Top Shows on Netflix - Dramas

WHETHER YOU ARE BRACING YOURSELF to endure the COVID pandemic (again) or a new mom with months of newborn feeding ahead of you, everyone is scouring their favorite streaming sites for new or under-the-radar shows. With the amount of competition among Netflix, Disney, Apple TV, HBO, and Amazon Prime to name a few, it can be tough to keep track of all the original content offerings. Here is a list of my favorites produced by Netflix—some well-known, and others off the beaten path. However, they all have in common compelling characters, twists, and intriguing world-building. Check out my faves below and share your own! Let's kick off first with Dramas: 

 

Best Epic Drama

Peaky Blinders: Cillian Murphy is electric in the role of Tommy Shelby, the charismatic and cunning leader of the scrappy Peaky Blinders street gang in 1919 Birmingham, England. Suffering from post-traumatic stress following World War I, Tommy rises as a dark Robin Hood who earns the people’s devotion and the ire of increasingly notorious mob bosses played by the likes of Tom Hardy and Adrien Brody. Let’s not forget Sam Neill’s excellent performance as a crooked cop, made more shocking for all of us who predominantly know him as the cranky but loveable paleontologist of Jurassic Park. Watching Peaky Blinders now is all the more poignant given the passing of legendary actress Helen McCrory, who plays Tommy’s fearless and no-nonsense Aunt Polly. The series will wrap up with Season 6.

The Last Kingdom: Join the charming and roguish Uhtred, a man torn between allegiance to the English Saxons and Vikings, on his journey to reclaim his kingdom of Bebbanburg during the 9^th Century AD. He makes a reluctant ally of last-Saxon-ruler-standing King Alfred, who sees Uhtred as little more than a barbaric heathen, and the transformation of their relationship throughout the course of the series is riveting. It’s juxtaposed against Uhtred’s equally fascinating relationship with on-and-off-again frenemy Brida, played effortlessly by Emily Cox. Although Brida has a similar upbringing to Uhtred, a Saxon-born raised by Vikings, she has no doubts about where her loyalties lie. Season 5 is coming soon—will Uhtred *finally* fulfill his destiny? Originally based off the Saxon Stories novels of Bernard Cornwell.

 

Best Drama Based on True Events

Narcos/Narcos: Mexico: Detailing the tragic rise of Pablo Escobar to dominate the cocaine trade in Columbia and Félix Gallardo in México respectively, each series plunges into the dark underworld and world events that shaped each kingpin’s rise to power in the 1980s. Narcos is exceedingly bingeworthy with excellent performances by Wagner Moura and Pedro Pascal, as you gawk at how many times Escobar twists and spins his way out of increasingly high stakes situations. Pascal is a scene stealer and even has a season to himself to take on the Gentleman of Cali.

After watching Narcos, take a break before picking up the thread with the series Narcos: Mexico. Diego Luna deftly takes on the role of Miguel Ángel “Félix” Gallardo, founder of the Guadalajara Cartel, who starts out as a smalltown hero but increasingly justifies the means with betrayal and violence, until he has created the bottleneck for drug flow into the biggest client, America. Season 1 is a must-watch which includes a wildly tense scene between Gallardo and Escobar; the show loses steam in Season 2, as the supporting cast just can’t keep up with Luna’s charm.

 

Best Historical Drama

Marco Polo: This is a lavishly developed and ambitious undertaking which realized too late who the main heart of the show is—the amazing Benedict Wong—and although it attempted to switch focus, it wasn’t soon enough to muster the audience needed to sustain its massive budget. Still, we get two seasons that are quite a visual treat. Marco Polo follows not Genghis Khan, but his grandson Kublai Khan in the late 13^th century, who succeeded in conquering China.

Initially we witness events at Kublai Khan’s court through the eyes of the Venetian explorer Marco Polo, whose merchant father-of-the-year barters him off to the Great Khan. From there, Polo earns the Khan’s favor as one of his “sons,” and we witness the intriguing struggles of the Khan, who embraces diversity and global expansion over the traditional Mongol values of maintaining a homogenized nomadic society. As the story shifts to delve deeper into the man behind the Khan, the drama really takes off. There are a number of memorable characters, including Hundred Eyes, a renowned fighter who gets his own Netflix movie, and the battles are top-notch!

 

Frontier: Starring Jason Momoa as half-Irish, half-Cree outsider Declan Harp, this is a dramatization of the North American fur trade in the late eighteenth century. This series starts off slow but grows on you; the characters are likeable and the historical conflicts interesting. Sadly the series was cancelled after Season 3, but it is always entertaining to watch Jason Momoa hunt down evildoers in snow clad forests with death in his eyes.

 

Best Limited Series – Drama

The Queen’s Gambit: The rivalry between America and the Soviet Union is at its peak during the Cold War, and what better way to settle it than with a game of chess. Beth Harmon, brilliantly embodied by Anya Taylor-Joy, is a maverick, a chess unicorn who spends her orphanage days learning the art of chess, and has such single-minded determination to be the best that she will do anything to give herself the edge—even take copious amounts of pills that are handed out to the orphanage children daily as vitamins. Dismissive of the consequences to her health and relationships with others, Beth finds solace only in the dance of chess pieces playing out across her bedroom ceiling every night. However, when the pills fail her against the Russian chess grandmaster, Beth must undergo an excruciating self-examination for a second chance at the finals match in Moscow—with the world watching.

Taylor-Joy makes an appearance in Peaky Blinders as well, and although I loathed her character there (which is a testament to the actress’s skill), here she takes us on a satisfying self-reflective journey of her vices that has us rooting for her every step of the way. Beth teams up with her opportunistic adoptive mother to attend various global chess tournaments. They'll have you flinching at every self-destructive decision and cheering every little victory. Highly bingeworthy!

 

Best Limited Series based on True Events

The Serpent: Every horror story you ever heard about traveling abroad comes frighteningly to life in this limited series based on the life of serial killer Charles Sobhraj, who preyed on “hippies” visiting South Asia during the 1970s. Taking full advantage of the time before smartphones, the suave and coldly calculating gem dealer Sobhraj, portrayed with equal parts allure and menace by Tahar Rahim, sucks not only tourists into his web of manipulation, but also Marie-Andrée Leclerc (Jenna Coleman) and Ajay Chowdhury (Amesh Edireweera). The trio’s actions increasingly escalate in Bangkok, Thailand when one tourist pair refuses to be their jewel smuggling mule. An intrepid Dutch diplomat, Herman Knippenberg, begins to unravel the web with the help of Sobhraj’s plucky neighbors. It’s fascinating to watch the massive global undertaking it took to go after Sobhraj, who was a master of altering his victims’ passports for his own use to escape time and time again. Serves as a friendly reminder to travelers: if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

 

More recommendations to come—however, due to being one of the aforementioned new moms, my time is up for today!