The Great (2020)

It says so on screen: The Great: An Occasionally True Story. Tony McNamara takes 18th-century Russia and Catherine's rise from nobody to empress, then cheerfully ignores whatever gets in the way of a good line, which is why Hulu billed it as anti-historical. Elle Fanning's Catherine is an idealist with very modern ideas about books and progress, stuck at a court of drunks, and Nicholas Hoult's Emperor Peter III is a magnificent monster of a husband. The swearing is constant and the violence sudden. Three seasons ran on Hulu from 2020 to 2023, and the third was the last.