to unpack. Returning faces include Monica Dolan’s flawlessly dry Carmel, Susan Lynch as the enigmatic Agnes, Jerome Flynn delightfully weird as William (a.k.a. Pig Man), and Paul Whitehouse’s Tony, who always seems half-in and half-out of whatever’s going on. Laura Checkley is the freshest addition, playing Theresa—a character already making waves.
The community Linda's desperate to be part of is equal parts hilarious and baffling. In one scene, grown adults bicker passionately about migratory eels like teens at a pop concert. But all the silliness masks real, often biting observations about how middle-aged women get boxed in and overlooked. Linda's now-infamous ledger of unpaid labor—years of invisible chores and emotional work—rears its head again, becoming a running motif as she seeks both recognition and connection.
The Change doesn’t just take aim at gender stereotypes; it shatters them, with jokes sharp enough for Christie’s comedy roots but grounded in the messiness of real life. Scenes slide from surreal to painfully familiar in a heartbeat, reflecting the tension so many women feel as they juggle self-discovery, family, and social pressures. Christie has openly admitted that she wrote Linda after years of rejections, hoping to finally see a character who felt as complicated and funny as she did growing up.
The production, still helmed by Expectation Entertainment, sees directors Al Campbell and Mackenzie Crook returning for another round. Their touch keeps everything brisk and a little mischievous—never letting the feminist message get too heavy, but never letting it slip into the background either. With twelve episodes across two series and showrunner Lisa Mitchell steering the ship, The Change just keeps getting more confident and more relevant.
This is the kind of series that punches above its weight. Audiences who crave sincere but unpolished stories about people—especially women—finding their voice after fifty have embraced it. Most midlife shows tend to focus on crisis or sagging energy, but here, there’s chaos, reinvention, and more one-liners about bodily changes and village weirdos than you’d ever expect in a prime-time slot.
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