Television series
Great Performances
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Great Performances is PBS's fifty-year anthology of world-class performing arts: opera, ballet, theatre, concerts. Each episode is a complete production, professionally filmed and beautifully presented. It's for anyone who loves live performance but can't always get to the theatre, or who wants to discover what they've been missing. No setup required—just sit down and be transported.
If you liked this
La Boheme1988
Puccini's masterpiece with a young, radiant cast and Zeffirelli's lush staging. This is how the opera hooks you—immediate, gorgeous, heartbreaking. Pure joy and devastation in two hours.
But If opera's not your world yet, the melodrama and emotional directness might feel overwrought rather than moving.
American Playhouse1982
Arthur Miller's masterwork about the Salem witch trials, directed with urgency and moral clarity. It's about hysteria, power, and conviction—and it will gut you. Fiercely relevant.
But Heavy subject matter and deliberately bleak tone. Not escapist. Miller can feel didactic if you're not in the mood for a sermon disguised as drama.
Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Great Performances
The wildcard
Something you would not have found on your own.
Ratatouille2007
Like Great Performances, it celebrates craft at the highest level—the obsessive pursuit of perfection in a difficult art. Both understand that mastery is a kind of love.
A rat teaches a garbage boy to cook in Paris, but it's really about ambition, perfectionism, and whether you can succeed by being yourself. Pixar at peak form: technically dazzling and emotionally true. One of the greatest films ever made.
But It's animated and a family film, so viewers looking for 'serious cinema' often skip it. Huge mistake, but understandable.
More like this (2)
Page Eight2011
Both are investments in intelligence and craft over entertainment machinery. Great Performances trusts that excellence is enough; Page Eight does too. Neither plays to the cheap seats.
Bill Nighy as a retired MI5 officer drawn into a moral crisis. David Hare's screenplay is smart, tense, and entirely grownup. Espionage as an intellectual problem, not a shoot-out. Impeccably acted and written.
But Glacial pacing, dialogue-heavy, no action sequences. If you need plot momentum and spectacle, this will feel like watching paint dry.
The Phantom of the Opera2004
Great Performances shows you opera and theatre at their most serious and refined. Phantom shows you how that passion spills into popular culture—the theatrical gene in everything. It's what happens when the performing arts escape the concert hall.
Joel Schumacher's lush, Gothic film of Lloyd Webber's musical. Gerard Butler, Emmy Rossum, and Patrick Wilson in a lavish production that captures the delicious melodrama and the genuine beauty. If you love spectacle and emotion unironic.
But The film is camp and operatic in ways that embarrass many viewers. The dialogue is overwrought, the CGI is early-2000s, and the plot is, let's be honest, a little silly.
People
Writing
- Daniel EzralowCreator
- Josh GrobanCreator
- Marion CaffeyCreator