Some stories just know how to grab you. A wedding dress zipping up. A hospital waiting room. A daughter who goes to college with a mother who pretends to be fine. One minute you’re staring at strangers and the next you’re texting your mom at 11pm on a Tuesday for no reason you can explain.
The best mother-daughter relationships on television
These 14 movies and shows will do exactly that. Some through relationships you recognize immediately: the best friend mother, the complicated one, the one where no one says what they really want to say. Others through which you didn’t know you needed until you did.
Doña and Sofia, My mother!
Donna and Sophie are less mother and daughter than each other’s entire world, and the film never lets you forget that. The scene in which Donna helps Sophie put on her wedding dress is the one that grabs you, always, without fail. Technically, My mother! is It’s a movie about parents, but it’s really about what it looks like when a mother raises a daughter completely alone and somehow, impossibly, does it right.
rory and lorelai Gilmore Girls
Lorelai and Rory are the gold standard of mom best friends: they talk fast, rely on coffee, and are completely codependent in a way that somehow (almost) never feels unhealthy. The show spans years of their lives and manages to make each stage seem real: the teenage friction, the college distance, the slow realization that your mother was right about more than you wanted to admit.
Ana and Tess, strange friday
Anna and Tess can’t stand each other, until they are forced to live inside each other’s lives for a day, at which point they realize that they aren’t so different after all. First it’s a comedy, but the moment it stops being funny is the moment it lands. The change is more than a plot device. It’s the most literal version of what every mother and daughter has to face: you have no idea what it’s like to be her.
Daphne, Maggie, Mae and Milly, Because I said so
Daphne meddles in her youngest daughter’s love life with the kind of specific, targeted overinvolvement that will make you laugh until you recognize it. The movie is light, but it deserves its place on this list for a reason: it’s the most honest depiction of a mother who loves her daughter so much that she hasn’t figured out how to let her be a person yet. All daughters have felt that. Most of them have finally understood it too.
Xo and Jane, jane the virgin
Jane and Xo are only 16 years apart, which means they grew up together as much as they grew up with each other, and the show knows exactly what to do with that. What makes it unusual is the third layer: Xo’s mother, Alba, whose presence turns every mother-daughter dynamic on the show into a negotiation between three generations. You look at it and start doing calculations with your own family without meaning to.
tami and julie, Friday night lights
Tami Taylor is the kind of mother who makes you want to be a better person: principled, warm, and completely uninterested in being liked when being right is most important. Her relationship with Julie is the most realistic depiction of a good mother and a difficult daughter on this list. Julie is frustrating in the way that only daughters who have everything they need can be, and Tami loves her anyway, without making it a thing. That’s the part that gets you.
Marmee, Jo, Amy, Meg and Beth, Little Women
March doesn’t dominate this story (her daughters do), but if you remove her, the whole thing falls apart. She leads by example so quietly that you don’t notice it until you’re already molded by it, which is either the most effective parenting or the most devastating part of growing up, depending on the day. Greta Gerwig’s 2019 adaptation earns your every tear.
Rebeca and Kate, It’s us
Rebecca and Kate’s relationship is hard to watch because it’s hard to look away: loving and charged in equal measure, spanning decades in a way that makes them both impossible to reduce to a single version of themselves. The show introduces you to Rebecca as a young mother, a middle-aged mother, and an elderly mother, and the accumulation of all three is what breaks you. You’ll finish an episode convinced that you need to call your mom right away and also that you need a minute alone first.
Lady Bird and Marion Ladybug
Christine (Lady Bird insists) wants to get out of Sacramento, her mother’s house, and all the expectations Marion has placed on her, and the film never once suggests that she’s wrong about that. Instead, what it does is show you Marion’s side with equal generosity, which is what makes this movie devastating instead of just good. The last three minutes will reorganize something in you.
Mia and Pearl, Elena, Izzy and Lexi, Small fires everywhere
Mia and Pearl are a team the way single mothers and only daughters sometimes are: isolated, loyal, and completely unprepared for what happens when the outside world enters. Elena and her daughters are the counterpoint: a mother who loves her children within a plan that they never accepted. The show puts these two versions of motherhood in direct collision and doesn’t let either of them get their way. It’s awkward in the best of ways.
Kate and Marah, Tully and Cloud, firefly lane
This one works on two tracks simultaneously: Kate’s tense and tender relationship with her daughter, and Tully’s lifelong reckoning with a mother who was never able to appear. One shows you what it looks like when love is present, but communication is broken. The other shows you a mother who was never going to appear. Together, they argue that whatever your relationship with your mother, you’re probably not as alone as you think.
Jackie, Isabel and Anna, stepmother
Jackie is dying and she knows it, which means she spends the movie doing the most selfless thing a mother can do: preparing someone else to love her children after she’s gone. It’s a movie about rivalry that becomes a movie about sacrifice without you noticing the change. The scene where he tells his daughter about the things he will miss is the one that kills you.
aurora and emma Terms of endearment
Aurora and Emma spend the first half of this movie driving each other crazy, and the second half proving that none of that mattered. It covers 30 years of a mother-daughter relationship and gets each stage right: the desperation to escape, the slow return, and the moment you realize your mother is the only person who has ever really known you. It’s not an easy watch, but it’s worth it.
M’lynn and Shelby, stem magnolias
Everything on this list has been building towards this one. M’Lynn and Shelby have a love that exists at full volume, present in every moment, every decision, every consequence, making it impossible to prepare for what happens to them, no matter how many times you’ve seen it. The graveyard scene is one of the greatest pieces of acting ever committed to cinema and will leave you devastated in a way that somehow still feels like a gift. Watch it with your mom if you can.
This post was last updated on May 29, 2026 to include new insights..
