The Mill (2013)

If 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 ten-hour day are the plot, not the backdrop. Be warned that it was cancelled after two series and ten episodes, leaving the story unfinished. Even so, few dramas make the machinery feel this physically dangerous.