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The streaming age has blessed us with some truly amazing, cinematic television shows, and with the wide range of content being produced, there is virtually no niche left untouched. Shows based on historical events have perhaps benefitted the most from this modern television renaissance.
TV budgets have afforded costume and set designers the ability to craft stunning sets and period-accurate clothing, letting viewers feel as if they have actually been transported back in time — rather than feeling as if they’re watching a stage production someone recorded on a Handycam.
But, of course, science has yet to enable true time travel, and so we must settle for watching high-budget adaptations of historic events translated from script to screen. Unfortunately, like a game of telephone, the truth of the depicted events does not always emerge with 100 percent accuracy.
The famed neurologist Sigmund Freud, for example, didn’t become entangled in an occult conspiracy with a psychic medium as the series Freud would suggest. But even shows that stick a bit more closely to reality suffer other kinds of misrepresentation, such as Peaky Blinders and Victoria.
These are nine popular television shows that portrayed real-life events from history — and the important details that they got completely wrong:
Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story Took “Artistic License” With Many Crucial Details
One of Netflix’s most popular true-crime adaptations is the series Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, a show produced by American Horror Story producer Ryan Murphy and his longtime collaborator Ian Brennan.
According to Vulture, the series has been the subject of debate regarding its focus on the serial killer’s gruesome crimes and horrific nature rather than his victims, and the decision of the creators to alter key details only further complicates the ethical grays of producing a show of this nature.
In the wake of this controversy, journalist Anne E. Schwartz, who first broke the Dahmer story in 1991, spoke with The Independent to address components of the show that were apparently changed to up the drama.
“In the first five minutes of the first episode you have Glenda Cleveland knocking on his door,” Schwartz pointed out. “None of that ever happened.” In reality, Cleveland — a neighbor who tried to alert the cops to Dahmer’s crimes — lived in a separate building. She didn’t live right next door to Jeffrey Dahmer, as portrayed in the show, and she never confronted him.
Schwartz also claimed that the rampant racism and homophobia of the Milwaukee Police Department were heavily exaggerated in the show. Though some Milwaukee residents may disagree with this claim, it’s clear that at least some of the cops’ scenes were completely fictionalized.
For instance, the police officers who returned one of Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims, 14-year-old Konerak Sinthasomphone, to the killer because they wrongly believed that Sinthasomphone was Dahmer’s lover didn’t win “Officer of the Year” awards as seen in the series. In reality, the cops were fired from their positions and then eventually reinstated, but they were never rewarded for their crucial mistakes as depicted in the series.
But even the scenes that the show got right have raised questions as to whether or not it’s ethical to make a show like this in the first place, especially considering that Dahmer was only apprehended for his crimes a few decades ago. And many of his victims’ families are still grieving.
Rita Isbell, the sister of one of Dahmer’s victims, Errol Lindsey, said in an interview with Insider that the character who portrayed her giving a heart-wrenching victim impact statement in court repeated, “verbatim exactly what I said.” But Isbell also said, “When I saw some of the show, it bothered me, especially when I saw myself… It felt like reliving it all over again.”
“I was never contacted about the show,” she added. “I feel like Netflix should’ve asked if we mind or how we felt about making it.”
The Shelby Family In Peaky Blinders Didn’t Actually Exist — And The Show Arguably Took Place A Few Decades Too Late
The popular BBC drama Peaky Blinders stars Cillian Murphy as a man named Thomas Shelby and chronicles his time in a street gang called Peaky Blinders. It follows the character and his family members as they rise through the ranks, with Shelby eventually becoming a Member of Parliament.
The show begins in 1918, with members of the Birmingham-based gang returning home from war, but the real Peaky Blinders gang was most active years earlier, from the late 19th century to the beginning of World War I.
Oh, and Thomas Shelby never existed.
According to Radio Times, the real Peaky Blinders were young, unemployed, working-class men and teenage boys known for being violent, robbing people, and taking control of the city’s gambling industry.
They probably did not earn their name by keeping razors to blind their victims beneath their peaked hats. That, as clever as it is, was just a myth.
And by the 1910s, the Peaky Blinders had lost ground to a bigger organization led by Billy Kimber, the Birmingham Boys. Unlike the Kimber in the show (a real-life historical figure portrayed in the series), the actual Kimber was much more successful in protecting his gang’s business.
By the 1920s, the real-life Peaky Blinders had all but disappeared, but their lasting reputation did lead to the name “Peaky Blinders” being used as a slang term to describe a variety of new gangs in Birmingham.
There are other small inaccuracies, such as Winston Churchill being depicted as the Home Secretary during the show’s timeline. In truth, as Express points out, Churchill was only Home Secretary from 1910 to 1911, years before the show takes place. In 1919, Churchill was the Minister for War and Air.
Similarly, the series shows the British Union of Fascists being set up by Oswald Mosley in 1929 when in actuality it was not founded until 1932.
These are, of course, only small inaccuracies in a fictional show that shouldn’t be cited in place of a history book. In other words, these changes are far less notable than the characters who never existed in the first place.
Vikings Is Almost Entirely Fantasy
The History Channel’s Vikings is an epic series that chronicles the lives and battles of several warriors from Viking-era Scandinavia, but this historical drama focuses much more on the drama than the history.
Perhaps most notably, the love/hate relationship between brothers Rollo and Ragnar is one of the main storylines of the show. But according to History, the two men were not brothers, and they probably never crossed paths, even though they may have lived around the same time period.
And some historians say that Ragnar may not have existed at all. While there is a large amount of substantial evidence that shows Rollo was a real person, the same cannot be said for Ragnar, leading some to believe that the latter may have been more of a legendary figure than a historical one.
The show also takes some artistic license with its depiction of Ivar the Boneless. Though Ivar was a real-life figure who was known to have been a powerful Viking despite his inability to walk, his renown came more from his cunning mind and intelligent tactics than from his ferociousness in battle.
In the Vikings series, Ivar eventually meets a brutal end on the battlefield, but the real-life warrior likely died of an unidentified disease, which was possibly connected to his mysterious “Boneless” title.
Vikings also takes liberties with the historical timeline. Early on in the show, the Vikings lead a brutal raid of a monastery on the island of Lindisfarne — a real event, English Heritage reports, that took place in 793 C.E.
Then, later on in the show, the same warriors take on Paris, another real event that happened in 911 C.E. — nearly 120 years later.
Even the Vikings’ clothes are wrong in the television series. According to the World History Encyclopedia, the notion that Vikings were rough and grimy is a complete misrepresentation of their actual culture.
In truth, Vikings were well-groomed and sometimes even wore colorful clothing with jewelry. Christian scholars often noted how the Vikings took care of their appearances and condemned their grooming as vain posturing.
The real Vikings also regularly carried combs with them and wore clothing made of wool, linen, animal hides, and silk — a far cry from the monotone, tight leather armor that the Vikings in the television series wear.
There are several other errors in the show, from geographical inaccuracies to historical figures interacting when they would have never met in real life.
Does that make Vikings a bad show? No, many people enjoy the fantastical nature of the series. But don’t write a history report based on it.
The Great Is “Anti-Historical” By Design
Hulu’s The Great, starring Elle Fanning and Nicholas Hoult, explores the life of Catherine the Great through a genre-bending, comedic lens, and the series is very aware that it doesn’t represent history well at all.
In fact, the show’s title sequence says that it’s “an occasionally true story.”
According to Slate, the Tony McNamara-created series takes many liberties with the true history for the sake of the show’s narrative.
For example, the show’s version of Catherine arrives in Russia when she is 19 years old and begins her coup on her 20th birthday. The real Catherine, however, arrived in Russia when she was 14 years old and then spent 18 years at court before she ever ascended to the throne.
In the show, Catherine’s husband Peter III is incredibly selfish and woefully unprepared for governing, yet handsome, energetic, and good in bed. In real life? He was known to have been boring — and possibly impotent.
As the Houston Press reports, the series also shows the creation of the Moscow Mule after Catherine’s lover Leo pours ginger beer and vodka into his mouth and chases it with a lemon. When he watches Catherine ride away on a mule, the idea for the famous cocktail comes to him.
But the Moscow Mule, like many other cocktails, was an invention that first emerged in 20th-century New York, possibly created by a ginger beer maker named Jack Morgan or a bartender named Wes Price.
The show also depicts Catherine inventing bowling, but evidence of humans playing the game dates back much further — to 5200 B.C.E.
A much larger storyline in the show, however, is that Catherine, who was born in Germany, doesn’t understand the culture of Russia or the empire’s people. Her husband Peter III, on the other hand, does.
But in reality, Peter III was also a German-born ruler who barely spoke Russian. Many of his policies were more German than Russian as well, and this contributed heavily to the discontent in his kingdom and his downfall.
Again, the show never claims to be historically accurate — quite the opposite, in fact — so these inaccuracies can’t be held against it.
Indeed, since the series presents information that it specifically acknowledges is false, it could actually prompt viewers to do a bit of digging on their own to find out what really happened during that time period.
Victoria Makes Queen Victoria Seem More Put Together Than She Actually Was
ITV’s Victoria is a historical drama centered around the life of Queen Victoria beginning with her ascension to the throne at age 18, starring Jenna Coleman as the titular Queen and Tom Hughes as her husband, Prince Albert. Unlike The Great, Victoria tried to portray history more accurately.
But despite referencing the real Queen Victoria’s extensive diaries, there are still a number of things that the show gets wrong.
One plot point of the series involves Victoria’s affection for Prime Minister Lord Melbourne, one of her main allies. In the show, Victoria is in love with Lord Melbourne and considers marrying him at one point.
But as Time acknowledges, the real Lord Melbourne was 40 years older than Victoria and far less attractive than Rufus Sewell, the actor who plays him.
“Victoria’s frank, vivid and detailed account makes it abundantly clear that she didn’t fancy Melbourne, let alone contemplate marrying him,” wrote English historian Professor Jane Ridley in The Telegraph.
Even Coleman’s casting paints an image of Queen Victoria that is far different from the real monarch. Reportedly, the royal was a “short, vulgar-looking child,” who stood under 5 feet tall and had a stout figure.
Coleman is contrastingly slender and stands a bit taller at 5’1″, and she is generally much more poised in her portrayal.
The show also depicts Victoria as being annoyed by Albert at first, likely because it’s more dramatic than love at first sight. That said, sometimes real life is simply much more straightforward than television.
“Victoria fell madly in love at first sight,” Ridley said. “She wrote ‘Albert is beautiful’ in her diary. He was much less excited, though.”
Ridley also acknowledged that Victoria “took little interest in the starving poor,” though the show features a plotline in which she intervenes to pardon Newport Chartists who were to be hung, drawn, and quartered for rebelling.
In real life, the rebel leaders were initially sentenced to death but later sent to Australia after a national campaign helped secure their release. But the Queen never personally intervened to help them herself.
And according to TV show reviewer James Delingpole of The Spectator, the scene where the Queen hallucinates a group of rats materializing on a giant cake, causing her to go into hysterics as people wonder whether she may have inherited George III’s madness, is baseless.
“Nor, I don’t think, was there an occasion where her favourite maidservant stole jewellery in order to satisfy the needs of an audience which still hasn’t quite got over the demise of Downton Abbey,” Delingpole writes.
Given that Queen Victoria kept extensive and detailed diaries, it does seem like Victoria often sacrificed historical accuracy for the sake of drama.
Sigmund Freud Did Not Go On Supernatural Mystery-Solving Adventures Like He Did In Freud
In 2020, Netflix released the eight-part series Freud, a historical thriller about the famed neurologist Sigmund Freud — except in this version, he’s a cocaine-addicted witch hunter who uses hypnosis to solve mysteries.
So, right off the bat, almost everything about this show is historically wrong.
Per a review from The Guardian, the show begins with a young Freud anxiously practicing hypnotism in the hopes of proving his worth at his academy and doing cocaine, presumably to calm himself down.
But midway through the episode, any pretense of historical accuracy is thrown out the window when two inspectors throw the mutilated body of a sex worker onto Freud’s desk. Freud uses this as an opportunity to look further into his idea of an embodied, active unconscious — and offers to help the inspectors figure out who killed the unfortunate victim.
Later on, the fictionalized Sigmund Freud attends a seance where a woman named Fleur Salome “suffers a bad trip into the alternate realm, one haunted by a blood-stained demon.” She is also evidently susceptible to Freud’s hypnotism, so she becomes a patient of his — and his lover.
A couple of episodes later, it is revealed that the criminal Freud is hunting is “Countess Sophia, whose hypnotic powers dwarf Freud’s and rely on a psychosexual combination of touch and verbal manipulation.”
According to a different review of the same series from the Daily Dot, “The show bears so little resemblance to reality that comparing the fictional Sigmund Freud to the real one feels like a fool’s errand.”
If there is any historical accuracy to be found in the show, it is that the real-life Freud did have an addiction to cocaine, according to PBS.
But did he possess magical hypnotic powers and go up against a sexually-charged villainess in a battle for the fate of Vienna? No.
Medici: Masters Of Florence Shattered Viewership Records — And Historical Timelines
When the series Medici: Masters of Florence debuted in Italy, it pulled in a record-breaking 7 million viewers who were excited to dive into the story of the Medici family, one of the most influential families in Italian history.
But as The Florentine acknowledges, there are numerous liberties taken with the television series that stray a bit far from the truth.
From the beginning, the show introduces Dustin Hoffman as Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici, the patriarch of the Medici family who meets a brutal demise at the hands of a hooded assassin. The ominous implication here is clear: Someone wanted Giovanni out of the way.
But historical records indicate that Giovanni’s death in 1429 was from natural causes. Presumed foul play undoubtedly makes for good television, but there is nothing to suggest that this is what actually happened in real life.
Likewise, the show portrays the construction of the Duomo as an undertaking that could have only happened after Giovanni’s death, as his son Cosimo follows his passion for the arts in the wake of his father’s passing.
In reality, though, the construction of the Duomo began nearly a decade before Giovanni died. And Donatello’s statue of David — which serves as evidence for Cosimo’s supposed lack of morals in the show — wasn’t created until long after the trial that sees Cosimo exiled in the series.
According to Into Florence, the role of Contessina, Cosimo’s wife, is also significantly overplayed in the series for the sake of drama.
The real Contessina was much more of a background figure in Cosimo’s life, and she did not interfere with his banking business or political affairs. And she certainly didn’t ride on horseback to beg for her husband’s life and to convince the Signoria to convert his death sentence to exile.
In the series, Contessina also helps her husband eventually return to Florence. However, the real Cosimo’s return was largely due to his influence and his powerful connections — not his wife’s scheming.
But despite the inaccuracies in these scenes, they clearly make for good TV.
Bridgerton Is Visually Decadent, But It’s Far From Historically Accurate
Bridgerton is an enormously popular television series adapted from a set of Regency-era romance novels by Julia Quinn. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the main focus of the show is on romance — not historical accuracy.
In fact, as Insider reports, Quinn herself has gone on the record to say, “It’s important to remember that Bridgerton isn’t a history lesson.”
The show is willing to shatter realistic expectations of Regency-era England in favor of including a diverse cast — but if you were to travel back in time to early-1800s England, you’d be hard-pressed to find such a diverse crowd.
According to How Stuff Works, Regency historian Whitney S. Christiansen said, “Bridgerton is largely a fantasy in terms of the diversity of the population shown.” At the time, only about 1.5 percent of England’s population was Black. “The majority of them were poor or working class, with most employed as servants,” Christiansen explained.
The show’s costumes, too, are largely fantasy, but they are somewhat inspired by the real fashion of the time period. “These are mostly fantasy, with the designers taking the silhouettes from the era and playing with color and creativity for effect,” Christiansen explained. “Regency-era gowns were inspired by Greek sculpture, as the Parthenon marbles were moved to London during this time, and so neoclassical ideals were all the rage.”
The show does, however, offer a decently realistic portrayal of women’s rights at the time. The fact that many of the show’s female characters vie so desperately for a man’s hand in marriage does speak to an era when women often didn’t — or couldn’t — inherit homes on their own.
When a family’s patriarch died, his estate typically went to his nearest living male relative, meaning that daughters, even if they were the only child in a family, were left out of the equation. In this sense, marriage was especially important for women to secure for themselves a stable place to live.
Still, Bridgerton isn’t a realistic portrayal of Regency England.
“Those who take Bridgerton‘s version of history as truth may fail to understand the deep racism that marked early 19th-century London, including how its depictions of Black men as boxers or Marina as sexually experienced may actually reinforce racist stereotypes rather than challenge them,” Christiansen warned.
That said, “fantasy history” shows like Bridgerton can often be a gateway for people to research the true history for themselves, which Christiansen called “a great marketing campaign that can lead to real scholarship.”
The Borgias Villainizes The Infamous Borgia Family — But The Rest Of Renaissance-Era Italy Wasn’t So Moral Either
In Showtime’s The Borgias, the titular family is shown to be ruthless, cunning, and cruel, especially when it comes to actions taken against cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, who is often portrayed as a “good guy.”
But perhaps the series is a bit harsh in its depiction of the Borgia family.
In an interview with blogger Marian L. Thorpe, historical novelist Anthony R. Wildman pointed out an important fact to keep in mind: “Renaissance Italy was by our standards extraordinary cruel, violent, and cynical.”
“Assassination, whether by the knife or poison, was a routine tool of statecraft; power was everything, and those who possessed it could do the most outrageous things with impunity,” Wildman said.
He added, “The Borgias were perhaps a little more extreme than their rivals and enemies, but only a little more; indeed, much of their reputation for depravity was manufactured by their successors in power, who were themselves just as guilty of the sins of simony and treachery.”
And as History Today reports, the Borgias, while cunning and vicious in their time, may have a slightly undeserved reputation in modern portrayals.
Claims of incest within the family, for example, have never been factually proven. The same goes for the allegations that Lucrezia Borgia was a notorious poisoner who attacked multiple men. In fact, the latter accusation was likely spread by one of Lucrezia’s embittered exes.
And though nepotism and bribery became firmly attached to the Borgia name, many prominent families in Renaissance-era Italy engaged in similar activities. Even the popes of the era weren’t above bad behavior, as Callixtus III and Alexander VI both bribed their way into the papacy.
Popes also became entangled in other scandals. Alexander VI was a lusty pope who fathered several children with his mistress Vannozza dei Cattanei and later began an affair with Giulia Farnese, a woman who was widely considered to have been one of the most attractive people of her time.
Still, much of the Borgias’ history has been vilified, leading modern interpretations of the family to portray them in a similar manner. But perhaps there is more nuance to the family than one might expect.
After this deep dive into the historical inaccuracies of modern television shows, read up on these 33 history myths that are commonly taken as fact. Then, learn about some of the terribly inaccurate science in six popular films.
