Today on Netflix, 6 seasons of a brutal and fast-paced action series with an impeccable score

Before the History Channel jumped into fiction, the network was known for its potential for crazy memes on shows centered around conspiracy theories about aliens in the pyramids. In 2013 he made a big bet on his first fiction series: 'Vikings', a production set in 9th century Scandinavia that surpassed 6 million viewers at its premiere. Now you have its 89 episodes on Netflix, and it continues to triumph in viewership.

The source material for the series is somewhat slippery: the main source on the life of Ragnar Lothbrok is the 'Saga of Ragnar Lothbrok', a 13th century Icelandic text (among other works that mention him, such as the 'Heimskringla', or the 'Sögubrot'). They are texts that were written three or four centuries after the events they describe, based on oral tradition, and their historical reliability is highly debatable (although experts at the time have praised their rigor in capturing the past). And yet, as the network's first bet on serialized fiction, it worked: showrunner Michael Hirst had just written the film 'Elizabeth' and created the series 'The Tudors'.

Hirst wrote each of the 89 episodes alone, something unusual for a television production of that scale. The narrative coherence that this generates is considerable, and that is why it has obtained consistently positive marks on score aggregators such as Rotten Tomatoes (where seasons 3 and 6 achieved a 100% rating from critics), with an average of 93. And all thanks to its balance between the most visceral action and the historical analysis of paganism, customs and geopolitics.

And although it was not received in such a unanimously positive way, if you binge the six seasons you also have on Netflix the three seasons of the sequel, 'Vikings: Valhalla', set more than a century after the events of the original series, and analyzing the conflicts between the descendants of the Vikings and the English nobility. The Nordic saga does not end here: Amazon Prime has contracted the rights to 'Bloodaxe', in which Michael Hirst once again gets behind the scripts, revisiting the life of another famous Nordic creature.