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The Great: A Not-so-Romantic Dark Comedy

If Bridgerton is the romantic fantasy of the past, The Great (JioHotstar, 2020-2023) is a fantasy with its gloves off and a knife behind its back. This series follows Catherine, a young German princess who arrives in Russia expecting a cultured court and finds herself married to Emperor Peter III, a man of almost theatrical stupidity and startling cruelty.

What makes The Great so extraordinary is its refusal to play it straight. The show opens with the disclaimer "an occasionally true story," and it means it. The costumes are sumptuous and historically detailed, yet the characters speak with thoroughly modern cadences. We find that this Catherine swears and Peter delivers absurdist monologues. The court gossips with the energy of a reality television confessional and yet underneath all the anachronism, the show is doing something genuinely sophisticated: it's using the eighteenth century as a mirror for timeless questions about power, ambition, complicity and what it costs a woman to take control of her own story.

Elle Fanning's Catherine is one of the most compelling protagonists in recent television. She is idealistic and calculating in equal measure while being genuinely funny and quietly devastating. She arrives in Russia with Enlightenment philosophy in her luggage and a romantic's heart and the show charts her slow, painful, hilarious transformation into someone who can survive the machinery of absolute power. Nicholas Hoult as Peter is a revelation: he plays the Emperor as a man-child of such breathtaking self-absorption that you somehow end up almost sympathetic. Almost being the key word. 

For the Bridgerton fan, The Great scratches that itch for palace hierarchy, social maneuvering and explores the question of what women could and couldn't do within the constraints of their world. But it adds something Bridgerton rarely ventures into: genuine darkness. Affairs, executions, betrayals and more. We find that the court here has real teeth, and the show doesn't flinch from taking the darkness to greater depths and heights. The result is a historical drama that is genuinely dangerous-feeling, where the stakes are life and death rather than merely a good match for the Season.

The Great is for you if: You love your period drama with black comedy, want a heroine who is morally complicated rather than morally aspirational and appreciate historical fiction that winks at its own artifice while still being deeply and earnestly about something real.

The Empress: Romance With Real Consequences

Where The Great subverts the historical romance, The Empress (Die Kaiserin, Netflix, 2022-present) inhabits it fully and without apology. This German-language series follows Elisabeth of Bavaria (the legendary "Sisi") as she falls into an unexpected courtship with Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria and finds herself thrust into the Habsburg court, one of the most rigid, protocol-bound institutions in European history.

If Bridgerton gave you butterflies, The Empress will give you a full symphony. The romance between Sisi and Franz Joseph is genuinely electric. It is combustible, inconvenient chemistry that historical fiction does best. But what elevates this show above a simple love story is its insistence on showing exactly what it means for a free-spirited young woman to step inside a gilded cage. The Habsburg court is presented as a place of extraordinary beauty and suffocating rules, where Empress Sophie (Franz Joseph's formidable mother) controls not just court etiquette but the emotional and political fate of everyone around her.

The tension between Sophie and Sisi is the engine of the series and creates binge-worthy television. Sophie is not a pantomime villain. She is a woman who has survived decades of court politics by becoming the system itself and she sees in Sisi not just an unsuitable match but a threat to everything she has sacrificed to maintain. Their confrontations crackle with the electricity of two women fighting for influence in a world that gives them none of the formal power but all of the real stakes.

The show is also visually ravishing in a way that rewards attention. The Habsburg palaces are rendered with a specificity that feels almost archaeological. Every piece of porcelain, every chandelier, every carefully ranked seating arrangement at dinner communicates the logic of a world where form is substance and where the way you hold your fork communicates your politics. For viewers who love Bridgerton for its aesthetic pleasure, The Empress delivers it in extraordinary measure.

The second season deepens the political intrigue considerably, weaving in the revolutionary currents sweeping mid-nineteenth century Europe and showing how the personal and the political are utterly inseparable at the level of empire. Sisi is no longer simply navigating her mother-in-law. She is navigating history.

The Empress is for you if: You want all the romance and visual splendour of Bridgerton but with a more complex emotional register, and you're interested in stories about what it costs to exist within powerful institutions, especially as a woman.

The Gilded Age: Class War in a Changing America

If The Great is historical fiction as satire and The Empress as romance, then The Gilded Age (JioHotstar, 2022–present) is historical fiction as social novel and it is absolutely magnificent at it. Created by Julian Fellowes, who built Downton Abbey from similar materials, this series is set in 1880s New York and traces the collision between old money and new: the established patrician families of Fifth Avenue and the brash, ambitious railway millionaires building mansions next door.

At the centre of the show is Marian Brook, a genteel young woman of reduced means who arrives in New York to live with her aunts who embody old money to their bones. Marian finds herself caught between two worlds. But the true star, and one of the great characters in recent prestige television, is Bertha Russell, the railway magnate's wife played by Carrie Coon with volcanic intelligence and precision. Bertha wants New York society to accept her family and she will deploy every resource, every calculated friendship, every architectural extravagance to make it happen. She is magnificent, terrifying, and impossible to look away from.

What The Gilded Age understands and what makes it so satisfying for the historical fiction devotee is that social hierarchies are not just background texture for romance plots. They are the plot. The question of who gets invited to Mrs. Astor's ball, which families control which philanthropies, who is cutting whom and why, all these are matters of genuine consequence in the show's universe, and Fellowes treats them with the seriousness they deserve. The result is drama that feels novelistic in the best sense: dense with character, built on long memories and slow burns, paying off small choices made episodes earlier.

The show also has a genuinely progressive streak that is easy to overlook. Peggy Scott, a Black woman of talent and ambition navigating a world that would prefer to ignore her, is given a full, complex storyline that engages seriously with the particular constraints and opportunities of her position. Her friendship with Marian is one of the show's warm centres and her own storyline involving her writing career, her family, and her navigation of Black social life in New York gives the series both moral weight and historical texture that most period dramas don't bother with.

For Bridgerton fans, The Gilded Age offers the familiar pleasures of social season, strategic marriages, and the drama of who dances with whom but set in a world where the rules are actively being contested, where old certainties are crumbling and new ones are being forged. It has all the costumes and all the palatial architecture but underneath runs a serious argument about America, money and the question of who gets to belong.

The Gilded Age is for you if: You love the social chess of Bridgerton but want the game played at higher stakes, you're interested in American history as well as European and you appreciate ensemble drama where every character has their own coherent, compelling arc.

The Verdict: Why All Three Belong on Your List

Each of these shows scratches a different itch for the historical fiction devotee and taken together, they form an almost perfect viewing season.

The Great will give you wit, danger, and a heroine who refuses to be contained by her era. 

The Empress will give you the romance and the longing and the gorgeous, crushing weight of institutions pressing down on individual feeling. 

The Gilded Age will give you the social architecture, the long game, the satisfying complexity of the class structures of USA.

Bridgerton is a romance that uses history as its setting. These three shows use history as their subject, which makes the drama richer, stranger and in many ways more satisfying.

The past, as it turns out, is extraordinarily good television. And you've only just started watching.