Most people live lives whose day-to-day features aren’t exactly gripping viewing and whose trajectories are difficult to squeeze into the structures and strictures of serialized television. So what these standout biographical series accomplish is even more impressive. They take sometimes mundane or contradictory raw material and turn it into art that both entertains and informs.
‘Elizabeth I’ (2005)
There’s a lot of royalist television out there, and much of it is either pretty mid or revels in bodice-ripping trashiness. But HBO’s “Elizabeth” stands far from that crowd, arriving two decades ago at the dawn of the prestige TV era and covering the back half of the queen’s 45-year reign, concluding with Essex’s Rebellion, a failed putsch against the monarch.
It didn’t hurt to land Helen Mirren, one of the finest actors of her generation, as Elizabeth. This comparatively brief, two-part limited series depicts one of the “few figures in history who are as influential in their time and as intriguing to future generations,” delivering a “richly drawn portrait of a powerful woman who is both ruthless and sentimental, formidable and mercurial, vain and likable,” said Alessandra Stanley at The New York Times. (HBO Max)
‘John Adams’ (2008)
The early aughts saw a flowering of popular interest in some of the less widely-revered figures in early American history, including HBO’s adaptation of pop historian David McCullough’s best-selling biography. The casting of two darlings of early 2000s indie cinema — Paul Giamatti as Adams and Laura Linney as First Lady Abigail Adams — was inspired.
The show’s scope is epic, beginning with Adams’ legal career in prerevolutionary Boston and tracing his life and American history until his retirement and death in 1826. A series that was “doggedly determined to remind us how bad everyone’s teeth were in the 18th century,” its greatness is due to its status as one of the “few depictions of the American revolution that treats the founding fathers as people, whose particular hang-ups and fractious personalities informed the republic they were building,” said Vince Mancini at GQ. (HBO Max)
‘House of Saddam’ (2008)
You have to hand it to the makers of “House of Saddam” because making a biographical series about one of history’s most notorious, violent dictators is one heck of a big swing. Yigal Naor shines in this BBC/HBO coproduction as Saddam Hussein, following the Iraqi dictator from his bloody rise to the country’s presidency in 1979 through his capture and trial after the 2003 U.S. invasion.
Saddam towered over Iraq’s political regime for nearly 30 years, plunging the country into multiple destructive wars, persecuting his own citizens and inflicting widespread trauma and suffering. Nonetheless, Naor’s inspired performance carries the series. “His Saddam is guilty of hubris, of believing his own propaganda, of murder many times over, but he’s still presented on a human scale,” said Troy Patterson at Slate. (HBO Max)
‘The Crown’ (2016-2023)
As ambitious as anything Netflix has attempted, creator Peter Morgan’s ‘The Crown’ is a sprawling look at the life and times of the United Kingdom’s Queen Elizabeth II, starting in 1947 and running through the nuptials of her son, then-Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles in 2005. Over the course of six lavishly-produced seasons, she is played by three different, and phenomenal actresses: Claire Foy, Olivia Colman and Imelda Staunton.
Though the series was usually sympathetic to the royal family, it also refused to shy away from its public dysfunction, staggering privilege and often shocking insularity. While reviews are less kind to its later seasons, the series offers the kind of narrative scope that is hard to find on television. “The Crown” benefits from an “inspired strategy, casting different collections of performers to play the royal family in different decades, leveraging an astonishing lineup of talented names,” said Eric Deggans at KQED. (Netflix)
‘The Dropout’ (2022)’
Based on a podcast of the same name about the notorious rise and fall of the blood-testing company Theranos, “The Dropout” is anchored by Amanda Seyfried’s performance as the company’s founder, Elizabeth Holmes. The series begins with her decision to drop out of Stanford University to pursue her idea with her much older boyfriend, Sunny Balwani (Naveen Andrews).
The show keeps a tight focus on Holmes’ gradual descent into fabulism, driven by repeated failure of the company’s signature and purportedly revolutionary blood-testing device. Seyfried’s brilliant turn allows the show to nail the “way Theranos begins as a sincere dream and slowly becomes a pile of lies and manipulation,” said Kathryn VanArendonk at Vulture. (Hulu)
‘George & Tammy’ (2022)
In the great tradition of biopics about hard-partying, troubled musicians comes “George & Tammy,” which traces the doomed marriage of country music superstars George Jones (Michael Shannon) and Tammy Wynette (Jessica Chastain). When they meet in 1968, they are both married to other people, and their tumultuous romance and subsequent marriage leave very cinematic wreckage in their wakes.
Jones was a sometimes violent alcoholic, and Wynette developed a lifelong addiction to painkillers after a botched hysterectomy. Shannon and Chastain do their own singing in the show, which succeeds in humanizing these two troubled music legends. The show “isn’t an easy watch, but it keeps you gripped by the authenticity of its musical interludes and by a pair of towering central performances,” said Adam Sweeting at The Arts Desk. (Paramount+)
‘A Small Light’ (2023)
The tragic story of Anne Frank is one of the most well-known in literature and history. Much less is known about Miep Gies (Bel Powley), the secretary who helped hide her boss, Otto Frank (Liev Schreiber), his wife, Edith (Amira Casar), and his daughters, Margot (Ashley Brooke) and Anne (Billie Boullet) in the attic of an Amsterdam office building for two years before they were apprehended by Nazi occupiers.
The series begins in 1933 when Gies takes a job working for Frank and follows her through the outbreak of the war, the ordeal of occupation and the melancholy denouement that sees Otto emerge as the lone survivor from the attic. An “immensely affecting show,” its eight episodes highlight “something profoundly true about the essential goodness of those who kept their humanity in the face of one of the most inhumane episodes in history,” said Chloe Schama at Vogue. (Prime Video)
‘Mussolini: Son of the Century’ (2025)
Its current home on niche arthouse streamer Mubi limits its reach, but director Joe Wright (“Darkest Hour”) delivers an important and resonant series with this biography of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini (Luca Marinelli). The eight-episode limited series focuses on the years between the founding of the country’s fascist movement in 1919 and Mussolini’s consolidation of power in parliament in 1925, offering modern audiences an entry point into understanding how elected leaders can dismantle democracy from within. Mussolini is “humanised by his corrosive flaws and how attractive they are to a faltering nation,” said Craig Mathieson at The Age. The series “can be overwhelming, even hinting at a rapturous trance state” in the way it shows us how war-traumatized Italy fell for such a madman. (Mubi)