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9 Shows Like The Bold Type to Watch If You Miss The Bold Type

They're lovable AND lovably ridiculous

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Allison Picurro
The Bold Type

Katie Stevens, Aisha Dee, and Meghann Fahy, The Bold Type

Freeform

The Bold Type concluded its five-season run on Freeform in 2021, and if you've found yourself missing Sutton (Meghann Fahy), Jane (Katie Stevens), Kat (Aisha Dee), and their cohorts at Scarlet ever since, you're not alone. Still, there are plenty of lovable (and lovably ridiculous) shows out there that we think any Bold Type fan will enjoy watching next. Just call me Jacqueline (Melora Hardin), because I'm here to drop some conveniently timed, weirdly specific life advice in your lap.

There are so many reasons to love The Bold Type, like its focus on female friendships, its tangled web of romantic drama, and its exploration of the challenges young career-driven women face. Or maybe you're just a big fan of fashion journalism! Whatever it is, there's a show on this list that you'll be able to obsess over. Take a walk in our fashion closet of recommendations.


Looking for more recommendations of what to watch next? We have a ton of them! We also have hand-picked selections based on shows you already love, as well as recommendations for Netflix (movies/shows), Amazon Prime Video (movies/shows), Hulu (movies/shows), Disney+ (movies/shows), HBO Max (movies/shows), Apple TV+, and Peacock.


The Sex Lives of College Girls

Reneé Rapp, Alyah Chanelle Scott, Pauline Chalamet, and Amrit Kaur, The Sex Lives of College Girls

Reneé Rapp, Alyah Chanelle Scott, Pauline Chalamet, and Amrit Kaur, The Sex Lives of College Girls

HBO Max

Mindy Kaling loves nothing more than exploring the thrills and mortifications of young women finding themselves. With The Sex Lives of College Girls, she does that with the quartet of friends at the comedy's center, who are thrown together when they become freshman year roommates and begin to navigate their newfound freedom. As the title promises, it does, in fact, deal with sex quite a lot, but in a fun, refreshing way that explores all the fumbling awkwardness of those in-between years when you're not quite adolescent but not quite an adult either. Fans of The Bold Type will like the empowering (but not cringeworthy) vibe of this show, and many of its best moments come when it focuses on the friendships between its core four. What's better than that? -Allison Picurro


Emily in Paris

Lily Collins, Emily in Paris

Lily Collins, Emily in Paris

Carole Bethuel/Netflix

Sure, Emily in Paris has received a lot of backlash for its overall ridiculousness (and subsequent award noms), but it's being included on this list because sometimes that's exactly what you want. And, let's be real, if you're a fan of The Bold Type, you're not afraid of insane dialogue and plot lines. Lily Collins stars as Emily, a young, fashionable Chicago-based marketing exec who lands her dream job serving as the American perspective at a Paris marketing firm. There are culture clashes as Emily struggles to fit in with her new colleagues! There is girlbossery as she succeeds at her job anyway! There's the ever-important search for love as she dates a string of handsome Frenchmen! There is no better show to zone out and laugh at than this one, we promise.


Good Trouble

Cierra Ramirez, Good Trouble

Cierra Ramirez, Good Trouble

Freeform

If it's the Freeform vibes you're looking for, it's the Freeform vibes you'll get with Good Trouble. It's actually a spin-off of another Freeform show called The Fosters, though you don't need to have seen it to enjoy Good Trouble. The dramedy follows two sisters, Callie (Maia Mitchell) and Mariana (Cierra Ramirez), as they move to Los Angeles to follow their dreams in the worlds of law and tech, respectively. It's a little different from the distinctly New York media world setting of The Bold Type, but it focuses just as much on the theme of young professionals navigating life, relationships, and work in the big city. Also, there's a lot of melodrama, if that's your thing.


Younger

Younger

Younger

TVLand

The Bold Type and Younger are basically twins: two frothy dramas about glamorous young professionals trying to carve out glamorous careers. It's just that one of the young professionals in Younger is secretly a divorced mother. The soapy Darren Star drama follows a woman in her 40s, Liza (Sutton Foster), who passes herself off as a twentysomething in order to get a foothold in the book publishing industry. Along the way, she befriends ambitious millennial Kelsey (Hilary Duff) and gets into a love triangle with the age-appropriate head of the company and a 26-year-old tattoo artist. Her fabulous boss, Diana (Miriam Shor), has a necklace collection that frankly deserves its own Scarlet magazine spread. Is it too late for a crossover? -Kelly Connolly 


Sweetbitter

Caitlin FitzGerald and Ella Purnell, Sweetbitter

Caitlin FitzGerald and Ella Purnell, Sweetbitter

Macall Polay/Starz

Much like The Bold Type, Sweetbitter is show about being a young woman working in New York City, but Tess (Ella Purnell) lands a job as a waitress as opposed to a fast-paced magazine. Based on Stephanie Danler's novel of the same name, Sweetbitter is a bit like a darker Bold Type, and it doesn't shy away from Tess' experiences with developing new relationships, both platonic (watching her form a friend group with her coworkers is one of the best parts of the series) and romantic (Tess quickly finds herself developing an uncontrollable infatuation with Tom Sturridige's Jake), and exploring the culture of the city. 


Twenties

Jonica T. Gibbs, Gabrielle Graham, Christina Elmore, Twenties

Jonica T. Gibbs, Gabrielle Graham, Christina Elmore, Twenties

BET

Created by Lena Waithe, Twenties puts a queer Black woman at the spotlight. Hattie, played by Jonica "JoJo" T. Gibbs, is a butch lesbian and just barely holding herself together. At the beginning of the series, she's just been evicted, is throwing herself into flings with women who are unavailable and uninterested, and aspiring to become a TV writer without taking the necessary steps to make it a reality. Her straight best friends, Marie (Christina Elmore) and Nia (Gabrielle Graham), are stumbling through their lives, too, but just like the girls of The Bold Type, the strength of their friendship is what keeps them all going through the rough patches.


Shrill

Shrill

Shrill

Allyson Riggs/Hulu

Like Jane, Aidy Bryant's Annie is a struggling journalist. She's also writing for a fictional publication — Portland's The Thorn — and dealing with an eccentric editor in John Cameron Mitchell's Gabe. But while the show definitely provides some funny commentary on the state of journalism today, it's also about Annie's journey with her body image: She's fat and wants to learn to love that about herself rather than go on a demoralizing weight loss journey. She doesn't want to waste her time with bad boyfriends, though that of course requires a self-discovery journey that the series navigates over its three seasons. Which is to say Shrill is about a very relatable concept a lot of women in their twenties and thirties might be pretty familiar with! Though the real draw of Shrill for any Bold Type fan, as is the case with many of the shows on this list, are Annie's friendships with her supportive, lovingly odd friends, like Lolly Adefope's Fran and Patti Harrison's Ruthie.



Ugly Betty

America Ferrera, Ugly Betty

America Ferrera, Ugly Betty

ABC

If you're looking for another show that deals with the fashion magazine culture, it's time to check out Ugly Betty. Based on a Colombian telenovela, the series centers around Betty (America Ferrera), a wide-eyed, awkward 22-year-old sorely lacking in a sense of style. Naturally, she gets a job working at Mode, a (fictional) fashion magazine where she is under-valued and disrespected by her workers — at first, anyway. Over time, she develops a connection with her inexperienced editor-in-chief, Daniel (Eric Mabius), who holds his job only because of nepotism, and has a delightfully antagonistic relationship with creative director Wilhelmina Slater (Vanessa Williams, who eats up every scene she's in). If you can believe it, Ugly Betty is even more dramatic than The Bold Type, but in the best possible way.


Insecure

Insecure

Yvonne Orji, Issa Rae, Insecure

Merie W. Wallace/HBO

If you're looking for a more true-to-life take on the millennial experience that still doesn't skimp on joy, Insecure has your back. The great HBO comedy-drama is a fresh, specific look at Black womanhood through the eyes of Issa (co-creator Issa Rae) and Molly (Yvonne Orji), longtime friends hitting their 30s in Los Angeles. Their struggle to balance friendship, dating, and career mobility will be familiar to fans of The Bold Type, but it's the show's willingness to steer into difficult moments of growth that really sets it apart. Insecure will have you celebrating the characters' wins, yelling about their love lives, and taking sides in Issa and Molly's fights with the rest of Twitter. -Kelly Connolly