Lady Parts

There’s something cartoonishly indulgent about meeting for oysters and prosecco at noon on a Thursday, but when I asked Meredith MacNeill and Jennifer Whalen to suggest an activity for our first interview, this was their pick. Before any bivalves are ordered, however, we’re distracted by the raucous office party taking place a few metres away. It’s mid-December, that stretch before the holidays when companies with a discretionary budget gather their staff over insipid finger foods and giant bottles of Jackson-Triggs. This bash, however, is a cut above: it’s well before quitting time; the attendees are in the airy back room of Paris Paris on Ossington; at least one of them is wearing an ugly Christmas sweater with the charming awkwardness of Colin Firth’s Mr. Darcy in Bridget Jones’s Diary. “Do you think it’s a start-up?” MacNeill asks. Whalen nods. “There’s…a lot of wine,” she says.

If this were one of their comedy bits, MacNeill would now volunteer for a reconnaissance mission. Concocting a half-baked noise complaint or an inquiry about the nature of the company, she would purposefully stride past the mullioned dividers and disappear, only to re-emerge 20 minutes later, table-dancing in her bra with that Christmas sweater draped around her neck like Superman’s cape. Whalen, meanwhile, would have been part of the bash from the jump—the po-faced COO, perhaps, who must be goaded to hoist a glass but gradually reveals that her inner freak is infinitely freakier than those of her underlings. This kind of madcap energy was part of what made Baroness von Sketch Show—the sharp, unpredictable CBC series co-created by MacNeill, Whalen, and Second City alumnae Aurora Browne and Carolyn Taylor—a smash that ran for five seasons.

The popularity of Baroness, which premiered in Canada in 2016 and was picked up by IFC in the US a year later, was anchored in its creators’ ability to capture, with uncanny precision, the absurdities of women’s day-to-day lives. The show amassed a string of viral successes, in part through the strategic online release of a few sketches, which were met with a flurry of shares and likes and LOLs and “THIS.” The unveiling began a month before the show’s official debut, when Gen X and elder millennial women on Facebook discovered “Locker Room” (a.k.a. “Welcome to Your 40s”), a sketch that salutes the DGAF attitude middle age confers on even the most self-conscious women: against the backdrop of a public change room, MacNeill’s naked protagonist leans in and lets it all hang out—literally.

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Conceptually, Whalen and MacNeill’s latest joint endeavour picks up where “Locker Room” left off. Small Achievable Goals, which debuts later this month on CBC, centres women of a certain age as they run the gauntlet of professional frustrations, unbridled neuroses, frenemy tensions, and the mortifications of their erratic and increasingly alien bodies. The show was sparked by 54-year-old Whalen’s bewilderment as she navigated a new stage of life: the change. “Honestly, I was like, ‘Where the fuck is Judy?’” she says, referring to the author of 1970’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, a foundational fictional guide to navigating puberty for legions of girls. “I could really use a good old Blume novel about what I’m going through.” When her subsequent consultations with Dr. Google unearthed nothing but bad news, Whalen set about developing, with MacNeill, a half-hour series. In SAG, they’re an archetypal odd couple: Whalen portrays a weary, sweaty podcast producer named Julie who is forced to work with MacNeill’s Kris, an open-hearted, unpolished and unspooled TikTok beauty influencer who guilelessly offers up makeup tips to their underserved demo. Despite their differences, the two find key points of connection—especially around the indignities of aging.

SAG takes the form of a conventional workplace sitcom and includes the broad, good-humoured send-ups of relatable moments that are catnip to our national broadcaster (see: Workin’ Moms, Kim’s Convenience, Run the Burbs). But it’s also punctuated by outrageous beats in the Baroness mode, with vignettes, set pieces and stand-alone visual jokes that leave viewers winded—sometimes in hysterics, sometimes in disbelief. Without spoiling anything, I’ll just say there’s a sequence involving MacNeill, a bathroom stall, and an obscene amount of toilet paper that should be mandatory viewing for anyone who questions why free menstrual products in bathrooms ought to be a fundamental human right. To MacNeill, SAG shares both a sensibility and a metabolism with ­Baroness—“the speed and the muscle,” as she puts it. But, with the sitcom format, unlike in sketch comedy, its characters get to experience actual growth.

It’s as reductive to say SAG is about menopause as it is to say Kris and Julie are proxies for their creators. Obviously, ­Whalen and MacNeill aren’t the characters they play on TV—if they were, they’d be wearing lampshades and transgressing boundaries at the office holiday party instead of staying put at our table, contemplating the spread of oysters, charcuterie and frites. Still, there are glimmers: ­MacNeill and Kris are both huggers, and like Julie, ­Whalen bristles at watering down things that matter to make them more palatable for public consumption. That includes the more visceral aspects of ­menopause, which function as a shorthand for the disorienting loss of agency—­professional, personal, physical—that can blindside women as they approach middle age.

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Whalen and MacNeill have been at this long enough to know that lady bits aren’t an easy sell; when they talk about the show making it to air, they sound like two bank robbers with a getaway car idling outside. They believe in their ideas and talent; they believe there’s a need for these stories to go out into the world. Baroness proved that people are desperate to commiserate about the cringiest, most maddening moments of life as a woman. Now, just as social mores suggest MacNeill and Whalen should dial it down and shuffle into the background, they’re shining a spotlight on even messier—and funnier—truths about aging bodies. They believe the territory is hilarious. The gamble is whether everyone else will agree.

Launching a new series is always a game of chance. The development process can be agonizingly long, and it’s impossible to anticipate what the cultural temperature will be six months or a year down the line. The last series MacNeill starred in, Pretty Hard Cases, was initially conceived as a wacky buddy comedy about two 40-something female cops (“Lady Dicks,” per its original title), one Black, one white. It was green-lit in February of 2020, but Covid-related setbacks delayed production. Then the murder of George Floyd late that spring escalated anti-police sentiment, and the showrunners had to overhaul the series—less glib, more engaged with ­real-world racial tensions. In comparison, even a grade-A soothsayer couldn’t have chosen a better time to release SAG. Menopause is hot, if you’ll forgive the pun. Local case in point: last fall, Sinai Health Foundation chose “Hot and Bothered” as the tagline for the celebrity-studded fundraising campaign it launched in support of its Centre for Mature Women’s Health.

Menopause has had cultural moments before, but middle-aged women were almost always the punchline. Menopause: The Musical (a.k.a. Menopause Out Loud), a 2001 production set in the bra section of Bloomingdale’s, used hammy retro-pop parodies to highlight how the embarrassment of hot flashes and memory lapses unites women. The early aughts also saw Absolutely Fabulous’s Patsy and Edina attending a Menopause Anonymous meeting, where members one-upped one another with a terrifying litany of symptoms, and Sex and the City’s chief cougar Samantha Jones likening herself to “day-old bread” during a menopause scare. But, as Gen X moves squarely into this stage of life, older millennials hard on their heels, self-flagellating boomer humour has been supplanted by candour.

Last May, artist and writer Miranda July released All Fours, a lusty not-so-thinly-veiled work of autofiction in which her perimenopausal protagonist experiences a sexual and existential reawakening. For months, the book came up in conversation with nearly every 40-something woman in my circle; as one headline promised, it did indeed “ignite my group chats.” In January, Demi Moore won her first acting award for The Substance, a grotesque look at what happens to women—specifically women in Hollywood—when they hit 50. In the latest season of the dark comedy Bad Sisters, Sharon ­Horgan’s Eva hires a menopause coach who’s one part personal trainer and one part Tara Brach, the Buddhist-lite self-help guru.

This cultural trend is in line with economic ones. According to recent estimates, menopause-related spending reached $17 billion (US) in 2024, and analysts suggest it could climb to $24 billion in the next half-decade. To be fair, much of that is snake oil—tinctures and supplements and devices that promise to combat the effects of dwindling hormones but rarely offer empirical evidence to support those claims. Still, with four million women between the ages of 40 and 55 in Canada alone, many of them scrambling to understand what’s happening to their bodies, there’s ample interest. SAG emerged from that informational void. Whalen needed to unpack what she was experiencing and how it was affecting her sense of self. This was the jumping-off point for her character, Julie, who’s grappling with hot flashes and bursts of unbridled fury as her younger co-workers capitalize on a cachet she can no longer access. “I wanted to work through why I felt so judgmental about aging, which is a natural process,” she says. “So I created a character who’s way more stuck than I am, who’s scared of that change.”

Julie and MacNeill’s Kris are also united by a kind of grim solidarity: their professional fates are intertwined in a culture that’s preparing to relegate them to obsolescence and a workplace that’s not set up to accommodate the physiological and psychological pitfalls of menopause. Meanwhile, Whalen and MacNeill, both executive producers on the show, are arguably in the best spots of their career to date. Credit the CBC, where public funding allows artists to take chances on content that doesn’t serve strictly commercial interests. Screenwriter and producer Tassie Cameron, who created Pretty Hard Cases, says that when she approached the CBC—a broadcaster largely run by older women—with that show, it was one of the first times she’d been in a pitch meeting where a network didn’t ask her to age the characters down.

In that context, SAG makes sense as an analogue of Pretty Hard Cases or Workin’ Moms. But the thing that sets it apart—and nudges it closer to All Fours, The Substance and other non-publicly-funded offerings—is how unapologetically tied it is to the body. Though humorous, the show is frank, almost starkly so, in the way it addresses sexual dysfunction, vaginal changes, flash bleeds in intimate moments. Whalen says she’s been fascinated by how squeamish and uncomfortable some people are when she tells them about her new show. “You’re told to present your femaleness in a way that is palatable. Don’t talk about your period—you’re supposed to be pretty and sexually attractive. You can be pregnant—amazing, you’re a mother—but don’t tell us about the blood and guts of it, how hard it is. And then you get to this point in life, and again, don’t talk about it, just quietly go away. I’ve related to my body this way since I got my period when I was 11, and I’m not doing it anymore. I’m tired of it.” For Whalen, comedy is the solution.

Though Whalen claims SAG was inspired by a desire to have Judy Blume decipher the havoc hormones can wreak, the truth is that both she and MacNeill grew up on tougher and funnier stuff (including The Muppet Show, a formative influence for both women). Whalen was raised a feminist: her mom was an early subscriber to Ms. magazine, and she recalls, as a seven-year-old, trying to parse the women’s lib slogan “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” Jokes were her lingua franca. She can still recite the zingers from the monster joke book she got for Christmas when she was six (“Why didn’t the skeleton cross the road? He didn’t have the guts!”); in another one of her joke books, she spent hours underlining the best material with a ruler. When Whalen was 10, her father bought her mother a stack of comedy albums as a birthday gift. Whalen would listen to the records on repeat, memorizing routines by Steve Martin, Richard Pryor and George Carlin (and Bill Cosby, though he’s dead to her now). Her family moved around some, and Whalen grew accustomed to being the new kid, the super-tall kid, the kid who was a bit eccentric. She recognized that she could rely on jokes as an entry point and a coat of armour: “You make people laugh, then you get a pass, and they decide not to tease and bully you. It defuses social situations and makes things less awkward.”

MacNeill, on the other hand, was drawn into other worlds as a way to disconnect from real life. Growing up in Amherst, Nova Scotia, a town on the periphery of the Bay of Fundy with a population of less than 10,000, she found solace in the imaginary. “Not being ‘seen’ as a kid and having experiences that weren’t great meant that the world of play became so intense,” she says. “I don’t like saying bad things happen for a reason, but there are stories to be told from them.” She’s reluctant to elaborate, but spending time with MacNeill, I get the sense that she’s still haunted by feeling underestimated as a child. While it fuels a ferocious drive, it’s also scar tissue that hurts if poked a certain way. MacNeill struggled in school at times, but there were bright spots. One English teacher let her deliver essays as oral presentations, which was foundational in learning to write for the stage, and a local drama program gave her a safe place to try and fail—to try again, fail again, fail better, as Samuel Beckett might say.

To understand MacNeill’s MO, says Allison Grace, a television producer and close friend, you need to get where she comes from. “The number one theme Meredith tackles in her work is shame. I believe that’s directly linked to being from a small town, because you know so much about people—you know all their business. Meredith is sensitive to people’s back­stories.” Ideally, though, creating work that draws on the embarrassing can’t happen in a vacuum. “There’s such vulnerability in creating content where you’re talking about shame,” MacNeill says. “But, if you have a writing partner or a showrunner who’s like, ‘I got you,’ it can be kind of great.”

After graduating from high school, MacNeill studied acting at Dalhousie. There, says her friend Adam Pettle, a Toronto screenwriter and playwright who was a year ahead of her in the program, she was both the darling of the class and its most unpredictable member. “One of the words people would use most to describe Meredith back then, and probably now, is wild,” he says. Everyone thought she was out of her mind, for instance, when, in her third year, MacNeill decided to audition for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in the UK. Anthony ­Hopkins and Alan Rickman attended RADA, not nobodies from Amherst. When MacNeill was accepted, her friends asked how she planned to pay for the school. “We were so broke we couldn’t afford a six-inch sub,” says Pettle. MacNeill insisted she’d find a way—and she did, by fundraising locally in a kind of proto-GoFundMe. Even at 20, MacNeill seemed to possess a physiological imperative to constantly create. “We all have ego, ambition, those things that are tied up in making work,” says Pettle. “But, with Meredith, it’s not just that—it’s like her motor runs differently.”

Watching MacNeill perform now—the way she commits to a physical bit, building layer upon layer and letting the joke ascend to an absurd crescendo—it seems implausible that comedy hasn’t always been her milieu. At Dalhousie and RADA, her focus was drama, and whether the material was by Shakespeare or Judith Thompson, MacNeill climbed inside her characters and embodied them with zeal. That willingness to keep revving the engine connects everything she does. As Pettle puts it, “She’s fearless—she always makes the hot choice, the one that subverts expectations.” That was evident in her final RADA showcase, which landed her a role on the wacky British sketch comedy Man Stroke Woman. In 2007, toward the end of her two-year stint on the show, she appeared in Pass It On: Coaching Skills for Managers, a corporate training video written by Veep creator Armando Iannucci that feels more like a fever dream than a legitimate tool to promote active listening and workplace equality. Perched stiffly on a desk chair, MacNeill faces her jovial manager with an expression of pained deference—teeth bared in a tight rictus, smize-free eyes squinched into slits. In this worker bee’s tense forbearing, there are distinct shades of MacNeill’s future stable of characters on the brink.

Whalen, like MacNeill, credits a high-school mentor for nudging her in the right direction. By Grade 11, she’d been accepted to the drama program at Cawthra Park in Mississauga. Her drama teacher took her and a group of friends to see a Second City show at the Old Fire Hall for her 16th birthday. (It’s impossible to imagine this happening today, but this was the ’80s.) She watched Mike Myers test out an early version of his Wayne’s World shtick and declared it the most exciting thing she’d ever seen. In her mid-20s, she returned to Second City to study improv, eventually working her way up to the touring ­company. Jennifer Irwin, a Toronto actor now based in LA, was Whalen’s bunkmate on the road. And after they were promoted to Second City’s main stage, Irwin and Whalen rented a house in the Annex with Lisa Lambert, who co-created The Drowsy Chaperone, and Ben Varadi, who co-founded the toy company and PAW Patrol brain trust Spin Master. Irwin and Whalen were inseparable—writing and rehearsing six days a week, performing on weekends, partying. Even then, Whalen came across as the adult in the room, Irwin says. She could step back from the chaos in a scene, then come in with impeccable timing and make sense of every character. “She was like the one kid in elementary school who volunteered to lead the group projects,” Irwin says. “She has this ability to find structure and clarity. But she also has that other side where she’s elevating the silliness.” It’s no coincidence that, of all the Muppets, Whalen most identifies with both Kermit and Animal—ego and id.

In 2010, MacNeill got pregnant and came back home from the UK—all the way home, to her parents’ basement in Amherst. Suddenly, she was the single parent of a daughter, and there was a new weight to her decisions. She started workshopping her own material, which scored her an invitation to work on a few episodes of This Hour Has 22 Minutes. It was another homecoming of sorts. When MacNeill was growing up, Cathy Jones and Mary Walsh—who got their start with the iconic Newfoundland sketch comedy troupe CODCO—had been touchstones. CODCO was emphatically grounded in a sense of place. “They were sociopolitical, and there were women using their voices and creating characters around what they wanted to say,” MacNeill says. It was an auspicious connection—during her brief time with 22 Minutes, MacNeill met fellow writer Carolyn Taylor, and the two came up with a kernel of an idea for an all-female sketch show. Taylor then introduced her to Whalen and Browne, and the four birthed Baroness von Sketch Show.

Whalen, who’d decided to prioritize writing after leaving Second City, had been a part of several writers’ rooms, including 22 Minutes. (She left the news parody show in 2007, well before MacNeill showed up.) After spending years on other people’s projects, working on Baroness was a revelation. “We just did what we wanted,” she says. “Early on, I was like, ‘Okay, we’ll write these things and then we’ll deal with it when someone says no,’ because that had been my experience up to that point.’” But the no never came. The topical carte blanche and the kinship between the co-creators were liberating. “My whole career, I was basically the only woman in a comedy room full of dudes,” she says. “With a bunch of women, there was no need to explain the joke.”

On Baroness, Whalen’s characters were often oases of sanity. According to her husband, David Mackenzie, whom she met in 2009 on The Ron James Show, she’s like that in real life too. “Jenn will politely—lovingly, even—listen to your side, then hit you with a devastating joke or a counterargument that wins the day,” he says. Whalen’s Baroness characters had a sturdy relatability that made them stand-ins for the audience—which could make things pretty weird in the show’s more surreal moments. There’s the Mad Max: Fury Road–inspired sketch, where Whalen’s humourless matriarch is abandoned by her Furiosa-esque sisters, whose horniness supplants their commitment to building a post-apocalyptic feminist-separatist society. Whalen caresses her sole remaining companion, a sex machine covered in protruding dildo-udders. A callback to that character shows up in an episode of SAG, when Julie gets caught in a sex shop with a sex toy strapped to her chest. “When I’m working, I listen to my internal weirdo telling me what to do,” says Whalen. “I see it as energy I’ve got to burn off, like a fugue state. So doing a crazy sketch where I’ve got a dildo strapped to my chest is just the same as making dinner.”

If Whalen is between Kermit and Animal on the Muppet scale, then MacNeill is drawn to Gonzo and Piggy. “I don’t know what this says about me, but I’d never felt more seen than when I first saw Gonzo,” she says. “He was amazing and heartbroken, in love with chickens and just so vulnerable. And Miss Piggy—I’m not saying the abuse was great, but that was absolute level-10 fury. It felt almost Shakespearean.” It makes perfect sense: with her wiry physicality, her rawness, her penchant for risk, MacNeill inhabits characters that are situated somewhere between the oddball daredevil with his heart on his sleeve and the lusty diva whose brash outbursts belie deep-seated uncertainty. Even in her most deranged Baroness moments—for instance, as a woman who is vehemently insistent that dry shampoo is the solution to life’s horrors—MacNeill brought a profound empathy to her work. It’s the same sensitivity that transforms Kris from a cartoonish influencer into a woman who, despite existing in an over-the-top sitcom framework, feels real. “It’s incredibly rare to be able to deliver that kind of bigness with the truth,” says Fab Filippo, co-creator of the CBC hit Sort Of and the director of several episodes of SAG.

In person, MacNeill’s relatability lies in her warmth, her lack of pretension, her anxiety. You can sense how attuned she is to other people’s discomfort, how compelled she is to fix it and how consumed she might become if a solution was beyond her capacity. She vibrates at a different frequency than Whalen, with her pragmatic get-it-done-ness, but they strike a chord in tandem; their end game is the same. The two use their unhinged brand of comedy as a kind of emotional fracking process, excavating truths from life’s seemingly mundane moments and refining the raw materials until they transcend their natural state and reflect something vital about the world and ourselves that we’d never fully considered.

Baroness von Sketch premiered in June of 2016, a year into Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign. The show took off in part because it amplified the voices and experiences of women, with irreverence and honesty, during peak Pussyhat era, at a time when they were being dismissed by people in power. In a similar way, SAG feels intensely relevant in the current moment of Trump 2.0 and rising conservatism in Canada. Faced with a world determined to control female bodies and curtail freedoms, Whalen and ­MacNeill are ­conveying the physical and psychological reality of menopause in visceral, often excruciating detail. When reality is too bleak, too absurd, too impossible to comprehend, they seem to suggest, hysterical laughter is the only way to ward off hysterical tears.

There’s often a trust-fall moment when creative collaborators really click—an act of radical vulnerability predicated on the hope that the other person will catch you. For MacNeill and Whalen, that moment was “Clean Pole.” The initial concept—a stripper who can’t deal with the germs on the pole—came to MacNeill early in the Baroness development process. But she was nervous about bringing such a weird idea to the table. She was new to Toronto and hadn’t come up in the local sketch community. “I told Meredith that it was one of the funniest, most original things I’d ever heard, and that she had to do it,” says Whalen. That vote of confidence catalyzed a signature MacNeill performance: a neurotic bride-to-be appalled by the unhygienic conditions at an amateur pole-dancing class, she grudgingly concedes to the whims of her bachelorette crew and winds up twerking, undulating and straddling the pole—oiling herself up with hand sanitizer and whipping her hair in a mist of disinfectant spray.

Having a partner who has your back is invaluable on a project like Small Achievable Goals, where both women are pushing themselves, gleefully but not without trepidation, to confront unsettling topics. “I love making out with failure,” says MacNeill. “For me, that’s where great stuff comes from.” She’ll admit to private moments of wondering if she had to take things quite so far—with the period blood, for example. But she has learned to shove those doubts away. “You fought so hard for your idea; nobody can know you’re scared. You have to stand behind it.”

Whalen and MacNeill share a taste for danger—they’re both provocateurs in their own ways. They champion those over-the-top moments because that excess feels true to the characters, to the experience, to real life. But, when you push and win, following through can be terrifying. Developing this idea, making this show—they know it’s a risk. It’s raw and it’s gross. It’s also funny and relatable, but it’s not a sure bet. Still, they refuse to worry about what comes next. They’ll keep revving that engine until they crash into a wall.

This story appears in the March 2025 issue of Toronto Life magazine. To subscribe, click here. To purchase single issues, click here.