Power Plays
A little bit like House of Cards in the court of King Henry VIII (with said king played by Brody from Homeland, for good measure), Masterpiece’s new miniseries for PBS, Wolf Hall, has all of the political machinations, costume drama, and kaleidoscopic cast of our binge-watching fantasies. But based on Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize-winning historical novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, and tethered to a crisp performance by Mark Rylance as the Machiavellian Tudor minister Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall is far more stately than other similarly addictive shows—if far less bloody and bat-shit in its proceedings. Set your DVRs for April 5.