What do these shows have in common? They don't mind getting it wrong

The Age

13-05-2025

The story goes that Stanley Kubrick, infamous for his perfectionism, was determined to shoot the interior sequences of 1975's Barry Lyndon using only candlelight to imbue the film with a greater sense of 18th-century authenticity. The problem was that film stock in the 1970s still required an enormous amount of light to achieve proper exposure.
So Kubrick cooked up a typically galaxy-brained solution: in addition to using specially made triple-wicked beeswax candles that let off an abnormal amount of light (and had to be replaced at the start of each new take), he borrowed super-wide-aperture camera lenses from NASA. Originally designed for use during the Apollo missions, they were hypersensitive enough that they allowed cinematographer John Alcott to shoot entire nighttime scenes by the glow of a candelabra.
This feels like a deeply Kubrickian contradiction: using space-age technology to recreate 'authentic' 1700s imagery. But it's also a dilemma filmmakers face to this day: how far should you go for the sake of period authenticity? And even if you bend over backwards to make your film or TV show look like a pixel-perfect reproduction of the past, do audiences actually care?
They certainly do when it's a goof. Since the earliest days of cinema, eagle-eyed viewers have gleefully called out filmmakers not just for errant boom mics and camera reflections, but for anachronistic bloopers. Consider the Casio wristwatch worn by a Civil War soldier in Edward Zwick's 1989 Glory, or the Starbucks cup on a banquet table in the final season of Game of Thrones which briefly threatened to break the internet in 2019 (simpler times).
The pair of pastel blue Converse sneakers in the background of Sofia Coppola's 1780s-set Marie Antoinette, though? That's no accident. Nor is the fact that they appear in the middle of a montage set to Bow Wow Wow's cover of the Strangeloves' I Want Candy. This was Coppola's expressionistic way of drawing a direct comparison between her ennui-riddled royal protagonist and everyday teenage moviegoers in 2006.
For some directors, the past is a sandbox where you get to make your own rules. This approach makes full use of the suspension of disbelief that has always been the cornerstone of the unspoken agreement between filmmakers and audiences. As we watch Mr Darcy saunter across the misty moors in Pride and Prejudice, dressed in a period-accurate long coat, we're more than willing to overlook his perfect Hollywood veneers; nobody wants their Regency-era heartthrob with a mouth full of rotting dentures any more than they want the marble statues in Gladiator to be repainted their original, gaudy colours (with beady eyes that follow you around the room).
Unless, perhaps, you're Robert Eggers, a modern acolyte of the Kubrick school of fastidiousness as renowned for his dogged attention to period detail as he is for his complete rejection of modernity. 'The idea of having to photograph a car makes me ill,' he said on the promotional trail for last year's Nosferatu, 'and the idea of photographing a cell phone is just death.'
All the sets and furniture in Eggers' 2015 New England horror The Witch were constructed using 17th-century Puritan carpentry techniques; the costumes in 2022's 10th-century revenge saga The Northman were hand-made using reindeer leather and Icelandic sheep wool. Eggers' goal appears to be nothing less than his audience's complete and total immersion in a bygone era – a tactic that benefits his actors, too.
Anya Taylor-Joy, star of The Witch, recalls working on Eggers' ruthlessly well-researched and painstakingly detailed sets: 'You show up and exist. You don't have to imagine it.'
While Eggers has built his reputation on a strict adherence to period accuracy, others like Baz Luhrmann have forged their own creative mythos from doing exactly the opposite – particularly when it comes to music. The soundtrack to Luhrmann's 1996 Romeo + Juliet is the stuff of legend (going triple platinum in Australia and reaching No. 2 on the US charts), and his follow-ups for Moulin Rouge, The Great Gatsby and Elvis similarly threw historical fidelity out the window, incorporating music by Elton John, Sting, Jay-Z and Kacey Musgraves to name but a few.
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Luhrmann's quasi-modern mixtapes bridge the gap between his characters' emotional experience and their audience's cultural context. Much like Sofia Coppola's young queen swooning through the Palace of Versailles to the Strokes' What Ever Happened?, Leo DiCaprio moping about on a beach to the strains of Radiohead's Talk Show Host was the perfect way to help angsty '90s teens relate to his Romeo – just as mixing Hound Dog with Doja Cat on the Elvis soundtrack tidily conveys the King's stratospheric popularity to listeners of his time.
While this kind of musical juxtapositioning has been common in film for decades (see also: Leonard Cohen scoring Robert Altman's 1971 Western McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Queen's We Will Rock You as the opening them to 2001's medieval A Knight's Tale, and David Bowie's Cat People (Putting Out Fire) popping up in Quentin Tarantino's World War II caper I nglourious Basterds), we've now entered a golden age of historical revisionism in television, too.
Were he alive today, I can absolutely see Tommy Shelby (Peaky Blinders) being a diehard Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds fan (possibly even Dirty Three?), just as I can imagine a young Emily Dickinson being as obsessed with Billie Eilish as any other twenty-something in 2025. This year's Dope Girls, billed as a 'spiritual successor' to Peaky Blinders, explores the birth of London's drug underworld in the post-World War I nightclub scene – all scored by modern British experimental electronic collective NYX.
And who could forget the very first episode of Netflix's Bridgerton, which proudly announced its anachronistic bona fides by having its young socialites arrive at the Danbury House debutante ball to an orchestral arrangement of Ariana Grande's thank u, next? Using modern music in these historical settings compresses our sense of time. It creates common ground between characters and audiences otherwise separated by centuries, and makes the past feel like a less alien place.
Bridgerton is a leading example of yet another form of wilful anachronism: race-blind casting, which feels like a fitting karmic corrective to a hundred years of on-screen blackface, yellowface, and everything in between.
Without this calculated departure from the historical record, we never would have had Regé-Jean Page's breakout turn as the Duke of Hastings in Bridgerton, or Sacha Dhawan as Russian royal adviser Count Orlo in The Great, or Dev Patel and Rosalind Eleazar as David Copperfield and Agnes Wickfield in Armando Iannucci's 2019 reimagining of the Charles Dickens classic.
Unshackling these stories from period accuracy has been a boon for casting directors and audiences alike. At its most powerful, race-blind casting subverts and re-interrogates history (as in Hamilton) – while even in its most minor application, it offers brilliantly talented actors of colour a proper and well-overdue turn in the sandbox.
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There will always be purists who believe a director's duty is to create a flawlessly accurate facsimile of the past. And while there's no doubt considerable artistry in the efforts of those like Robert Eggers, choosing to play a little bit fast-and-loose with period detail allows even more modern-day viewers to see themselves reflected in history. More than that: it makes us feel less alone. It reminds us that even though fashion changes and film stock evolves, the human experience remains remarkably consistent. Whatever you're going through right now – workplace drama or star-cross'd passion or fiery rebellion – people have been going through it for centuries.
And should you find yourself unable or simply unwilling to suspend your disbelief – if the sight of Marie Antoinette's Chucks or the thought of Regency-era teenagers dancing to Taylor Swift is anathema to your filmic sensibilities – there's always the History Channel.