Items12The creator’s order
  1. 1North & South (2004)North & South (2004) 8.6/10 on IMDbFirst aired Nov 14, 2004The best gateway to the genre, because its romance is fought out over the factory floor. Margaret Hale arrives in the smoky northern town of Milton with southern assumptions, and mill owner John Thornton has to defend his business while his workers strike. The dispute gives both sides real…0
  2. 2The Mill (2013)The Mill (2013) 7.5/10 on IMDbFirst aired Jul 28, 2013If you want the workers' side with nothing softened, start here. Channel 4 built it from the archive of Quarry Bank Mill in Cheshire and filmed at the mill itself, so the apprentices and their masters are drawn from real records of the 1830s. Child labor, workers' rights and the fight for a…0
  3. 3Germinal (2021)Germinal (2021) 6.8/10 on IMDbFirst aired Oct 27, 2021The 2021 French adaptation of Zola's novel is the strike drama at full strength. Étienne Lantier takes a job in the Montsou coal mine and lodges with the Maheu family, and the six episodes follow poverty, dangerous work and a walkout as they push a mining town in northern France toward…0
  4. 4Poldark (2015)Poldark (2015) 8.2/10 on IMDbFirst aired Mar 8, 2015The 2015 series, not the 1975 original. Yes, it is a swoony costume drama, but the engine of the story is a mine. Ross Poldark comes home to 1780s Cornwall and stakes everything on reviving Wheal Leisure, and the miners, their pay and their families' hunger keep pulling him into conflict with the…0
  5. 5Gentleman Jack (2019)Gentleman Jack (2019) 8.2/10 on IMDbFirst aired May 19, 2019Anne Lister is a landowner rather than a laborer, which is why this sits a little apart, but coal is the business at the center of it. Back in Halifax in 1832, she sets out to reopen her estate's long-closed mine and discovers the Rawson brothers are taking coal from beneath her land. The fight…0
  6. 6How Green Was My Valley (1975)How Green Was My Valley (1975) 7.8/10 on IMDbFirst aired Dec 29, 1975The 1975 BBC serial, not John Ford's 1941 film. The Morgans are a coal-mining family in Victorian South Wales, and the story follows the youngest son, Huw, whose schooling might take him away from the pits where his father and brothers work. That pull between the mine and a way out is the whole…0
  7. 7Hard Times (1977)Hard Times (1977) 7.5/10 on IMDbFirst aired Oct 25, 1977The 1977 Granada serial, not the 1994 version. Dickens wrote the grim factory town of Coketown as a furious satire of facts-and-figures industry, and this four-part adaptation keeps the anger. Timothy West's bombastic Josiah Bounderby and Patrick Allen's rigid Thomas Gradgrind are the system; Alan…0
  8. 8Ziemia obiecana (1978)Ziemia obiecana (1978)First aired May 21, 1978Andrzej Wajda's four-part 1978 television version of his own film, The Promised Land. Karol Borowiecki, an engineer at a textile factory in booming Łódź, sets out with two friends, a German and a Jew, to build a factory of their own, and Wajda shows the dirty, dangerous factories and the ruthless…0
  9. 9Rote Erde (1983)Rote Erde (1983) 8.4/10 on IMDbFirst aired Oct 23, 1983The deep cut for viewers who want mining history on a grand scale. This German saga, directed by Klaus Emmerich, follows a fictional miner's family in the Ruhr from around 1887 across roughly 70 years, so you watch the pits, the strikes and the violence around them change one community over…0
  10. 10Hell on Wheels (2011)Hell on Wheels (2011) 8.3/10 on IMDbFirst aired Nov 6, 2011The American industrial epic: building the first transcontinental railroad, mile by mile. Anson Mount's Cullen Bohannon, a former Confederate officer out for revenge, ends up running crews for the Union Pacific, while Colm Meaney's investor Thomas Durant schemes for his fortune. The camp of…0