The lives of women from history, from Catherine the Great to Shirley Jackson, are being brought to the screen with a radical focus on character over facts

It is a point in favor of TV’s sprawling proliferation that one gets, in the course of a year, both a lush, serious historical drama starring Helen Mirren as Catherine the Great on HBO, and its tonal opposite, Hulu’s raucous, gleefully brutal The Great, which puts an asterisk right on the title card: “An Occasionally True Story.” The Great, developed by Tony McNamara, the writer of absurd court send-up The Favourite, cares little for the historical accuracy of the 18th-century Russian monarch. Its Catherine (Elle Fanning) arrives in the backward, hedonistic Russian court as a naive 19-year-old bride in 1761. The real Catherine was 35 and a mother by then, but that’s fine – free from the constraints of biography or pedantic seriousness, The Great’s occasional truth delivers, ironically, a more lasting impression of a real, flesh and blood princess – one slowly but determinedly amassing power, enlightened but ambitious to rule.

Related: The Great review – gleefully garish new series from The Favourite writer