Oprah, 68, and Maria Shriver, 67, Get Honest About ‘the Big M’ in New Docuseries
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Oprah and Maria Shriver open up about menopause in a new docuseries.
Paramount+’s The Checkup with Dr. David Agus features interviews with celebrities who discuss their personal health struggles.
It also features discussions with Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Howie Mandel, and more.
If you haven’t noticed, there’s been a recent surge in public discussion of menopause—in the form of catered skincare brands (a la Naomi Watts) and candid celebrity Instagrams (a la Gabrielle Union), to name a few. And now, streaming is taking a stab at the discourse with Paramount+’s The Checkup with Dr. David Agus, in which Oprah Winfrey and Maria Shriver share their own experiences with “the big M”—menopause.
The Checkup is a series of sit-down interviews with celebrities who discuss personal health struggles with David Angus, M.D., a medical oncologist, author, and professor of medicine and engineering at the University of Southern California.
The trailer was released this week, and shows snippets of Winfrey and Shriver getting candid about the big change.
“Oh, so we’re talking about the big M today. I love this,” Winfrey says at one point. “What is this I’m feeling and how am I feeling? Nobody’s told you that this day is coming,” she says in another clip.
In Shriver’s interview, she opens up about the stigmas associated with the transition. “There’s that whole thing, you know, women who are in menopause are crazy in general,” she says.
Both influential women have previously discussed menopause in some form to shed light on the taboo subject. In a 2019 essay for Oprah Daily, Winfrey, 68, revealed heart palpitations and trouble sleeping led her to realize she was approaching it.
“Until that point in my adult life, I don’t recall one serious conversation with another woman about what to expect. Sure, I’d heard about hot flashes. But I wasn’t prepared for palpitations,” she wrote. “And, after my menstrual cycle stopped for good, at 53, I wasn’t prepared to have such difficulty concentrating. Reading, my favorite pastime, became a chore. Suddenly my attitude toward most things was ‘whatever.’ I wasn’t vibrant. My whole world dulled down a couple of notches.”
She added that using an estrogen supplement helped tremendously.
Shriver, 67, has had various candid talks about menopause with medical experts and the like on her blog, Sunday Paper, and podcast, Conversations Above the Noise.
“For myself, I attributed much of what I was feeling to, ‘My mother is sick, oh, my mother just died. My father is sick, now my father has died. My marriage is in trouble, my kids are leaving home.’ I attributed everything I was going through to something other than what I was actually going through,” she recently told Stacy London on the podcast.
“I’m so tired of all these women’s health issues being in the shadows, and nobody wants to talk about them,” she said in another interview with Lisa Larkin, M.D., women’s health and menopause expert. “So many young women know nothing about it, so many women who are going through it know nothing about it.”
The Checkup also features conversations with Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Amy Schumer, Ashton Kutcher, and Howie Mandel about their own health experiences. The first three episodes release on December 6.
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