Nobody makes shows like this anymore. Each episode takes two historical titans from completely different worlds, a conqueror and an inventor, a philosopher and a general, and finds the moment where ambition breaks or builds a person. You're not watching dramatized greatness. You're watching the specific decision, the specific failure, the specific obsession that made them who they got remembered as. It asks nothing from you but attention, and gives back the architecture of how humans actually change the world.

Each of the 46 episodes of this 1977 TV series profiles a pair of major historical figures, recounting their lives and what they accomplished. The subjects cover a wide range, with Genghis Khan and Thomas Edison among them, which makes for a biographical anthology aimed at viewers curious about the people behind major moments in the past.