If you want to get lost in more historical tales after watching the sweeping adaptation of Pulitzer-winning novel All the Light We Cannot See, we’ve got you covered. Some of these series are about World War II and its aftermath, but also World War I, 1870s footballers, and, well, time travel through multiple places and conflicts. (We’ve also added one movie as a bonus, for an extra historical tug at your heartstrings.)
Read on to stay immersed in these sorts of stories, which feel far away and incredibly familiar all at once.
This multiple-award winning mini-series is based on a true story, following the “Easy” Company, the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division, and what this band of brothers experienced during World War II. While some of the details about the people and what happened to them have changed, interviews of survivors are included. It’s got a stacked cast: Tom and Colin Hanks, Michael Fassbender, Damian Lewis, Ron Livingston, Paul Bentley, and Tom Hardy, to name a few. The series was also created and executive produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg. It’s a classic for a reason.
What if you fell back in time? And fell in love there? This centuries-spanning historical drama follows Claire Randall (Caitriona Balfe), a British World War II military nurse. While with her husband in Inverness, Scotland, in 1945, she accidentally falls through the standing stones at Craigh na Dun into 1743 Scotland. But getting back to her “real” life isn’t easy, especially when she finds herself also falling for Jamie Fraser (Sam Heughan), a Highlander being pursued by none other than her husband’s ancestor (both played by Tobias Menzies). The action brings Claire and Jamie to King Louis XV’s court in France, the Caribbean, and Revolutionary War America. It’s heavy (and steamy) on the romance, as one would expect for a series about time travelers in love.
In the early 1940s, the city of Marseille was swelling with Jewish refugees trying to get out of Europe. To help, a scrappy group of heroes, including American journalist Varian Fry (Cory Michael Smith) and American socialite Mary Jayne Gold (Gillian Jacobs), band together to get about 2,000 people out of Europe and safely to the US. There’s love, subterfuge, undercover work, and both tragedy and victory — all gorgeously shot in this historical mini-series. It’s based on the book The Flight Portfolio, which itself is a fictionalized version of the real Emergency Rescue Committee (Fry and Gold, for example, were real people).
It’s a bit of class warfare in this series about the early days of English football (or soccer, as it’s called on the other side of the Atlantic). In the 1870s, the sport was for upper-class toffs only — and amateurs. But James Walsh (Craig Parkinson), owner of the working class team Darwen FC (and a mill), decides to secretly pay two players, upsetting the status quo. The series is about sports, of course, but also has elements of melodrama, as can be expected by a Julian Fellowes mini-series, as he made his name in the upstairs/downstairs conflicts of Downton Abbey. Expect lots of clashes — and romance — with a lot more sweat this time around.
As men head to the battlefield during World War I, women are left to keep their households — and their countries — going. This Franco-Belgian historical drama focuses on four women in Saint-Paulin, a town near the border of France and Germany: Marguerite de Lancastel (Audrey Fleurot), a Parisian sex worker; Caroline Dewitt (Sofia Essaïdi), who’s trying to keep her family business afloat while her husband is fighting; Agnes (Julie De Bona), the Mother Superior of a convent turned into a haven for wounded soldiers; and Suzanne Faure (Camille Lou), a nurse who’s wanted for murder and is on the run.
As England tries to rebuild itself after World War II, young civil servant Feef Symonds (Emma Appleton) is recruited for a dangerous mission: Thomas Rowe (Michael Stuhlbarg), an American agent from the Office of Strategic Services (the precursor to the CIA) asks her to figure out who in the UK Cabinet Office is a Russian spy. It’s a tense spy thriller, as can be expected from creator Bash Doran, who’s also known for Boardwalk Empire and Masters of Sex. There’s high-risk stakes, and of course, romances — ill-conceived and dangerous as they may be. It’s a tense one to the very end.
In 1946, New York City police detective Max McLaughlin (Taylor Kitsch) is sent to Berlin by the US State Department to help young German officer Elsie Garten (Nina Hoss) create a new police force. But he has a dual mission: He’s also trying to find his brother Moritz (Logan Marshall-Green), who went missing at the end of World War II. If the names Max and Moritz sound familiar, that might be because they come from a classic 19th-century German children’s book Max and Moritz: A Story of Seven Boyish Pranks, which pops up in the series, even if the tone of this drama is far from child’s play.
As England worked to heal from the trauma of World War II, bundles of joy followed — a lot of them. This long-running English series about midwives in London’s East End in the 1950s and ’60s started in 2012 and is still going with new seasons added every year. Even as times and styles and social mores change, one thing does not: a weekly series of tear-jerking tales about the work done to birth new life into the world.
When Guernsey, an island in the English Channel near the French coast, was occupied by German forces during World War II, its citizens there were under a tight curfew. When four friends were caught breaking it, they pretended they were in a book club called the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society to avoid being arrested. Five years later, in 1946, London-based Juliet Ashton (Lily James) gets a letter from one of the members, which leads her to travel to the island to write about their story — although it isn’t over yet when it arrives, and neither is hers — which is where the true heart of this movie lives.
