Catherine de Medici

Married off as a teenager to the French royal family, Catherine de Medici arrives at court an orphaned foreigner with no dowry, no allies, and a husband who barely looks at her. Dismissed as plain and disposable by the nobles around her, she watches everything, says little, and begins working out how survival at Versailles actually functions.

Samantha Morton plays her twice over — as the wry, world-weary older woman narrating her own history and as the wide-eyed girl living it — and the gap between those two performances is where the show's dark comedy lives. Watching naivety curdle into cunning, in real time, is the whole pleasure.