Explaining Saltiness

Besides serving as a record of TV and Films that purport to show audiences a vision of the past, Period Piece also hosts our own editorial assessments of the relative historical accuracy of the titles in our archive. Fundamentally, we believe that, by the nature of the format, you should take everything you watch with a grain of salt. However, we also recognize that some works truly take greater efforts toward staying true to the historical record or providing audiences with a reasonable depiction of the past than others. To map this rather nebulous and semi-subjective spectrum, we've created our own metric that we call Saltiness.

Since everything ought to be taken with a grain of salt, 1 grain is our lowest metric and our strongest indicator that a work is historically faithful. As greater cinematic liberties are taken, we accordingly encourage our readers to equip themselves with a little more than just a grain of salt. Eventually, however, you possess enough salt to salt the grounds of a notable ancient city, at which point, it should be apparent that a work bears little resemblance to anything that could be classified as scholarship.

How we score it

We assess a title's net historical accuracy across a variety of metrics, the primary components of which are given when we do a score "breakdown". These include but are certainly not limited to gauging the authenticity of the materials used in a production, seeing whether the costuming is authentic to the period, finding whether the set design accurately captures what a historical scene might have really looked like, determining whether the events themselves generally follow accepted historical accounts, identifying anachronisms or distortions such as the compression of long stretches of time into mere days, and deciding if the title authentically captures the historical experience it purports to show. Naturally, each one of these presents an extensive opportunity for discussion on their own merits, which we try to explain in our full-text reviews.

What Saltiness is not

Saltiness is not a marker of quality. We include ratings drawn from popular review sites such as Letterboxd and Serializd to demonstrate that our saltiness assessment is not at all related to our impressions of a work as a piece of entertaining media. There are many titles in our archive that are extremely well regarded and may have high saltiness (low historical accuracy) scores to boot. There are also potentially highly historically faithful works that simply fail to be entertaining shows or films. We create our saltiness score purely from our research and determinations on how representative a title is of the period or events it attempts to depict.

To that end, saltiness is a reflection of our specific research efforts. We will always try our best to back up our reviews with as thorough and detailed research as we are able to produce. For whatever claims we make, we provide full citation information as well as our notes on the subject. That being said, though we may cite many historians, we cannot be said to be representatives of the wider historical community or declare that our rankings are something that would be backed by serious scholarship. We acknowledge that a 1 to 5 scale measuring something as nuanced as historical accuracy is both rather arbitrary and subjective, just as it is a humorous and somewhat revealing way to put hundreds of titles into relative perspective. For our most specifically accurate conclusions, please consult our full-text reviews and notes over just the raw number scores.