Oprah and Maria Shriver Talk Menopause on ‘The Checkup’

• Oprah and Maria Shriver talk about menopause in a new documentary series.
• Paramount+ The review with Dr. David Agus features interviews with celebrities discussing their personal health issues.
• 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 discussions about menopause—in the form of catering to skincare brands (a la Naomi Watts) and outspoken Instagram celebrities (a la Gabrielle Union), to name a few. And now streaming is taking a stab at the discourse with Paramount+ The review with Dr. David Agusin which Oprah Winfrey and Maria Shriver share their own experiences with the “big M” – menopause.

The check is a series of celebrity interviews discussing personal health issues with David Angus, MD, medical oncologist, author and professor of medicine and engineering at the University of Southern California.

The trailer was released this week and features clips of Winfrey and Shriver getting candid about the big change.

“Oh, so we’re talking about the big M today. I love that,” Winfrey says at one point. “What is it that I feel and how do I feel? Nobody told you this day was coming,” she says in another clip.

In Shriver’s interview, she talked about the stigmas associated with transitioning. “There’s this whole thing, you know, women who go through menopause are generally crazy,” she says.

Both powerful women have already discussed menopause in some form to shed light on the taboo subject. In 2019 Essay Oprah DailyWinfrey, 68, revealed that palpitations and trouble sleeping made her realize she was getting close.

“Up to this point in my adult life, I don’t recall having a single serious conversation with another woman about what to expect. Sure, I’ve heard of hot flashes. But I wasn’t prepared for heart palpitations,” she wrote. “And after my period stopped for good at age 53, I wasn’t prepared to have such difficulty concentrating. Reading, my favorite pastime, has become a chore. Suddenly my attitude towards most things was “whatever”. I wasn’t lively. My whole world dulled a few notches.

She added that using an estrogen supplement helped tremendously.

Shriver, 67, has had various candid conversations about menopause with medical experts and others on her blog, Sunday paperand podcast, Talk above the noise.

“For myself, I put a lot of what I was feeling down to, ‘My mom is sick, oh, my mom just passed away. My father is sick, now my father died. My marriage is in trouble, my children are leaving home. I was attributing everything I was going through to something other than what I was actually going through,” she recently told Stacey London on the podcast.

“I’m so tired of all these women’s health issues being in the shadows and no one wants to talk about them,” she said in another interview with Lisa Larkin, MD, an expert on women’s health and menopause. “So many young women don’t know anything about it, so many women going through it don’t know anything about it.”

The check also includes conversations with Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Amy Schumer, Ashton Kutcher and Howie Mandel on their own health experiences. The first three episodes are released on December 6.