Netflix's My Brilliant Career dropped in August with six episodes and a heroine who'd really like everyone to stop proposing. Philippa Northeast's Sybylla is prickly, determined, and dead-set on becoming a writer in early-1900s rural Australia—a time and place that would much rather she marry well and keep quiet. The series wraps her stubbornness in enough romantic tension to keep you guessing until the final frame.
If you've already binged the whole thing and crave more period heroines making choices their families will never forgive, there's plenty on TV to fill the void. Here are shows about women behaving very badly—for their times, at least.
'Dickinson' (2019–2021)
Hailee Steinfeld plays Emily Dickinson, but not the somber recluse from your high school English class. Creator Alena Smith's Apple TV series ran for three seasons and 30 episodes, reimagining the poet as a young woman sneaking out at night and falling for her brother's fiancée (Ella Hunt's Sue Gilbert) while locked in an ongoing war with her father (Toby Huss) over whether her writing has any business existing outside her bedroom drawer. The show is deliberately anachronistic, set to modern pop music and peppered with contemporary slang. Wiz Khalifa plays Death in a top hat and carriage, and John Mulaney shows up as a hilariously vain Thoreau—somehow it all makes Emily's frustration feel completely present rather than safely historical.
Emily and Sybylla share the same core problem: they want to write, and the people closest to them wish they'd stop. My Brilliant Career plays that tension with warmth and a romantic slow burn; Dickinson takes it somewhere far stranger, building into near-magical realism by its final season. The tonal gap is huge, but if Sybylla's stubbornness got to you, Emily's will too.
'The Buccaneers' (2023–Present)
Five wealthy young American women descend on 1870s London looking for titled husbands, and what starts as a giddy fish-out-of-water comedy of manners gradually turns into a story about what happens when the marriages you chased turn out to be cages. Apple TV's The Buccaneers, created by Katherine Jakeways from Edith Wharton's unfinished novel, has aired two seasons of eight episodes each, with a third renewed. It's anchored by Kristine Froseth's Nan St. George and Christina Hendricks as her scene-stealing mother. The Gilded Age setting is gorgeous, but the show earns its keep with the friendships between these women and how they protect each other when their lives start pulling in different directions.
Like My Brilliant Career, The Buccaneers is interested in young women realizing that the life they were raised to want may not be the one they actually want. Sybylla's story is intimate—one woman and her notebook in a small corner of the Outback—while The Buccaneers blows that scale wide open, scattering its heroines across London ballrooms and country estates. It's soapier than My Brilliant Career, but that's not a bad thing.
'The Great' (2020–2023)
Elle Fanning plays Catherine the Great as a bright-eyed idealist who arrives in 18th-century Russia expecting a love story and gets a husband, Peter III (Nicholas Hoult), who is, to put it gently, a nightmare. Creator Tony McNamara's Hulu series ran for three seasons and 30 episodes, wearing the subtitle “an occasionally true story” as a badge of honor. The show borrows history's broad strokes and turns them into a pitch-black comedy about power. Catherine's solution to her miserable marriage is to stage a coup—the kind of ambition that makes Sybylla's literary dreams look pretty polite by comparison.
Sybylla's rebellion is quiet and personal; Catherine's involves at least one beheading and several poisonings. The Great is funnier and significantly bloodier than anything else on this list, and it's the pick for anyone who watched Sybylla refuse a proposal and thought, “OK, but what if she just killed her suitor instead?”
'Little Women' (2017)
Jo March is the original “I'd rather write than get married” heroine, and this three-part 2017 BBC miniseries, adapted by Heidi Thomas, gives her a version worth seeking out alongside the better-known Greta Gerwig film. Maya Hawke plays Jo, with Emily Watson as Marmee and Angela Lansbury as Aunt March. The miniseries aired on PBS Masterpiece in 2018, and at only three episodes it moves briskly through Alcott's novel, covering the March sisters from wartime poverty through Jo's early writing career with a directness that bigger adaptations lose in the shuffle.
The connection to My Brilliant Career is the most straightforward one here: Alcott's novel came out in 1868, and Miles Franklin's in 1901. Both center on a young woman choosing writing over the comfortable route everyone wants her to accept.
'Anne with an E' (2017–2019)
Amybeth McNulty's Anne Shirley is one of the great TV performances of the last decade, and if you've only ever thought of Anne of Green Gables as a cozy childhood story, this CBC/Netflix adaptation will reset your expectations. Created by Moira Walley-Beckett (who won an Emmy for writing Breaking Bad's “Ozymandias”), the series ran for three seasons and takes L.M. Montgomery's novel into darker territory. Anne's years in orphanages and abusive foster homes have left her with scars that the show doesn't shy away from, and her fierce imagination becomes both a refuge and a weapon. Like Sybylla, Anne refuses to be defined by what society expects of her—she's a dreamer who fights for her own voice, even when the world tries to silence her.
If you're looking for more shows about defiant women, check out Netflix's September picks or dive into Keri Russell's return in The Diplomat. And for a change of pace, this overlooked comedy might surprise you.
