Our annual PBS MASTERPIECE! preview with Executive Producer and Head of Scripted Content SUSANNE SIMPSON. Susanne spotlights two historical dramas from the new season premiering in 2025: WOLF HALL: THE MIRROR AND THE LIGHT, based on the final Wolf Hall novel by Hilary Mantel; and MISS AUSTEN, based on the novel by Gill Hornby, premiering for the 250th anniversary year of author Jane Austen’s birth.

SHIRLEY features Oscar winner Regina King as New York Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm tells the story of the first Black congresswoman and political icon and her trailblazing 1972 run for president of the United States. Our guest is Dr. Zinga A. Fraser, a foremost expert on Shirley Chisholm, Director of the Shirley Chisholm Project on Brooklyn Women’s Activism, and the historical consultant for the Netflix feature SHIRLEY. 

Podcast SEASON 4 PREMIERE - Episode 58 brings you a conversation with Viet Thanh Nguyen, about the adaptation of his Pulitzer Prize-winning espionage, thriller, cross-cultural satire The Sympathizer into an HBO miniseries. THE SYMPATHIZER is directed by Park Chan-wook featuring a Vietnamese cast -- Hoa Xuande, Fred Nguyen Khan, Duy Nguyen; also featured are Robert Downey Jr., (in 4 roles) and Sandra Oh.

Episode 57 features a conversation with actor Rishi Nair who portrays Alphy Kottaram the new vicar in the PBS MASTERPIECE MYSTERY! GRANTCHESTER.

Episode 56 features a conversation with actor Ruth Gemmell, best known as Lady Violet Bridgerton in the BRIDGERTON series and its prequel QUEEN CHARLOTTE: A BRIDGERTON STORY from Shonda Rhimes’s Shondaland based on the Regency romance novels by Julia Quinn.

Episode 55 features a conversation with Damianne Scott “Dami,” creator of Black Girl Loves Jane about the Regency-era Shondaland series BRIDGERTON now in its 3rd season on Netflix. What would Jane Austen think about the people of the ton? Are we seeing a surge in new historical drama fans as a result of “The Bridgerton Effect”?

The Boston Sisters have selected 5 books for summer reading inspired by past episodes of the podcast since its launch in 2021. We’ve got your covered for historical drama for summer 2024.

The Boston Sisters take a deep dive into the series THE NEW LOOK. Not just a story about haute couture fashion by Christian Dior (Ben Mendelsohn) and Coco Chanel (Juliette Binoche), THE NEW LOOK is based on real-life events during World War II that include the impact of the 4-year Nazi occupation of France and the early months of Liberation on Paris’s community of designers, Resistance fighters, business owners, and everyday people struggling to survive.

We welcome back Ben Vanstone (ALL CREATURES GREAT & SMALL), showrunner and executive producer for the much-anticipate drama series, A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW an adaptation of author Amor Towles’s internationally best-selling novel of the same name. The series features Ewan McGregor as Count Alexandre Rostov, an aristocrat who, in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, finds that his gilded past has placed him on the wrong side of history.

Director Reinaldo Marcus Green talks about making BOB MARLEY: ONE LOVE, starring Kingsley Ben-Adir as the Jamaican Reggae icon Bob Marley and Lashana Lynch as his wife, Rita Marley. BOB MARLEY: ONE LOVE celebrates the life and music of Bob Marley who inspired generations through his message of love and unity. The film chronicles the reggae icon’s powerful story of overcoming adversity and the journey behind his revolutionary music.

It’s the 50th anniversary of the release of the 1974 film adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’sTHE GREAT GATSBY. Author and scholar Emily Bernard from our PASSING conversation is back to explore the overlapping themes in this classic film directed by Jack Clayton, as well as the 2013 reimagining by Baz Luhrmann. THE GREAT GATSBY features Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby, Mia Farrow as Daisy Buchanan, and Sam Waterston as Nick Carraway. The film is a window into the roaring 1920s and also a mirror on American social constructs for wealth, class, and illusion, as well as the destructive power to recapture the past.

Episode 49 we talk about PACHINKO, the 2022 Apple TV+ series based on Min Jin Lee’s epic novel about 4 generations of Koreans from the early 1900s to the 1980s. Korean-adoptee and everything Korean blogger Kat Turner, and writer, artist, entrepreneur Taylor Turner for a mother-daughter conversation about PACHINKO

Episode 48 features a conversation about the Martin Scorsese film KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON with Dr. Moira RedCorn and brother Yancey Red Corn, members of the Osage Nation. Yancey Red Corn appears in the Martin Scorsese film as Osage Chief Arthur Bonnicastle and Moira Red Corn was an extra in the film. Yancy and Moira’s father, the late Charles H. Red Corn authored the novel, A Pipe for February, released by the University of Oklahoma Press over 10 years before David Grann’s book Killers of the Flower Moon. Both books were optioned for the film which has received 10 Academy Award™ nominations.

In Episode 47 we talkabout the biopic RUSTIN with Robert Raben, founder of the March On Washington Film Festival and The Raben Group, a national public affairs and strategic communications firm in Washington, DC. Featuring Academy Award™ nominated actor Colman Domingo as Bayard Rustin, the film RUSTIN shines a long overdue spotlight on the extraordinary man who, alongside giants like the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and Ella Baker, dared to imagine a different world, and inspired a movement for freedom.

Join us! We're doing something a little different. Instead of dropping a new podcast on Tuesday, January 23rd, Historical Drama with The Boston Sisters’s will drop its first LIVE podcast on Wednesday January 24th! Register. Go to the page for more info.Register

In Episode 46, we talk with Eric Winterling who realizes the costume designers’s vision for 2 historical dramas set in New York City: THE GILDED AGE and THE MARVELOUS MRS. MAISEL. Eric’s New York City costume studio, Eric Winterling Inc., brings costume designers’s visions and history to life for stage and screen.

Episode 46 commemorates the 50th anniversary of THE STING, winner of 7 Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay. Paul Newman and Robert Redford play two con men who team up to pull off the ultimate big con to swindle a ruthless crime boss. Our guest is veteran casino operator and author Geno Munari who shares behind-the-scenes stories of cons and scams in THE STING and real life.

JULIA, based on the life of the "French Chef" star and cookbook author Julia Child, is back for a 2nd season on Max. Also back on the podcast is wine expert and restaurant strategist Janet Cam, co-founder of Washington, DC's storied Le Pavillon restaurant, the first nouvelle cuisine restaurant of its kind in the U.S. We talk about the challenges for Julia Child to recreate classic French dishes in the U.S., women in the culinary industry, and Julia and Janet's journeys and adventures through wine and food in the domestically and abroad.

Carla L. Peterson is back! The author of the 2011 book “Black Gotham” that inspired the Scott family in HBO’s THE GILDED AGE joins us for a conversation on “taste” as a value reflected in the lives of 19th century Black middle class communities in Manhattan and Brooklyn. We also talk about the separate and elite lives of 19th century New York “old money,” “new money,” and the Black elite and how they’re interpreted for the 2nd season of THE GILDED AGE.

Episode 42 features THE GREAT “by request” by podcast subscriber MARSHA WEINER and a conversation with SAM DIXON, food stylist for THE GREAT’s 2nd and 3rd seasons for a behind-the-scenes look at food in the satirical comic series about the rise of Catherine the Great.