Finished The Polygamist on Netflix? From Fifty to The Undoing and Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey, here are 10 shows and movies with more betrayal, secrets and family drama.
The Polygamist has viewers hooked on its messy, glamorous unravelling of a marriage built on lies. If Joyce Gomora’s journey from social media darling to betrayed wife left you craving more stories about deception, double lives, and the women who survive them, here’s where to go next.
Fifty
This 2015 Nigerian drama follows four successful Lagos women navigating ambition, infidelity and family secrets as they approach midlife. If you’ve just finished a polygamy-themed series, Fifty makes a natural follow-up, same emotional terrain, told through a sharp, female-centred lens.
Big Love
HBO’s acclaimed drama follows Bill Henrickson, his three wives and their nine children as they try to keep their illegal lifestyle hidden from their suburban Utah neighbours.
It’s one of the most thoughtful series on the explorations of plural marriage on television, contrasting the Henricksons’ relatively modern household with a corrupt, cult-like compound. For anyone who’s lived through a fundamentalist or polygamist upbringing, it can be a genuinely relatable watch.
The Undoing
Nicole Kidman plays a successful therapist whose seemingly perfect marriage collapses overnight when her husband becomes the prime suspect in a murder investigation. If what fascinated you about The Polygamist was the psychology of a charming, manipulative partner, this miniseries is close to a masterclass in it.
A Sunday Affair
Two lifelong best friends unknowingly fall for the same indecisive bachelor in this Nigerian romance-drama. Watching their bond fracture and slowly heal offers a smaller-scale but equally relatable take on betrayal and recovery for anyone processing a similarly tangled relationship.
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
A woman finds her uncle’s dead body, and as funeral preparations unfold, long-buried family secrets surface, including a pattern of abuse the family chose to cover up rather than confront. It’s darkly funny and deeply unsettling, and it makes for one of the sharpest critiques of patriarchal silence currently streaming.
The Other Woman
A lawyer, a devoted wife and a young model discover they’re all dating the same man, and instead of competing, they team up for revenge.
It’s the comic flip side to everything The Polygamist takes seriously, dismantling the idea that multiple partners can coexist harmoniously when deception is the foundation.
Unfaithful
Diane Lane plays a wife whose affair spirals into obsession, with devastating consequences for her marriage. For viewers drawn to the cost of secret-keeping in The Polygamist, this is a tense, intimate study of what hidden lives eventually do to the people living them.
Sister Wives
TLC’s long-running reality series follows a real polygamous family navigating love, jealousy and public scrutiny. It’s a useful real-world counterpoint to the heightened drama of fiction, proof that the dynamics The Polygamist exaggerates for television are rooted in something genuinely lived.
Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey
This Netflix docuseries unpacks the rise and fall of FLDS leader Warren Jeffs, who is serving a life sentence over multiple convictions for child sexual abuse. It’s a far darker, true-crime angle on the genre, for viewers who want to understand how charismatic control can curdle into something criminal.
My Five Wives
This reality series follows a polygamist family that, unusually for the genre, actually seems to like each other, even as they wrestle with leaving their fundamentalist community. A gentler, more hopeful watch if the rest of this list has left you needing something lighter.
