13 Best-Ever TV Period Dramas, Ranked

For more than a decade now, viewers have tuned into PBS to watch the nuns and nurse midwives of Nonnatus House deliver healthcare (often by bicycle). Whereas other period dramas are set in moneyed social strata, Call the Midwife depicts the hardscrabble existence of London’s East end in the 1950s and 1960s.

This Shondaland bodice-ripper, an adaptation of the romance novels by Julia Quinn, set Netflix viewership records when it debuted in 2020. The show tracks the love lives and sexual entanglements of eight Bridgerton siblings in a racially diverse version of Regency-era high society.

Rome was undone by its high production costs, canceled after two seasons. But the lavish spending meant that viewers feel immersed in Ancient Rome as they meet Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, Augustus, and Cleopatra and other historical figures from Rome’s segue from republic to empire.

Few stories show how Wild the West was like Deadwood, which featured fictionalized versions of real-life Deadwood residents — including lawman Seth Bullock, saloon owner Al Swearengen, and sharpshooter Calamity Jane — as they grapple for survival and power on the 1870s frontier.

Irish street gangs, British fascists, New York mafiosos, and petty criminals clash in a powder keg of 1920s-era drama and violence in this series, starring Cillian Murphy as the ruthless gang leader Tommy Shelby. Turn on your subtitles if the Brummie accents get the better of you!

All’s fair in love and Cold War, according to the tagline of this spy thriller starring Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys as Russian spies posing as a married American couple in 1980s-era Virginia, with Noah Emmerich as the FBI counterintelligence agent next door. Come for the spy intrigue, stay for the interpersonal dynamic between the so-called Jennings.

With characters from four generations and dialogue from three languages, this series — adapted from Min Jin Lee’s novel of the same name — tells a finely tuned story of a Korean immigrant family staking out their place in a rapidly changing world. (Bonus points for the joyful dance montage in the opening credits.)

Though this drama may play a little fast and loose with history, it still tells a royally fascinating story of Queen Elizabeth II and her heirs, with Claire Foy, Olivia Colman, and Imelda Staunton giving crowning performances as the stiff-lipped British monarch in different eras of her life.

Based on the Pulitzer-winning novel by Colson Whitehead and developed by Oscar winner Barry Jenkins, this magical-realist miniseries follows Cora (Thuso Mbedu) on her journey toward freedom, with the beauty of the show’s magical-realist imagery cut by the brutality and cruelty of the subject matter.

Created by Saving Private Ryan collaborators Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg — and based on the Stephen E. Ambrose book of the same name — this World War II saga tracks American parachute infantrymen from their training to their capture of the Nazi’s Eagle’s Nest in Berchtesgaden, Germany, with the budget and production values to match such an epic story.

A Masterpiece production that truly lives up to the name, Downton Abbey is the rare PBS production to break into the mainstream, an upstairs-downstairs historical drama centering on Yorkshire upper-crusters and their working-class employees — who become family members in their own right — as they navigate the turbulence of the early 20th century.

“What you call love was invented by guys like me to sell nylons.” So says Don Draper (Jon Hamm) in the pilot episode of this drama, in which Madison Ave. advertising execs paint pictures of domestic bliss in 1960s America, even as their own relationships and marriages vanish in puffs of cigarette smoke.

A hundred million Americans tuned in for the conclusion of this television sensation, a miniseries based on the novel of the same name by Alex Haley. The story starts with the abduction of Kunta Kinte (LeVar Burton) in Gambia and follows him and his descendants across decades of slavery and oppression in the United States.