5 TV Shows To Watch If You Like Margo's Got Money Troubles

Based on Rufi Thorpe's best-selling novel of the same name, the Apple TV series "Margo's Got Money Troubles" boasts an outstanding cast, a deeply fun and surprisingly emotional story, and a unique visual style pioneered by showrunner David E. Kelley. So what's it about, and what should you watch if you love this quirky, heartwarming, and empowering series?

"Margo's Got Money Troubles" stars Oscar nominee Elle Fanning as Margo Millet, a young woman who's a talented writer and working towards an undergraduate degree when she finds herself in a romantic entanglement with her married English professor Mark Gable (Michael Angarano). When Margo gets pregnant, she decides to keep the baby, much to the chagrin of Mark and his powerful mother Elizabeth (Marcia Gay Harden), but there's a problem: having a baby is really expensive. When two of her three roommates move out over Margo's constantly crying baby Bodhi, Margo finds herself in a bind — but along the way, she reunites with her wrestler father Jinx (a perfectly cast Nick Offerman), gets emotional support from her over-the-top mom Shyanne (Michelle Pfeiffer), and figures out a new career move: posting on the adult website OnlyFans under the name HungryGhost.

"Margo's Got Money Troubles" is unbelievably charming, heartfelt, funny, and sweet ... so what pairs perfectly with this show? Here are five shows you should definitely check out if you're a big fan of "Margo's Got Money Troubles."

If you can't get enough of Elle Fanning's irreverent and charismatic lead performance on "Margo's Got Money Troubles," you absolutely must binge-watch her historical drama series "The Great." The series — created by "The Favourite" writer Tony McNamara — started its run on Hulu in 2020 and stars Fanning as the powerful and legendary Russian empress Catherine the Great, kicking things off with her arranged marriage to Emperor Peter III of Russia (Nicholas Hoult, delivering one of his best-ever "weird little guy" performances). Unfortunately for the sharp, brilliant Catherine, Peter is a drunken lout who only cares about partying and carnal pleasures, not the responsibilites of running his empire; shortly into their marriage, Catherine starts planning a coup against him with the aid of her handmaiden and disgraced noblewoman Marial Brezhnev (Phoebe Fox).

Across three seasons, it's a consistent delight to watch Catherine spar with Peter — though their marriage does improve as the show goes on, and the two even become a bit of a team after multiple coup attempts fail — and Hoult and Fanning's chemistry absolutely crackles on-screen. While "The Great" might not be fully committed to historical accuracy, that doesn't matter ... because it's such a good time, and Fanning's sharp-tongued and ridiculously intelligent take on Catherine the Great does feel like it has some basis in historical fact.

Look, it's okay if your favorite thing about "Margo's Got Money Troubles" is its steamier scenes ... but if that's the case, definitely check out Netflix's "Sex Education," a show with just as much heart that uses teenagers exploring their sexualities to tell emotional and incredibly relatable stories. The series, created by Laurie Nunn, is set in a British secondary school called Moordale and introduces us to Otis Milburn (Asa Butterfield), a student who's constantly embarrassed by his very open and communicative mother Jean (Gillian Anderson), who's a sex therapist. Eventually, though, Otis learns that his expertise in this field, all of which he's gleaned from his mom, could help some of his classmates as they figure out their sexual preferences, and he starts a sort of makeshift sex education clinic in an abandoned shed on Moordale's campus with the help of his friend and crush Maeve Wiley (Emma Mackey).

"Sex Education" isn't just ribald and risqué; just like "Margo's Got Money Troubles," it tackles serious topics in deeply real and thoughtful ways, like when student Aimee Gibbs (future "White Lotus" standout Aimee Lou Wood) is sexually harassed on the bus and her female friends rally around her to lend their support, or when Otis' openly gay best friend Eric Effiong (brief "Doctor Who" star Ncuti Gatwa) finds a way to truly express himself to his religious family. If you love "Margo's Got Money Troubles," you'll definitely love "Sex Education."

Created by Carly Mensch, "GLOW" is one of the best Netflix shows that the streamer also canceled far too early — and if you sit down and watch it, you, like its star Alison Brie, might feel like it changed your life. Like Margo Millet, Brie's Ruth Wilder is at a crossroads in her life; she's having an affair with Mark Eagan ("Mad Men" veteran Rich Sommer) with an acting career that's going nowhere, but one day, her agent tells her about an audition for something called GLOW. That stands for "Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling," and it's a scheme run by Sam Sylvia (Marc Maron) to stage fake wrestling matches to snag male attention; all the gorgeous ladies involved wear intense costume and develop over-the-top personas, which is how mild-mannered Ruth transforms into her wrestler "Zoya the Destroya." One big problem for Ruth right out of the gate, though, is that her best friend Debbie Eagan (Betty Gilpin) is also in GLOW ... and Mark just so happens to be Debbie's husband.

With a supporting cast that also includes Sydelle Noel, Kate Nash, Gayle Rankin, Chris Lowell, and even the legendary Geena Davis, "GLOW" was a genuinely wonderful show ... but in 2020, Netflix abruptly reversed the show's renewal for a fourth season and canceled it. Still, if you want to watch enterprising women change their lives with a series of silly costumes and you've already watched "Margo's Got Money Troubles," check out "GLOW."

If you love "Margo's Got Money Trouble" because you love messy female characters, look no further than "Fleabag," an Amazon Prime Video original series that might just also be one of the best shows the streamer has ever made (and which you can easily binge-watch in just one day). Created, written by, and starring Phoebe Waller-Bridge — who originally conceived of "Fleabag" as a one-woman show for the famed Edinburgh Fringe Festival — "Fleabag" encompasses just two short seasons and centers around Waller-Bridge's titular Fleabag, who never receives a proper name. Constantly breaking the fourth wall and making questionable decisions both personally and professionally, we meet Fleabag in the show's debut season not long after the tragic and sudden death of her best friend Boo (Jenny Rainsford) and watches as she deals with her uptight sister Claire (Sian Clifford), her emotionally absent father (Bill Paterson), and her godmother (Olivia Colman), who got involved with Fleabag's dad after her and Claire's mother died.

Season 1 of "Fleabag" is pitch-perfect, but Season 2 of this Emmy-winning series is a legitimate masterpiece. This time, we follow a "reformed" Fleabag as she tries to better her life after a shocking revelation closes out Season 1, but she's tempted by the presence of a local religious leader known only as Hot Priest (Andrew Scott). "Fleabag" is about a woman in crisis at the end of the day, but it's also about her learning how to face any crisis with inner strength and fortitude ... just like "Margo's Got Money Troubles."

If you've already watched "Fleabag" after "Margo's Got Money Troubles" but you wish there were four messy women at the helm, Lena Dunham's HBO series "Girls" is just a ticket. A much more honest and frank take on the "four single women in New York City" trope created by "Sex and the City," "Girls" stars Dunham as Hannah Horvath, a self-obsessed millennial nightmare who opens the series by telling her parents that she might be "the voice of a generaton" as a writer ... or, as she concedes, "a voice of a generation." As she tries to become a great writer living in Brooklyn, Hannah is flanked by her best friend, nightmare human Marnie Michaels (the always phenomenal Allison Williams), the free-spirited "citizen of the world" Jessa Johanssen (Jemima Kirke), and the uptight but quietly brilliant Shoshanna Shapiro (Zosia Mamet) — as well as Hannah's on-again off-again love interest Adam Sackler (Adam Driver in his breakout role). 

"Girls" is unabashedly messy, dirty, sexy, funny, and painfully real; as a showrunner and writer, Dunham never shied away from showing any of the flaws of her main characters. (In fact, in Hannah's case, Dunham often put her flaws on full display.) When it first released in 2012, too many audience members took it too seriously, thinking that Dunham was basically advocating for the kind of behavior she depicted — and thankfully, it got a critical reappraisal years later when fans finally understood Dunham's sharp critique of her generation.

As for "Margo's Got Money Troubles," you can stream that on Hulu.