Overview
Grant - l'eroe della Guerra Civile (2020) follows characters drawn into a defining crisis, where private motives collide with public stakes. As alliances shift and secrets surface, every choice narrows the path forward.
Seasons
- Status
- Returning Series
- Seasons
- 1 season
- Episodes
- 1 episode
- First aired
- Oct 19, 2020
Reviews
4 min readThe General and the Ghosts
I’ve always been drawn to the quiet men who carry wars inside them. Ulysses S. Grant is one of those men—less a roaring lion than a weary ox, plodding forward not because he wants to, but because he must. Grant - l'eroe della Guerra Civile, Malcolm Venville’s three-part documentary miniseries, latestnetflix.com maintains, doesn’t try to gild that truth.
Instead, it lets the weight of Grant’s life press down on the screen, frame by frame, until you feel the exhaustion in your own bones.
This isn’t just another historical documentary, the kind that treats the past like a museum exhibit—sterile, distant, behind glass. Venville and his team (including executive producers Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Davisson) have made something far more alive. They blend expert interviews, archival imagery, and re-enactments with a kind of restless energy, as if they’re afraid the audience might look away if they linger too long on any one thing.
(And maybe they’re right. History, especially the messy, human kind, has a way of slipping through our fingers when we try to hold it still.)
The series is based on Ron Chernow’s 2017 biography, and you can feel the book’s influence in the way it refuses to let Grant be reduced to a single narrative. He’s not just the victorious Union general or the scandal-plagued president—he’s a man who failed at business, who drank too much, who loved his wife fiercely but couldn’t always protect her from the world’s cruelty. The re-enactments, particularly Justin Salinger’s portrayal of Grant, capture this complexity with a kind of understated precision.
There’s no grandstanding here, no sweeping declarations of heroism. Instead, Salinger plays Grant as a man who looks like he’s carrying the world’s sorrows in his slouched shoulders. His Grant is sad, resolute, and just a little bit broken—exactly the kind of leader history often overlooks in favor of the loud and the charismatic.
Buzz & Rumors
Public reportsDiCaprio parked a Union general on Memorial Day, and Italy sold it as a Civil War hero serial.
Leonardo DiCaprio did not wander onto History as a talking head. Appian Way, with Jennifer Davisson, executive produced the three-night hybrid that US cable billed as Grant. It opened Memorial Day, May 25, 2020, at 9 p.m., then ran the 26th and 27th. Italian catalogs later sold the same object as Grant - l'eroe della Guerra Civile. That is the title on this page. It is not a RAI original, and it is not a new Italian cut. JustWatch Italy still lists the original title as Grant, three episodes, about 85 minutes each. TMDB's Italian stub, the record this catalog keyed, collapses the run to one episode dated October 19, 2020. latestnetflix.com's view is that that is a listing quirk after the US premiere, not a second production.
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The source book is Ron Chernow's 2017 biography. RadicalMedia and Lionsgate Television made the series. Malcolm Venville directed. Nicholas Greene and Frederick Rendina wrote the episodes. Justin Salinger plays Grant with a cigar and a knotted brow. Carel Nel is Lincoln. Dianne Simpson is Julia. Brian Heydenrych is Lee. The faces who do the arguing are Chernow, Ta-Nehisi Coates, David Petraeus, West Point's Elizabeth Samet, and Christy Coleman of the American Civil War Museum. History's own copy said that at Grant's death in 1885 he stood with Washington and Lincoln, then vanished under "a fog of myth, rumor and falsehood." Deadline's trailer roundup listed the insults the show wanted on camera: "the first modern American warrior," "a bloody butcher," "a corrupt president," "a belligerent drunk," "the greatest general of the time." , 
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Dave Sirulnick, another executive producer, told TV Insider the quieter version. "Grant is probably the least known of our most important American figures. He's not on Mount Rushmore." They ran dramatic sequences longer than a typical doc because they wanted an emotional hook, not another map special. Cameras went to real ground at Shiloh. Episode 1, "Unlikely Hero," drew 2.97 million US viewers. "Lincoln's General" and "Freedom's Champion" followed. Netflix later carried the US three-parter. ,
The rumor that still travels is the bottle. Garry Adelman, chief historian of the American Battlefield Trust and a face in the series, told HistoryNet that Grant "clearly had a drinking problem," then cut the cartoon down. People treat one binge as a lifestyle. The miniseries does not pretend he was dry. It refuses the drunk who somehow also ran Vicksburg. Chernow, quoted in Military Times, said Grant got painted as a "plodding, dim-witted commander" who threw bodies at Lee. The show's answer is maps, casualty math, and a third night on Reconstruction, the Justice Department, and Klan prosecutions. Daily Beast called the package DiCaprio's "middle finger to the Confederacy," which is tabloid language for a rehab job the producers actually signed. Memorial Day 2020 was a loaded week to put that argument on basic cable. The series does not invent a bar fight. It puts the old slurs in the trailer and then spends six hours arguing with them. , ,
HISTORY's official trailer is still up. Watch Salinger's beard and the historians talk over the same man. If you came here hunting an Italian war soap, you have Chernow, DiCaprio, and a patriotic sticker.
Entertainment rumors and trivia aggregated from public reporting. Treat speculation as unverified unless a cited source confirms it.
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