Finally, a middle aged romance done right! I'm thoroughly enjoying everything about Dom and Jean's relationship in The Madame Blanc Mysteries and want to see more of the same on TV.
Like The Marlow Murder Club and Miss Scarlet, The Madame Blanc Mysteries is a cosy crime drama with a cult following - and has a strong woman at the helm. First arriving on our screens in 2021, the series was an instant hit. Now into its fourth season, it's showing no sign of slowing down and fans perpetually cross their fingers for another instalment as soon as each season comes to an end.
Set in the fictional village of Sainte Victoire in the South of France (fun fact: it's actually filmed in Malta, with Gozo standing in for France), the show is full of colourful midlife characters, and has now captured my attention for its very accurate portrayal of midlife romance.
Antiques dealer Jean (Sally Lindsay) is grieving at the very start of the series, and she also has no children. Ordinarily, these two key character traits would define a female character on our screens. The rush to 'get back out there' and find love again takes precedence, and their childlessness a constant talking point.
These characters are often driven by a need to find a man to fill the inevitable void in their lives everyone assumes they have, and rush against the clock to have the children society thinks they should be having. Not Jean - she wants to work through her feelings and the mystery surrounding her husband's death.
Even when she's in a better place, her journey isn't defined by that incessant and almost desperate need we so often see, to hop back into the dating loop.
Jean has friends, and skills - she discovers how amazing she is at unravelling difficult crime cases and working out the final piece of the puzzle. She is *gasps and clutches pearls* happy just being herself - heaven forbid!
When she is ready for love, it's perfectly pitched and this is just how Sally Lindsay planned it to be. It's slow burn, joyful and fun. "You don't really see middle-aged love stories, do you?" the actor and writer said in conversation with What To Watch.
She added, "Once you get to 50, everybody's like a dad or a mum, and they've got teenage kids - you don't see the excitement of new love in somebody of that age."
That's the thing - love in midlife can be just as exciting as the young love TV shows tell us is the ideal. Just after I had my children and in a postnatal fug of adjusting to my wildly altered body and instant fear that now I'd popped a couple of babies out I was instantly undesirable, I suddenly had more time on my hands to watch TV.
What I found were endless shows available to me that only gave me unrealistic depictions of love and sex. Perfect young people with their perfect young bodies, having amazing sex all over the place. Relationships of mums and midlifers were relegated to the side lines - often the butt of the joke, playing out as the 'last chance saloon' or a poorly written midlife crisis type affair. There was nothing I could actually relate to, which made it even more depressing.
In the years that have passed, those stereotypes have largely remained on our TV screens, but the tide does appear to be gently turning. A totally different show altogether, but the Disney+ romp-a-minute Rivals did an excellent job of showing that midlife women can do it their own way.
The sex might've been totally unethical, but the women involved were all mums of teens and this had zero affect on their sensuality and ability to have some no-strings greatest sex of their lives. Their age wasn't an issue.
As Sally Lindsay told Radio Times of the relationship between Jean and Dom (Steve Edge) in The Madame Blanc Mysteries, "It is a little bit exciting for them... like they're at school, that kind of thing, but on the other end of the life scale." The couple don't want children, there's no rush to live together, it's just pure, unadulterated enjoyment.
Midlife relationships can be fraught with difficulty, but they can be filled with just as much excitement as those early, heady days of new love you recall from years gone by - just like Jean is giddily feeling in Madame Blanc.
Middle aged women know what they want and they know how to get it when it comes to sex and love. We aren't a secondary story or an afterthought, and we're bored of our love lives being depicted with the same old threadbare, misleading tropes. The narrative is changing slightly, and we want more of the same to add to our watch list, please.
The Madame Blanc Mysteries seasons 1 -3 are available on Channel 5 in their entirety. Season 4 is currently airing new episodes on Channel 5 in the UK on Thursdays at 9pm.
