Best Shows Like Hacks & Mrs. Maisel: Female-Led Comedy-Dramas 2026

"The blueprint for modern female-led comedy-drama. Phoebe Waller-Bridge breaks the fourth wall like she's letting you in on a secret she probably shouldn't share. The grief underneath the gags hits like a freight train. If Maisel's rapid-fire confidence inspires you, Fleabag's raw honesty will rearrange you."

"The 1980s women's wrestling setting sounds gimmicky until you realize it's the perfect arena for the same tensions Hacks thrives on: women fighting for space, clashing egos, and finding solidarity in the chaos. The ensemble cast is consistently surprising, and Alison Brie's transformation is one of TV's best character arcs."

"Issa Rae built a show around the awkward, uncomfortable, hilarious realities of navigating career and friendship when you're not sure who you're becoming. The dialogue snaps with the same lived-in specificity that makes Hacks and Maisel feel real. It's never preachy and always painfully honest."

"Don't let the title fool youu2014this show weaponizes rom-com tropes to dismantle them. Rachel Bloom's Rebecca Bunch is as complicated and self-sabotaging as they come, and the musical numbers are legitimately brilliant satire. It gets darker and more ambitious every season, earning its emotional wallop."

"Julia Louis-Dreyfus playing a power-hungry narcissist with razor-sharp dialogue is its own genre. The ensemble insults fly faster than any show on television, and the political satire only gets more savage. If Hacks' Deborah Vance appealed to you as a woman who refuses to shrink, Selina Meyer is her feral political cousin."

"Pamela Adlon's semi-autobiographical gem follows a working actress raising three daughters, and it captures the exhaustion and tenderness of motherhood with zero sentimentality. The mother-daughter dynamics here are as layered and thorny as anything in Maisel, just without the period costumes."

"Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini turn female friendship into a high-wire act over a shared secret. The comedy is dark, the grief is real, and the twists actually earn their shocks. It's the kind of show that trusts women to be angry, funny, and completely untrustworthy narrators of their own lives."

"Bridget Everett plays a woman finding her voice in small-town Kansas, and the result is quieter than Hacks but no less sharp. It's about the weirdos who become your chosen family, and it earns every emotional beat without ever getting saccharine. The most underrated show on this list."

"Alia Shawkat leads this dark comedy about millennials who get entangled in a missing person case, and it spirals into something far stranger. The satire is vicious, the characters are terrible people you can't stop watching, and it reinvents itself every season. Perfect if you like your comedy with a slow-burn dread."

"Abby McEnany created and stars in this half-hour comedy about a queer, butch woman in Chicago, and it's as raw and specific as Hacks is polished. The humor comes from lived experience, not setup-punchline structure. It's short, bold, and doesn't care if you're comfortableu2014exactly the kind of voice that inspired this whole list."