After her father's death, sixteen-year-old Ottilie Faber must helm her family's global empire, defying patriarchal norms while navigating a high-stakes choice between two powerful suitors.

At the end of the 19th century, the carefree young life of Ottilie von Faber comes to an abrupt end. After the sudden death of her father Wilhelm, she becomes the sole heir and her grandfather Lothar Von Faber steers her into the family business, the famous pencil manufacturing Faber Corporation in Stein near Nuremberg.

It's extremely challenging for a young woman in a society and time dominated by men. Ottilie acquiesces, is eager to learn and shows talent, despite all odds.

She is a strong woman, far ahead of her time; but soon enough, two men compete for her hand - Alexander Graf zu Castell-Rüdenhausen and Philipp von Brand zu Neidstein, leaving Ottilie torn between her own feelings and the high expectations of her family.

The series opens in a girls' boarding school with a prank going wrong — shouting, a mistress demanding someone come down at once, everyone sent to the washrooms, and one girl told to stay behind. Then, without ceremony: "Ottilie, get dressed. An accident has happened. Your father."

Within minutes she is at a graveside listening to condolences, and then to something else. "I know this is not the right moment to talk about it, but it is the only one." That sentence, offered over her father's grave, is the whole of her inheritance in a line.

Ottilie Faber was sixteen when she became heir to the largest pencil manufacturer in the world. The series follows what that meant in Germany in 1900: a company with factories on several continents, a family name that carried a title, and a girl who was legally and socially considered incapable of running any of it.

The pressure arrives immediately and takes the form everyone finds reasonable — she must marry, and the choice of husband is the choice of who will actually control the business. Two suitors, two futures, and a decision that is presented to her as romance while everybody in the room understands it is a merger.

What lifts this above costume drama is that the company is real and so is she. Faber-Castell still exists; the pencils are probably somewhere in your house. Ottilie married Alexander zu Castell-Rüdenhausen, which is where the double-barrelled name came from, and the marriage did not go as the family planned. The series does not soften what followed.

The production is handsome without being smug about it — Bavarian factories, drawing rooms, and the particular tension of a household where the servants know more about the business than the heiress is permitted to. Claudia Garde directs and co-wrote it with Asta Scheib, whose novel it draws on, and the perspective throughout is Ottilie's rather than the company's.

It sits alongside a strong recent run of German drama about industrial dynasties, and shares their interest in the moment when the nineteenth century's certainties began to fail. Here that moment is personal: a girl at a funeral being asked to make a decision she is not allowed to make.

Directed by Claudia Garde. In German with subtitles. Set in 1900.

A murder mystery unearths the untold story of Chinese miners in the Australian gold rush.

In the 1850s Australian gold rush, Europeans, Americans and Chinese all race to make their fortunes. Wei Shing, the charming and diplomatic headman of the Chinese camp, keeps a thousand diggers organised — while quietly enriching himself.

Everything shifts when a murdered European woman is found, her death seemingly linked to the Chinese camp. With tensions already high, Shing knows that blame falling on the Chinese could prove catastrophic.

As he scrambles to hide the connection and uncover the truth, Shing is drawn into a web of secrets involving a widowed newspaper owner, a young Indigenous tracker, and forces determined to seize control.

A police raid opens the series, and the detail that matters comes before any violence. Sergeant Harkin has arrived a day earlier than agreed. Someone points this out. He answers: "Imagine that's why they call it a fuckin' raid, innit?"

The agreement was real, and so was the assumption that it would be honoured. That is the position the Chinese miners of the Victorian goldfields occupy in 1857 — inside the system enough to have arrangements with it, outside it enough that the arrangements mean nothing when convenient.

The series is a murder mystery, and it uses that shape well, but its real subject is the gold rush that Australian history has largely told without these people in it. At its centre is Leung Wei Shing, headman of the Chinese camp: the man who negotiates with the authorities, keeps his own community in order, and is trusted completely by neither. When a white woman is found dead, the position becomes untenable in both directions at once.

What the series does unusually is refuse to make Shing a straightforwardly sympathetic figure. He runs an opium tent. He manages people. He makes calculations about who can be protected and who cannot, and lives with the results. The role requires that, because the job requires it — a man who survives between two powers by being useful to both cannot afford to be innocent.

Around him the camp is drying out. The good claims have been taken, the seams are failing, and men are leaving: four tents in a morning, sixteen more gone. That economic pressure runs underneath the whole story and explains a great deal of what people are prepared to do.

The production makes one choice that changes everything: a large part of the dialogue is in Cantonese, subtitled, spoken between characters who have no reason to speak English to each other. The effect is immediate. These are not extras in someone else's gold rush; the story is happening among them, and the English-speaking world is the one that occasionally intrudes.

It was directed by Corrie Chen and created by Peter Cox, and it belongs to a recent strand of Australian drama willing to look at the nineteenth century from an angle other than the settler one. The gold rush drew people from southern China in enormous numbers — the name of the series is what they called Australia. Very little popular drama has been made about them.

Four episodes, and it repays watching the negotiations more closely than the mystery.

A widow's impulsive romance in Tuscany sparks a clash of cultures, pride, and hidden motives, drawing everyone into a journey that transforms their loyalties and desires.

A young widow, Lilia Herriton, travels to Tuscany with her friend Caroline Abbott and unexpectedly falls in love with a much younger Italian man.

Her late husband's family, obsessed with propriety, try to intervene, but Lilia chooses to stay in Italy and start a new life. After unforseen circumstances, the Herriton family becomes determined to take control of her infant child, claiming it as their duty while privately caring only about their reputation.

Philip Herriton and Caroline return to Italy, where they confront cultural clashes, shifting loyalties, and their own growing admiration for the Italian way of life. As tensions rise between the English visitors, the passionate Italian father, and the rigid expectations of society, their mission becomes far more complicated than any of them expected—leading to consequences none of them could foresee.

Based on the novel of the same name by E. M. Forster. The title comes from a line in Alexander Pope's poem 'An Essay on Criticism: For fools rush in where angels fear to tread'

Charles Sturridge's adaptation opens on a railway platform, and the cruelty is in the small talk. Lilia is going to Italy. Her late husband's family are seeing her off, and while she is still within earshot they discuss her.

"Has she no sense of dignity?"

"She has no respect for your brother's memory and no respect for us."

Then Philip, the one Herriton with imagination, tells her the thing he actually believes: don't treat Italy as a museum of antiquities and art. "Get to understand and love the Italian people. The people are more wonderful than the land."

He is right, and it destroys everything. Lilia does exactly as instructed. She falls in love with Gino, a young working-class Italian, and marries him — and the family that could not wait to be rid of her discovers that being rid of her on her own terms is intolerable.

Forster's 1905 novel is very funny and then, abruptly, not. Sturridge's film holds that shape faithfully. The first half is comedy of manners: the Herritons dispatching emissaries to Tuscany with the confidence of people who have never encountered a situation that money and social pressure could not resolve. The second half is what happens when they meet one.

The cast does a great deal with restraint. Helena Bonham Carter's Caroline Abbott is the character who changes most, and the film lets that happen slowly — a chaperone who came to prevent something, discovering that her certainties were borrowed. Judy Davis's Harriet is the opposite: rigid, righteous, and the most dangerous person in the story precisely because she never doubts herself for a moment.

What makes it more than a heritage picture is that Forster is not writing about Italy at all. He is writing about English people who have decided in advance what foreigners are for — scenery, self-discovery, a warm place to have feelings in — and cannot cope when a foreigner turns out to have plans of his own. Gino is neither a romantic ideal nor a villain. He is a man with a house, a temper and a child, and the tragedy comes from the Herritons' inability to see him as any of those things.

Directed by Charles Sturridge, who made *Brideshead Revisited*, with a screenplay by Tim Sullivan and Derek Granger. One hour forty-seven. Set in 1905, and no kinder about the English abroad now than it was then.

A family in World War One and how their lives change when their two sons go to war.

A drama telling the true story of a family in World War One and the impact on their lives as their two sons go to war.

Tell Them of Us is a moving and unforgettable portrait of a Lincolnshire family during the First World War. It is both unique and universal. It is a tale of two brothers, William and Robert, and their sister Grace.

Told from the home front, it is based on an unpublished archive of letters, memoirs, photographs and artefacts from the Crowder family.

How does a man become Voltaire – the Giant of Thought, the Master of Blasphemy — whose struggles will give birth to the French Revolution?

How did Voltaire become who he was? One of the world's greatest thinkers, known for his wit, an advocate of freedom of speech and religion, whose writings shaped the course of the French Revolution.

Voltaire in Love is a four-part drama series that explores Voltaire's early life and evolution. It reveals aspects of the gifted philosopher's life that have receivedless attention: Voltaire the adventurer, lover, man of justice who had an ambiguous relationship with royalty.

In his permanent quest of questioning the status quo, he finds accomplices, loving women and friends, some of whom will not always be faithful. And he is dealt many blows including imprisonment and being exiled to England.

Voltaire in Love is a modern and timely series that depicts an outspoken advocate of civil liberties, a visionary, an influencer of his time. And still relevant today.

The series opens on a deathwatch, and on the gossip surrounding it. A crowd has gathered because Voltaire is dying — he has vomited all night, the doctors say he will not last the day — and among them are people who came a long way to enjoy it.

"He has done a lot of harm to our society and he will do more."

"What are you doing here if you don't like him?"

"I came to tell him face to face."

That is the register of the whole thing. Voltaire in Love is about a man whose enemies could not stay away, and it is far more entertaining than the reverence usually afforded to Enlightenment philosophers.

The series takes the question in its title seriously: not what Voltaire thought, but how he became Voltaire. The answer it offers is largely Émilie du Châtelet — mathematician, physicist, translator of Newton, and the intellectual partner without whom his story makes much less sense. Their years together at Cirey were a working relationship as much as a romance, and the series treats her as a scientist rather than a muse, which is both truer and more interesting.

The literary politics are gloriously petty. In one early scene a rival is enraged that Voltaire has declared Shakespeare the god of theatre — not a line on Racine, nothing on Corneille — and then arrives at what actually stings: "And even worse, nothing on me. Voltaire doesn't know me!" These were people who could have one another imprisoned over a pamphlet, and frequently tried.

That is the real subject. Voltaire was exiled, jailed in the Bastille, published anonymously, fled repeatedly, and made a fortune on the side so he could afford to keep doing it. The ideas that fed into the Revolution were not developed in tranquil studies; they were argued out by people who were being watched, and who knew what it cost to be wrong in public.

Directed by Alain Tasma, written by Georges-Marc Benamou and Henri Helman. In French with subtitles. Set from the 1720s onward, in a France where a sharp sentence could ruin you and a sharper one could make you immortal.

In 1950s West Germany, two friends confront a shifting world of American influence, testing their loyalties as tradition clashes with newfound freedom and desire.

In a small West German town of the early 1950s, American influence brings new freedoms and unsettling change. Two young women find their lives reshaped as tradition collides with opportunity, challenging everything they've known.

Marie and Erika, raised in very different households, respond in contrasting ways to the shifting world around them. Their friendship becomes a lens through which the town's tensions, hopes, and generational divides come sharply into focus.

As political, social, and religious pressures intensify, both women confront choices that test their identities and loyalties. Their intertwined journeys reveal how personal dreams can clash with the expectations of a community in transition.