Victoria

ITV's Victoria follows Queen Victoria from her accession at eighteen in 1837 through the early decades of her reign. Created by Daisy Goodwin, the three-series drama stars Jenna Coleman as the young queen and Tom Hughes as Prince Albert, charting her transformation from sheltered princess to formidable monarch.

The period detail is the draw: candlelit state rooms, exacting court protocol, crinolines and military uniforms, and the machinery of a monarchy learning to share power with Parliament. The show lingers on the texture of royal life — the audiences, the levees, the endless etiquette — while grounding it in real events like the Bedchamber Crisis and the Chartist unrest.

Victorian fans love it because it treats the era's most famous figure as a young woman figuring out power in real time. It is romantic without being frothy, and it makes the politics of the 1830s and 40s — reform, industry, empire — feel personal rather than textbook.