'Becoming Elizabeth' Puts a New Spin on a Familiar Tudor Tale

As we celebrate the Platinum Jubilee of the second English queen named Elizabeth, it's worth asking ourselves why, nearly 500 years after her reign began, we as a culture are still so fascinated by the first. Perhaps it's because Elizabeth Tudor represents so much that we want our leaders to be: Trailblazers, icons, survivors. A woman who refused to bow to the whims of the men around her, and forged her own path in a world that desperately wanted her to fail.

But Elizabeth was of necessity such a chameleon in life that it's easy for us to project our own ideas about who she was onto her memory. And, to be fair, as a general rule we as a culture tend to only pay attention to certain aspects of her story — we like to remember her in the full flush of her power, wearing white face paint and enormous ruffs, defeating the Spanish Armada without breaking a nail, and serving as Will Shakespeare's most famous patron. We don't like to look too closely at how hard Elizabeth had to work to become Gloriana or think too much about what she likely had to sacrifice and survive. along the way.

The new Starz period drama Becoming Elizabeth which arrives this weekend and runs for the next eight weeks on the premium cable network aims to change that, approaching the story of Elizabeth in a new (and fairly unprecedented) way. Set in the immediate aftermath of King Henry VIII's death, it shows us Elizabeth as a young girl who, at this moment in time, is about as far removed from that iconic image we all of her as it's possible to be.