Film Adaptation Overview

The Eleanor Code

A dramatic origins series for Streaming

written by

Mark Richard Beaulieu

The Eleanor Code is a six-season historical drama—an epic with a unique plot whose themes parallel our times. Its central figure is Eleanor, an orphan who becomes Queen of France as a girl. She idealistically joins her inept husband’s desperate crusade. After a devastating holy war, she recovers by developing her own code of pleasure and love within a controversial mixed-gender church. She champions music and helps invent the courts of love. She falls for a young prince and leaves France to become Queen of England. She becomes mother to a large family that revolts against their father for his heinous crimes; he then imprisons her for sixteen years. In a second revolt, her children defeat him and free her to build the Aquitaine empire.

Unlike a throne-fantasy, this origin story delivers a precise historical recreation of customs and styles—shocking and entertaining as any fantasy. Each episode in Season One (eight to ten episodes) is a standalone adventure. The plan spans six seasons, each covering a fifteen-year segment of Eleanor of Aquitaine’s vibrant 12th-century life. By the end, she has changed the world; her progeny sit on every European throne. In sum, young Eleanor becomes the mother of empires.

Characters act with personal heroism, wit, humor, eros, and pathos in a defining drama that entwines the birth of human empathy and mannered love as a strategy to survive a barbaric world of harsh religion and brutality.

2. The Overview — Synopsis, Why this series

Synopsis (one paragraph)

Young Eleanor of Aquitaine—an orphan made Queen of France at thirteen—must learn to rule before she can even choose her life. Dragged into a disastrous crusade by a timid husband, she narrowly survives and engineers an annulment, marrying the electrifying Henri of Anjou, soon Henry II of England. As Henry’s ambition curdles into tyranny, Eleanor builds a revolutionary court and academy that codify manners, music, and the “arts of love,” a humanist counterweight to a brutal age. When Henry’s allyship ends in the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket, Europe turns against him; Eleanor is seized and imprisoned for sixteen years. Her children—led by Richard—force their father’s collapse, and Eleanor returns to power, arranging marriages, forging alliances, and seeding a dynasty whose blood will sit on thrones across Europe. At its heart, this is the origin story of a woman who answers a violent century with a code: love as policy, empathy as statecraft.

Why this series?

In times of moral confusion, people reach for a code. Eleanor invents one. The Eleanor Code isn’t another throne-swap fantasy; it’s a character-driven odyssey about an empathetic strategist who bends culture—song, story, ceremony—into a survivable politics. Her hard-won code reframes power not as domination but as discipline, courtesy, and mutual obligation.

The origin of romantic tradition is born of necessity. Eleanor shows the inevitability necessity of love. Her idea of love challenges standard conventions. The series explores what made such an accomplished, original, and controversial woman tick. In so doing, a seed is planted for others to consider achieving such a goal.

What makes the story fresh?

Eleanor’s story is an entirely new story of a queen, how she prevailed, and what gave her purpose. It focuses on the origins of an orphan who is given a blank slate. Youth take on responsibility far earlier than we are accustomed to. Eleanor tells us what a person born from privilege might take advantage of for a better world. Collaterally, we see what all families can become through their generations.

 Hot-button themes we explore—honestly and responsibly

• Faith and power: how institutions weaponize belief—and how personal conscience pushes back.
• Coercion vs. consent: arranged matches, age-gap dynamics, and the evolution of courtly love toward agency and reciprocity.
• Gendered violence: frank, survivor-centered depictions of assault and captivity—and the cultural tools Eleanor develops to resist them.
• Slavery, conquest, and law: the economics of war, scutage and mercenaries, and the lived cost of empire.
• Cross-cultural encounter: Catholic Europe in dialogue (and conflict) with Islam and other traditions, challenging inherited prejudices.

Primary Scope of Each Season

Six charged segments reveal Eleanor’s controversial life. Each lasts about 15 years, each an upgrade in spiritualism, love, combat, art, intelligence, and character.

The story begins young. Characters test a wealth of idealism in how they play, acting unencumbered as the institutions of the time weigh down on them. It all comes crashing down when her father is poisoned by eels on a pilgrimage to Spain and Eleanor is made Queen of France to inherit the vast and wealthy Aquitaine.

The second part is more like The Wire with an upgrade in technology/spiritualism that tests Eleanor. Like the Wire, two sides fight, each with problems of their own. The Christians and Muslims are at war but each side is someone in a Catch-22 mess that if fatal. The second crusade is a catastrophe of the church’s own blind and greedy design. Holy righteousness is no substitute for trained knights and secular battle wisdom.

The third part proceeds from the second, conceived as the story of marching into a holy war and returning home by sea. Eleanor learns the ways of sea trade and how inspiring love and the rudiments of chivalry are survival values.

The fourth part is an entire shift in characters and story. It is as dramatic as in Gone With the Wind when the whole Civil War ends, and we meet Rhett Butler. Eleanor rejects the failed church and her meek husband to be restored to Aquitaine. While battling a troublesome Norman house, Eleanor jumps ship from the Capets to the Anjevins, enamored by the younger vibrant anti-religious Henry Anjou. Whereas her first marriage was forced and holy, this is her chosen second marriage and earthy. But at a cost. The marriage must be secret, as in Romeo and Juliet. Her upgrade is her spiritually rich human philosophy that believes in pleasure and the qualities of love as an antidote to austerity and heartless, blind faith. Eleanor risks it all for love, only to find her husband is a brutal philanderer as she gives birth to seven children.

The fifth 15-year segment has Eleanor raising her family, echoing her youth, and exerting her influence on the Empire. Her unfaithful husband Henri brutally murders family friend Thomas Becket, whom he had appointed Archbishop of England. All of Europe, indeed, she and her children revolt against Henri. Trying to make it to the protection of her first husband, Henri captures her and imprisons her for life. He crushes the entire rebellion forcing his children to his side.

In the sixth and final part, Eleanor triumphs over Henri. A second rebellion by her elder children resists the father's tyranny, fatally defeating him in battle. Eleanor is freed from prison and directs her progeny to take the thrones of Europe and the Holy Land. In a third crusade, she helps her son, Richard Lionhearted, and travels to Germany to pay ransom to rescue him. Heroically, Eleanor travels to Spain to choose a granddaughter and escort her to become the next Queen of France. Retired to Fontevrault Abbey, she continues to fight for her children's future.