Forget the damsel in distress. Toss the love interest who exists to motivate the male protagonist. Burn the tired trope where women characters are either saints or villains with zero complexity between.
These ten TV shows said no to all of that. They put women front and center. Gave them agency, flaws, ambition, rage, vulnerability, power. Made them detectives, queens, survivors, con artists, politicians, addicts, geniuses, mothers, killers. Made them human in ways television historically reserved for men.
And the result? Some of the best television ever created. Shows that don’t just pass the Bechdel test. Shows that obliterate it. Where women drive plots, make impossible choices, screw up spectacularly, win against odds, lose despite trying, and exist as fully realized people rather than plot devices.
Olivia Benson has been solving sex crimes for 25 years while the world changed around her. Beth Harmon conquered chess boards and addiction simultaneously. June Osborne survived Gilead through rage and resilience. These aren’t just characters. They’re cultural touchstones. Proof that audiences were always ready for complex women. Hollywood just needed to catch up.
The shows on this list span genres, decades, and tones. Dark comedy. Prestige drama. Procedural. Thriller. Period piece. What they share is centering women’s stories without apology. Without softening edges or making them more palatable. Just letting women be complicated, difficult, brilliant, messy humans who happen to drive the narrative.
Share this with your binge-watching crew because these shows aren’t just entertainment. They’re proof television finally figured out what audiences knew all along: women’s stories are everyone’s stories.
1. Law & Order: SVU: When One Woman Defined Justice For 25 Years
Credits: CBR
Twenty-five years. That’s how long Mariska Hargitay has played Detective (now Captain) Olivia Benson. The longest-running female character in a primetime drama. Ever. That’s not just impressive. That’s legacy-defining television history.
Benson started as a detective in Manhattan’s Special Victims Unit, investigating sex crimes and crimes against children. What could’ve been procedural background character became television’s most enduring depiction of trauma-informed justice. Benson doesn’t just solve cases. She advocates for victims in a system designed to retraumatize them.
The show tackles rape, domestic violence, child abuse, sex trafficking. Heavy content that could easily exploit victims for entertainment. Instead, SVU centered survivors’ experiences. And Benson became the face of that advocacy, both on screen and off. Hargitay’s Joyful Heart Foundation has helped process over 250,000 untested rape kits across America.
The character evolved over two decades. From detective to sergeant to lieutenant to captain. From someone afraid of motherhood because of her own conception through rape to adoptive mother who understands generational trauma. Benson isn’t static. She grows, changes, struggles with her past while building her future.
And she does it all while being the show’s moral center. The person who reminds everyone that victims deserve belief, dignity, and justice. In 25 years and over 550 episodes, Benson never became cynical. Never stopped caring. That’s not just good television. That’s aspirational.
2. The Morning Show: When Women Dismantle Power Structures From Inside
Credits: THR
Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon aren’t just starring in The Morning Show. They’re producing it. Controlling the narrative. Making sure the story about women navigating media’s toxic power dynamics is actually told by women who’ve lived it.
The series exploded onto Apple TV Plus in 2019, perfectly timed with #MeToo reckoning. Aniston plays Alex Levy, a morning show anchor whose co-host is fired for sexual misconduct. Witherspoon’s Bradley Jackson is the outsider journalist brought in as replacement. The collision between establishment figure desperate to maintain power and truth-teller uninterested in playing politics drives everything.
What makes the show exceptional is refusing easy answers. Alex isn’t purely victim or villain. She enabled bad behavior while also being exploited by it. Bradley champions truth-telling but struggles with her own ambitions and compromises. Neither woman is simple. Both contain multitudes.
The third season introduced Jon Hamm as a manipulative media titan, adding even more complexity to already layered power dynamics. But at its core, The Morning Show remains about women fighting for control of their narratives in an industry built to silence them.
Aniston earned Emmy and SAG Award nominations for her devastating performance. Witherspoon brings her signature intensity. And together, they created a show that’s simultaneously entertaining and uncomfortably honest about how power protects itself.
3. Big Little Lies: When Five Women Covered Up Murder And Became Family
Credits: Los Angeles Times
Take Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, Shailene Woodley, Laura Dern, and Zoë Kravitz. Put them in Monterey, California. Give them secrets, trauma, privilege, and one dead body. Watch television magic happen.
Big Little Lies started as limited series based on Liane Moriarty’s novel. Mothers at an elementary school whose lives intertwine through their children’s friendships. Underneath the coastal wealth and picture-perfect facades, domestic violence, rape, postpartum depression, complicated marriages, and the aftermath of sexual assault.
The show’s genius is balancing tones. It’s darkly funny. Deeply tragic. Visually stunning. Emotionally devastating. The murder mystery structure keeps you hooked while the character development makes you care why someone died and who killed them.
Each woman represents different facets of female experience. Madeline (Witherspoon) channels rage at injustice into activism and occasional chaos. Celeste (Kidman) survives abuse from her impossibly charming husband. Jane (Woodley) grapples with single motherhood and past trauma. Renata (Dern) dominates boardrooms while her personal life crumbles. Bonnie (Kravitz) exists as the seemingly Zen outsider hiding her own darkness.
When these five women cover up Celeste’s abuser’s death, they become bound by shared secret and mutual protection. The second season explores that aftermath, showing how trauma bonds people and how privilege both shields and imprisons.
Kidman’s performance as abuse survivor is gutting. The scene where Celeste testifies in court about her abuse while her lawyer presents video evidence of her husband’s violence won Kidman an Emmy. Because Big Little Lies doesn’t flinch from showing what domestic violence actually looks like.
Don’t miss number 4 because Beth Harmon broke every rule and became television’s most unlikely icon.
4. The Queen’s Gambit: When A Chess Prodigy Conquered Addiction And Sexism Simultaneously
Credits: Entertainment Weekly
Beth Harmon is a fictional character. The Queen’s Gambit is adapted from a 1983 novel. None of it is based on real events. And yet Beth became the most talked-about female character of 2020, inspiring a global chess boom and proving audiences will obsess over a show about a woman playing board games.
Anya Taylor-Joy plays Beth with perfect precision. Orphaned young. Introduced to chess by school janitor. Addicted to tranquilizers before puberty. Genius at the game but struggling with everything else. The show follows her rise through the chess world from age 8 to early 20s, competing in male-dominated tournaments while battling substance abuse.
What makes Beth compelling is her contradictions. She’s fragile and invulnerable. Isolated and connected. Brilliant but self-destructive. The show never resolves these tensions. It lets them exist simultaneously because people are complicated.
The chess scenes are shockingly engaging. Cinematographer Steven Meizler shoots board positions like action sequences. The games have stakes, tension, drama. You don’t need to understand chess to feel the weight of each move.
But underneath the chess tournaments is a story about addiction, grief, and found family. Beth’s tranquilizer dependency starts as coping mechanism for trauma. By her teens, she’s combining pills with alcohol, spiraling toward self-destruction. Her recovery isn’t linear or easy. It requires support from the found family of fellow chess players and childhood friend Jolene.
The Queen’s Gambit became Netflix’s most-watched limited series ever. 62 million households in its first 28 days. Chess set sales increased 1000%. Female chess tournament participation spiked. All because one show centered a female genius and her messy, brilliant journey.
5. Fleabag: When Breaking The Fourth Wall Became Emotional Devastation
Credits: Variety
Phoebe Waller-Bridge created, wrote, and starred in Fleabag. The show about a messy London woman navigating grief, sex, family dysfunction, and her complicated relationship with god and desire. It’s 12 episodes total. And it’s perfect.
Fleabag (the character doesn’t get a name) talks directly to the camera. Shares inner thoughts. Lets audiences in on jokes and lies she’s telling other characters. This meta storytelling device creates intimacy that makes the emotional punches land harder.
Season one explores Fleabag’s grief over her best friend’s death. Season two adds a Hot Priest (Andrew Scott) whose chemistry with Fleabag becomes one of television’s great love stories despite or because of its impossibility. Their relationship tackles desire, faith, emotional connection, and why some people are wrong for us even when they feel so right.
Waller-Bridge won Emmys for writing, acting, and producing. The show swept awards. Critics lauded it. Audiences sobbed through that final season 2 scene. All for a show that’s funny, filthy, heartbreaking, and only 12 episodes long.
Fleabag is anti-hero without being hateable. She’s selfish, self-destructive, sexually liberated, emotionally avoidant, and deeply wounded. The show never excuses her behavior. It just shows how trauma manifests in messy ways and healing is nonlinear.
The fourth wall breaking makes viewers complicit. We’re her confidants. The only ones who see her fully. When the Hot Priest notices her glances to camera and asks “Where did you just go?” it breaks the show’s fundamental conceit and devastates simultaneously.
6. Killing Eve: When Spy And Assassin Became Obsessed With Each Other
Credits: Rayo
What happens when an MI6 agent becomes obsessed with the female assassin she’s hunting? And what happens when the assassin becomes equally obsessed with her pursuer? Killing Eve answers those questions across four seasons of cat-and-mouse that’s really a twisted love story.
Sandra Oh plays Eve Polastri, a bored MI6 security officer who gets recruited to track international assassin Villanelle (Jodie Comer). Villanelle is psychopathic, fashion-obsessed, wildly skilled, and increasingly fixated on the woman hunting her. Their obsession with each other drives the plot while the actual spy thriller elements become background.
The show subverts spy genre expectations. Eve isn’t glamorous superspy. She’s middle-aged, in failing marriage, wearing practical clothes. Villanelle is the flashy one. Designer outfits. Dramatic kills. Scene-stealing charisma. The role reversal alone makes Killing Eve fresh.
But it’s Oh and Comer’s performances that make it exceptional. Oh brings vulnerability and growing darkness as Eve’s obsession transforms her. Comer makes Villanelle simultaneously terrifying and magnetic. Their chemistry crackles even in scenes where they’re not together.
The show is also gorgeously shot. Paris. Berlin. London. Amsterdam. Each episode looks like fashion editorial. Villanelle’s wardrobe alone became cultural talking point. The murder scenes are stylized, creative, often darkly funny.
Killing Eve won 22 Emmy nominations across its run. Oh and Comer both won acting awards. Phoebe Waller-Bridge adapted the first season before passing showrunning duties to other female creators for subsequent seasons.
Share this list with your TV-obsessed friend because we’re only halfway through and it gets even better.
7. The Handmaid’s Tale: When Dystopia Became Too Real To Ignore
Credits: THR
Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel became required reading for understanding reproductive rights and theocratic oppression. The 2017 Hulu adaptation became required viewing for anyone trying to process real-world attacks on women’s autonomy.
Elisabeth Moss plays June Osborne, forced into sexual servitude as a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead, a totalitarian regime that overthrew the United States. The show is brutal. Rape. Violence. Oppression. Watching it is difficult. But June’s resistance, resilience, and rage make it necessary.
What makes The Handmaid’s Tale powerful is refusing to let June be passive victim. She fights back. Sabotages. Escapes. Returns. Kills when necessary. Her journey from survival to resistance to revenge shows how oppression radicalizes people and why revolution requires fury.
Moss won Emmys for her devastating performance. The show won Outstanding Drama Series. And the imagery of Handmaids in red cloaks became protest symbol at reproductive rights rallies worldwide. Art influenced reality which influenced art which influenced reality in ongoing cycle.
The show expanded beyond Atwood’s novel, exploring what happens when June escapes Gilead and tries to dismantle it from outside. Season 5 concluded the main story while a sequel series The Testaments is in development.
The Handmaid’s Tale succeeds because it never feels exploitative. The violence has purpose. June’s suffering matters. And the show consistently centers women’s experiences even in a world designed to erase them.
8. Orphan Black: When One Actress Played Ten Clones And Changed Sci-Fi Forever
Credits: THR
Tatiana Maslany deserves every award she won for Orphan Black. She plays Sarah Manning, a con artist who discovers she’s one of many clones created in illegal experiment. Then Maslany plays all the other clones. Different accents, mannerisms, personalities, wardrobes. Ten distinct characters all played by one actress.
The show is sci-fi thriller about corporate conspiracy, genetic manipulation, and bodily autonomy. But at its heart, it’s about found family. The clones forming community, protecting each other, and reclaiming ownership of their bodies from the people who created them.
Each clone represents different aspects of womanhood. Sarah is the tough streetwise survivor. Cosima is the scientist. Alison is the suburban mother. Helena is the traumatized warrior. Together they show spectrum of female experience while literally being the same person genetically.
Maslany’s performance is technically astonishing. Watching her play scenes where multiple clones interact requires reminding yourself it’s one person. The makeup, hair, and costuming help differentiate characters but Maslany’s acting sells it completely.
Orphan Black ran five seasons on BBC America, earning cult following and critical acclaim. Maslany finally won the Emmy in the show’s final season after multiple nominations. And the show remains gold standard for how science fiction can explore bodily autonomy, identity, and sisterhood.
9. Succession: When The Only Competent Roy Was The Daughter Nobody Took Seriously
Credits: THR
Succession is ensemble drama about the Roy family fighting over media empire. But Shiv Roy (Sarah Snook) deserves special mention for navigating the sexism of being the only daughter in a family that values ruthlessness and underestimates women.
Shiv is brilliant, ambitious, and perpetually underestimated by her father Logan and brothers Kendall and Roman. She leaves the family company to pursue politics, only to be lured back with promises of CEO position her father never intends to keep. Watching Shiv’s journey from outsider to insider to betrayed daughter to ruthless player is devastating character arc.
Snook’s performance earned her Emmy for the final season. Shiv is neither hero nor villain. She’s complicit in the family’s corruption while also being its victim. She uses feminism as weapon when convenient, abandons it when power beckons. She’s exactly as flawed and ruthless as her brothers but faces additional barriers because of her gender.
The show’s final season revolves partly around Shiv’s pregnancy and how it complicates her ambitions and relationships. The ending sees her making pragmatic choice that betrays her brother to secure her own future. It’s morally complex, character-consistent, and perfectly acted.
Succession proved prestige drama could center deeply flawed women without redemption arcs. Shiv doesn’t learn lessons or grow into better person. She becomes more of who she always was. And that’s refreshing in its honesty.
10. Yellowjackets: When Survival Required Becoming Something Else
Credits: The Direct
What happens when a girls’ high school soccer team’s plane crashes in remote wilderness? They survive. By any means necessary. Including eventually resorting to cannibalism. Yellowjackets doesn’t flinch from showing what desperation does to people and how trauma shapes everything that comes after.
The show splits timelines. 1996 crash and immediate aftermath. 2021 present day where survivors cope with what they did to survive and secrets they’ve kept for 25 years. The dual timeline structure creates tension as present-day mystery connects to past trauma.
The ensemble cast includes Melanie Lynskey, Juliette Lewis, Christina Ricci, and Tawny Cypress as adult survivors. Sophie Nélisse, Sammi Hanratty, Sophie Thatcher, and Jasmin Savoy Brown play their teenage selves. Both casts are exceptional, creating coherent characters across time periods.
Yellowjackets is horror. It’s mystery. It’s survival drama. It’s character study of trauma. And it’s all anchored by women and girls making impossible choices that haunt them forever. The show doesn’t judge them for what survival required. It just shows the cost of living when death surrounded them.
The second season expanded the mythology while deepening character development. The show was renewed through season 5, giving creators time to tell complete story. And it’s become cultural phenomenon, inspiring fan theories, analysis, and recognition that women-centered horror-thriller can be prestige television.
Drop a comment: Which powerful female lead resonates most with you? What show with a female protagonist should be on this list? Share this with every person who needs their next binge-watch because these shows aren’t just entertaining. They’re proof representation matters and audiences were always ready for complex women driving stories.
Follow for more recommendations that prove television finally figured out what audiences knew all along: women’s stories are universal. They’re compelling. They’re necessary. And when given space to be fully human, female characters create the most memorable television ever made.
Television is better when women lead. Not because diversity quota or representation checkbox. But because centering women’s perspectives, experiences, and stories makes for richer, more complex, more human narratives. These ten shows prove it across genres, tones, and decades. From Olivia Benson solving crimes for 25 years to Beth Harmon conquering chess to June Osborne surviving Gilead to the Yellowjackets surviving wilderness and their secrets. These aren’t just strong female characters. These are fully realized humans who happen to be women. Flawed. Ambitious. Vulnerable. Powerful. Messy. Brilliant. Everything male protagonists have always been allowed to be. And audiences responded by making these shows cultural phenomena. Because when you stop limiting what women characters can be, you unlock what television can be. Complex. Challenging. Unforgettable. These shows didn’t just give us powerful female leads. They redefined what power looks like and who gets to wield it. And television is better for it.
