Muhteşem Yüzyıl: Kösem

Kösem Sultan arrived at the Ottoman palace as a young Greek girl and died as one of the most powerful women in the empire’s history — a regent who governed in the name of two sultans, survived the execution of one husband and the madness of another, and held the empire together through decades of internal war. Muhteşem Yüzyıl: Kösem follows that arc from arrival to assassination.

Beren Saat carries the series in a way that is hard to overstate. The role requires her to age forty years across sixty episodes while navigating a court that is trying to kill her from multiple directions at once. The production matches the standard set by the original Muhteşem Yüzyıl — the palaces, the costumes, the political complexity — and in some ways surpasses it. It ran two seasons between 2015 and 2017.