About Us

Period Piece is a project dedicated to both providing an archive of historical films and TV as well as a host to critical analysis of those titles from the perspective of assessing how well they represent the historical events they claim to be showing. Period Piece is not a traditional TV and movie review site. We do not aggregate reader reviews of titles, nor do we rate works on whether we personally enjoyed them or found them to be cinematically well-crafted. We draw in ratings from other review sites to give readers a relative perspective of how titles featured here are regarded as works of entertainment. We provide our own metric, named Saltiness, to compare how these works stand up as representations of actual history. Put simply, if you should take everything you watch with a grain of salt, we tell you which titles need more salt than others.

Why we built it

At the end of the day, what people see on the big screen can often leave a lasting impression on how they perceive actual history. For better or worse, films such as Gladiator, Braveheart, and Saving Private Ryan become era-defining works that may provide the only frame of reference the majority of people will have for certain events. Since we at Period Piece are both avid students of history and history-related media, we thought it would be a worthwhile endeavor to map this hidden historiography of how popular culture has been remembering the past.

Posters, Ratings, and External Content

Poster art, episode stills, and basic media information are sourced from TMDB. Ratings are sourced from Letterboxd and Serializd and generally will have clarification from where they originate when featured. Conventionally, film ratings are sourced from the former and TV Show ratings from the latter.

Period Piece represents the effort of a small team working for our love of history. If you'd like to help us, please do so by sending us reports of mistakes, research commentary, and general feedback at this link.