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Tuesday, July 26th, 2022 5:02 AM

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costume-drama (subgenre) should be described as fiction

As a subgenre, "costume-drama" is defined by IMDb as: "A drama set between the middle ages and the start of World War I."  To clearly differentiate costume-drama from "costume-drama-history", I suggest changing the description to: "A fictional drama set between the middle ages and the start of World War I."

P.S. IMDb explicitly warns that "Use of actual persons in an otherwise fictional setting, or of historic events as a backdrop for a fictional story, would not qualify" for the history genre.

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2 years ago

I think the term costume drama (like period drama) is widely used independent of the degree to which the story is fictional, and it would not be helpful if IMDb defined it differently.

As such, costume-drama-history can be seen as a subdivision of costume-drama.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/costume%20drama

https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199587261.001.0001/acref-9780199587261-e-0160

http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/570755/index.html

I wonder where IMDb's specification "between the middle ages and the start of World War I" comes from.

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@Peter_pbn​ wrote:

I think the term costume drama (like period drama) is widely used independent of the degree to which the story is fictional

I think that's why costume-drama can be easily confused with costume-drama-history, which is a much less known subgenre.  IMDb differentiates between these subgenres by explicitly defining the latter as "based on real-life events".  My idea is to also explicitly define the more well-known subgenre, which is the fictional opposite of costume-drama-history.

P.S.  under IMDb's definitions, there's no costume-drama-history that's set after WWI.

(edited)

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costume-drama and costume-drama-history don't have to be mutually exclusive.