The Last Kingdom

Stephen Butchard's The Last Kingdom launched on BBC Two in October 2015 and ran for five seasons through 2022, transitioning to Netflix as a co-production from season three onwards as the BBC's commissioning model shifted. The series concluded with a feature-length finale, Seven Kings Must Die, released directly on Netflix in 2023. The total run is forty-six episodes plus the closing film.

The series is adapted from Bernard Cornwell's The Saxon Stories historical-novel cycle, which had begun with The Last Kingdom in 2004 and would extend across thirteen volumes through 2020. The chronology of the source novels (the Anglo-Saxon resistance to Danish Viking invasions during the late ninth and tenth centuries) sits in close proximity to the actual reigns of Alfred the Great, Edward the Elder and Æthelstan, with Cornwell's research foregrounding the recently restored historical record of these monarchs.

The cast is led by Alexander Dreymon as the central protagonist, with David Dawson, Emily Cox, Mark Rowley and Adrian Schiller in major supporting roles across the run. The first two seasons were shot principally in Hungary and the later seasons increasingly in Wales and Hungary in combination, with cinematography rotating across multiple Directors of Photography across the show's run. The series was nominated for the BAFTA TV Award for Best Drama Series in 2017 and is now widely cited as one of the most successful British-Netflix co-productions of the 2010s, alongside The Crown and Sex Education.