Two excellent TV series I’m watching weekly are at a point where I’m ready to talk about them. They are The Testaments and Margo’s Got Money Troubles. Normally I like to wait until something is complete so I can binge it. This is because I’m quite old and my memory is gone. But these two series are so powerful and strong, they make an indelible impression. Let’s see how the old brain holds up.

The Testaments and Margo’s Got Money Troubles are both about the position and treatment of women in society. Both are about the expectations and demands the patriarchy puts on women to look and act in certain prescribed ways. Ways determined by men.

Outstanding casts, excellent world-building and costuming, and mostly women directors are strong points in both series. Both have been renewed for a second season. The Testaments is on Hulu/Disney+ and Margo’s Got Money Troubles is on Apple TV+.

Margo’s Got Money Troubles

College student and aspiring writer Margo (Elle Fanning) gets pregnant by her married lit professor (Michael Angarano). He wants nothing to do with the baby. She wants to keep it. Margo’s parents are divorced now. Her mom, Shyanne (Michelle Pfeiffer), managed to raise her by working at Hooters. Shyanne is engaged to a minister now. Yes, a man of the church, played by Greg Kinnear.

Margo’s roommate is Susie (Thaddea Graham). Susie likes to cosplay and is especially fond of a wrestler named Jinx.

In order to stay home with the baby and still pay the rent, Margo decides to work at OnlyFans. At first she has very few followers and gets small tips. But the more she works, the better she gets at finding followers and making more money. She develops a persona and writes complex sci-fi stories for her character, an alien named Hungry Ghost. Susie helps. Margo meets a couple of women who are really big on OnlyFans and they help her gain followers, too.

Susie answers the door one day and there stands her hero Jinx (Nick Offerman). Margo reveals that Jinx is her father. He’s just out of rehab for drug addiction and wants to live with them. The baby loves him, so they agree to let him stay as long as he’s clean.

Once this central cast is built, things start to happen. The baby’s father finds out about OnlyFans. His mother (Marcia Gay Harden) doesn’t like the optics. They cause trouble.

Lace (Nicole Kidman) is one of Jinx’s old wrestling buddies, and now his attorney. (Bet you never thought you’d see Nicole Kidman gussied up in a wrestler’s costume.) She dumps Jinx on his back at a wrestling expo, making an old injury flare up. That’s a problem. To compensate, Lace represents Margo in the legal battle against the baby’s dad.

There are threads about sex work being art, about sex work being legal, and about sex work being one of the few ways a woman can make money at home with her baby and a video camera. Can a sex worker be a fit parent? That is the issue that finally takes center stage and leads into a court room.

There’s more depth to this series. There are themes about drug addiction, about family and relationships, about motherhood and parenting, and (obviously) about women’s role in society.

The women directors in this series were Dearbhla Walsh, Kate Herron, and Alice Seabright. Season 1 is complete and season 2 is on the way.

The Testaments

Running The Testaments weekly was smart for this series. It has a huge following from The Handmaid’s Tale fandom. It’s mysterious and engages fans in all sort of theories that get discussed weekly on social media. After a shocking episode 9, there’s one more week to wait for the season finale in episode 10 on May 27.

The cast is a new generation in Gilead with lots of young women who were unknown actors before this. A few faces from The Handmaid’s Tale show up. This includes Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd) and a couple of episodes with Elisabeth Moss as June.

Agnes (Chase Infiniti) is the central character. Agnes is actually June’s daughter Hannah. She now of an age to be married off to a Commander.

The other central character is Daisy (Lucy Halliday) from Toronto. Daisy was recruited by June and Mayday to go into Gilead undercover. She’s pretending to be a convert. Daisy’s handler, Garth (Brad Alexander), is Agnes’s guardian and a soon-to-be Commander.

These young girls have grown up under the oppressive and rule-bound thumb of Gilead. They wait for their periods to begin so they can be married. They are not allowed to read or write or be alone with a boy. Their interactions are tightly controlled. Any tiny moments they have to just be themselves are stolen away and secret.

Everything is mysterious and guarded. What Daisy and Garth can do as Mayday, who others in Mayday might be, which characters from The Handmaid’s Tale might be related to the girls in this world, and what Agnes will do when she learns the truth about her mother are open questions. Viewers perch on the edge of their seats waiting to see what baby lesbian Becka (Mattea Conforti) will do to avoid marriage and what Daisy will do to help her oppressed new friends. Fans scour Margaret Atwood’s original books for clues.

This series is a cultural milestone, as was The Handmaid’s Tale. With women losing rights to the current American regime daily, the scenes in Gilead become more and more like what we are living now. Loss of women’s health rights, loss of voting rights, loss of educational excellence, and the loss of trustworthy media echo through the real world.

The women directors in this series are Shana Stein, Quyen Tran, and Jet Wilkinson.

These two television series are very different but both excellent and worthy of your time and attention.