TV Shows

When their husbands announce they’re in love with each other, two very different women — uptight Grace (Jane Fonda) and free-spirited Frankie (Lily Tomlin) — are forced to reinvent themselves and become best friends. Seven seasons of wisdom, humor, and fierce celebration of older women’s full humanity including sexuality and business.

Pamela Adlon writes, directs, and stars as Sam Fox — a single actress-mother raising three daughters while navigating Hollywood, aging, menopause, desire, and her eccentric mother. Honest, funny, and fiercely non-sentimental about the realities of midlife womanhood.

A Cuban-American single mother veteran raises her family across three generations. Rita Moreno’s Lydia is a revelation — an older woman whose sexuality, vanity, and full personhood are celebrated rather than erased. Among the best representations of older Latinx women on television.

Michael Douglas and Alan Arkin navigate the indignities of getting old in Hollywood. A rare show that treats aging with both humor and dignity, addressing prostate cancer, death of spouses, and the persistence of desire and ambition in later life.

A gay man with cerebral palsy rewrites his own narrative. Relevant for midlife women because of its unflinching look at ableism, disability, sexuality, and the right to live a full life outside of conventional expectations about what a good body and a good life look like.

Set in post-war East London, this long-running drama follows a community of midwives and nuns across decades. Features multiple storylines centered on older women’s health, aging, menopause, sexuality, and the evolution of women’s healthcare over the 20th century.

A teenager with a sex therapist mother creates an informal sex therapy clinic. Gillian Anderson’s character is a perfectly drawn portrait of a single, sexually active, professionally successful woman in her 50s. Funny, frank, and refreshingly sex-positive about midlife desire.

The adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel about an on-and-off relationship between two young Irish people. Though centered on youth, the show’s frank, respectful portrayal of intimacy, consent, and emotional complexity has made it essential viewing for anyone who cares about healthy sexuality at any age.

Gillian Anderson plays Detective Superintendent Stella Gibson — a composed, sexually confident, professionally ruthless woman in her 40s hunting a serial killer. A rare portrayal of a fully realized, uncompromising older woman as the absolute center of a crime drama.