History is full of dramatic tales, myths, and places ready for great storytelling and rich settings. Since the 1990s, HBO has produced many popular period pieces in television and continues to create new and exciting stories for viewers every year.
To this day on HBO Max, there is a catalogue of great shows and movies that take place in the past and have all the drama, fashion, and emotions you could want. Here’s a list of the best period pieces on HBO Max.
1. The Gilded Age
It’s only had two seasons so far, but The Gilded Age has shown more promise than a nouveau riche railroad tycoon’s hot wife taking the social groups of New York City by storm in the late 1800s. Yes, that’s exactly what you’ll get to watch in this beautifully crafted drama following dueling members of society. This period piece introduces new drama every episode and always has me trying to guess what happens next.
Something special about TGA is its attention to the Black American experience in post-Civil War America, both in New York City and when some of our beloved characters travel to the South. TGA also gives us servant drama and romance à la Downton Abbey; the roller coaster of drama never ends. You won’t be able to just put this one on in the background, especially if you enjoy judging fashion choices.
2. Gentleman Jack
It’s rare that a period piece gives us insight into the LGBTQIA+ experience in history, but Gentleman Jack does just that. Secrets cultivate drama, and in the 1830s, gay and trans people had to keep their identities secret in order to survive. A jaunty soundtrack, breathy innuendos, and business negotiations follow gay businesswoman Anne Lister as she attempts to navigate a world unsuited to her queerness.
Anne is on the hunt for a wife and has a few romantic entanglements along the way, all the while trying to be a strict dealer in business and make a profit. GJ questions gender roles, is fraught with relationship troubles like jealousy and insecure attachment, and still manages to cover business in the 1830s. Guaranteed to keep you on your toes the whole time, and to get the title song stuck in your head.
3. Catherine the Great
Has Helen Mirren ever chosen a bad acting gig? I don’t think so. Our Lady of Excellent Acting is a particularly regal and commanding fit for Catherine the Great, an unparalleled telling of the story of one of the most influential Russian monarchs in history. There are lots of great adaptations of Catherine II’s story, but Mirren makes the empress very human in romance and in ruling. It’s hard not to love Mirren yelling at her incompetent ministers and pining after her lover as Catherine II in her later and more politically powerful years. The story takes place in the late 1700s when wigs, corsets, and too much rouge were at the height of fashion. At only four episodes, this limited period piece is a great weekend binge watch if you love ruffles, Helen Mirren correcting people, and women as monarchs.
4. Rome
Rome has everything that HBO viewers have loved for decades: blood, sex, politics, and intrigue. You thought I was going to say incest, didn’t you? You’re not wrong, because Rome has that, too. Violence, love, and honor such as it was in Ancient Rome are all central to the broad range of wealthy and powerful characters that the show follows. In 2015, The Verge called Rome the “precursor” to Game of Thrones ten years before one of the most popular fantasy TV shows in the world aired. Indeed, Rome was just that and is still an excellent watch today. Much like GoT, Rome will have you choosing a side.
5. Shirley
Shirley is a bizarre, tangentially erotic period piece that takes place in the 1950s in Vermont. Elizabeth Moss and Odessa Young star as two women in parallel places, emotionally, who happen to end up living together along with their husbands who work at the same nearby university. Both women are going through their own life crisis, and in both cases the emotional, physical, and mental crises revolve around childbearing and what it means to be a woman in the world. “Are we only mothers?” asks Shirley and its two main characters. I have rewatched this a couple of times and still wonder at the exquisitely strange execution of the plot.
6. Olive Kitteridge
Frances McDormand is an impatient and bossy schoolteacher with a sting in every sentence. Richard Jenkins plays her earnest, albeit bumbling, husband with a bad fake northeastern accent. These two lead Olive Kitteridge, which takes place in a small coastal Maine town in the 1980s. Dialogue between McDormand and Jenkins as the central marriage is natural and revealing at the same time. It tells a story of intimate familiarity, the conflict of unspoken emotions between people who have known each other for decades, and the mental health challenges that come with grief and trauma. Besides all that, there are bizarre occurrences that keep the viewers on their toes. Give yourself time to binge this period drama, because like me, you won’t be able to stop watching.
7. Gunpowder
Kit Harington leads Gunpowder as a young Catholic resisting the Anglican Church as it overwhelms England in the early 1600s. “Guy Fawkes makes friends with Jon Snow and tries to change England’s religious law” makes for some great drama, even if it is only three episodes long. Fair warning: It isn’t pretty in the first episode when they depict torture, but that is par for course for HBO. This is a particularly serious period piece, but it’s a great one.
8. Boardwalk Empire
Boardwalk Empire is one of those period pieces that is a slow burn in the beginning. BE is a show that becomes stronger as time goes on, with better individual storylines, character development, and surprise plot moments in later seasons. I love to see Steve Buscemi in his role as Nucky Thompson, mostly because he seems particularly good at playing manipulative weirdo-vibe guys (think Randall from Monsters, Inc). BE is a great period piece with a lot of nods to historic vocabulary that will leave you chuckling and shocked—that and the back alley business that went on during Prohibition in the early 20th century.
9. Slow West
I love Slow West as a period piece for one big reason: It shows the softness of human connection between awkward men in the American West. Michael Fassbender rescues Kodi Smit-McPhee early in this film about a young Scottish man traveling from the U.K. to the American West to find his fiancée. This young man is very clearly not made for the harshness of sleeping on the ground or living in a place without law, so a grumpy and handsome guy in a dirty hat comes along on a horse to begrudgingly protect and mentor him. One of my favorite things about Slow West is that it doesn’t end like you think it will. This is a lemon twist of a Western period piece well worth the watch.
10. Deadwood
The Wild American West was certainly full of plenty of drama, and Deadwood does a good job of touching on the experiences of different (white) Americans in this HBO series from 2004. Most of the relationships that Deadwood focuses on are between men, but then again most of the old American West towns had few women living there. Like the real Western town in early 1800s South Dakota, the series is full of lawless theft, murder, sexual assault, and politics.
Though Deadwood‘s character range is mostly men, it crosses classes from desperate prospectors to starving miners, from wealthy families looking to claim money to men who run sex worker businesses, to naive couples. Deadwood will have you on your toes, and also probably laughing about the fact that the guy named Swearengen keeps saying the F word.
(featured image: HBO)
