Margaret Thatcher

Newly elected in 1979, Thatcher arrives at Number 10 as a grocer's daughter who has scaled the Conservative Party through sheer will, conviction and preparation. Convinced of her own rightness, she is impatient with consensus, brisk with subordinates, and unshowy about her ambition to remake Britain on her own terms.

Anderson buries herself in the physical grammar of Thatcher — the tilted head, the softened vowels, the handbag held like a shield — until the impression becomes something stranger and more interior: a study of certainty as armor. The show lets her be formidable without asking us to like her, which is its own kind of respect.