Women On The Edge

There's a particular kind of female character having a moment right now, not the girlboss, not the victim, not the one who learns her lesson. Something messier. A woman who knows exactly what she's doing is wrong and does it anyway. Who is operating under a weight so specific, so quietly accumulating, that the thing she finally does, the desperate thing, the unhinged thing, the thing that will cost her, feels, by the time it arrives, almost inevitable.

Here are four shows built around that woman. None of them are entirely comfortable. All of them are worth it.

Margo's Got Money Troubles

Margo is nineteen, newly pregnant by her married English professor, broke, and out of options. Her solution, OnlyFans, is treated by the show not as a scandal or a cautionary tale but simply as a move. A decision made by someone who looked at the board and played the only piece she had. Elle Fanning carries it with a lightness that disguises how much she's actually doing; Michelle Pfeiffer plays her mother, a woman who made her own version of the same choice twenty years earlier and is watching history repeat itself with complicated feelings. Their scenes together are the whole reason to watch. This is not a show about shame, and that alone makes it unusual. Already renewed for a second season, this is the most fun you'll have watching someone's life fall apart.

Watch now only on Apple TV+

Long Bright River

Mickey Fitzpatrick is a Philadelphia beat cop patrolling the neighbourhood she grew up in, raising her son alone, playing English horn at night when the apartment is quiet. Her younger sister Kacey is living on the streets. When women start turning up dead on the avenue Mickey knows, the predominantly male authorities have decided aren't worth the urgency, she starts looking herself. Amanda Seyfried has never been better, building a woman so tightly held together that you feel the effort of it in every scene. This is a show about the particular burden of the eldest daughter: the one who didn't leave, who held everything, who is still holding it. Grim, yes. Also, the most emotionally honest thing on television this season.

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Straight To Hell

Japan's most famous fortune teller, Kazuko Hosoki, built her empire by telling people loudly, on national television, that they were going straight to hell. The show is the story of how she got there first and survived it. Spanning sixty years of post-war Japan, it follows Kazuko from desperate hostess bar worker to media phenomenon, through shady decisions, underworld connections, and a brutal refusal to be anyone other than exactly who she was. Erika Toda does not ask you to like her. She dares you to understand her. The show is nine hours long and occasionally slow; watch it anyway. Women who built empires from nothing rarely get this kind of treatment.

Inspired by real life, Kazuko Hosoki and her life story, watch this only on Netflix

How To Get To Heaven From Belfast

From Lisa McGee, the creator of Derry Girls, comes something considerably darker, though she keeps the wit. Three lifelong friends in their late thirties are pulled back together by the suspicious death of a fourth, estranged member of their school group. What starts as a wake turns into something none of them planned for, involving secrets they've been carrying for twenty years and one very large problem they now have to solve together. It is funny, and then it is not funny at all, and the shift between those two registers is handled with real skill. The kind of show that reminds you why female friendship is, among other things, a survival strategy.

Watch now on Netflix

Imperfect Women

One of the three best friends is found dead. The other two, played by Kerry Washington and Elisabeth Moss, both at the top of their game, must now sit with everything they knew about her, everything they suspected, and everything they chose not to see. What makes this different from the standard murder mystery is that the investigation is almost beside the point. The real subject is the architecture of a long female friendship: the loyalty, the envy, the careful silences, the things you never say because saying them would change everything. Twisted, sinister, and better than its mixed reviews suggest.

Catch the show only on Apple TV+

What connects Margo, Mickey, Kazuko, Saoirse, and Eleanor is not strength in the easy sense. It's something more specific: the ability to keep moving under an impossible amount of weight, often in the wrong direction, always for reasons that make sense if you understand what they've been carrying. That's the character worth watching right now. Not because she's admirable but because she's honest.