Original release 6 décembre 1998
Previous episode S1998E113 - Norman Vincent Peale
Number S1998E114
Episode runtime 45 minutes
Country United States
Original language English
Genres Documentary, History
External links TheTVDB page
IMDB page
TheMovieDB page
Last update 8 novembre 2026 - 04:15
on 11 databases

Colonel Sanders: America's Chicken King

1 member

Here is the story of the fast-food giant who waited 65 years before he hit it big.

For the first 65 years of his life, he bounced from job to job, trying to make ends meet. It was only after he collected his first social security check that he found the secret to success. Colonel Sanders' face is one of the most recognizable commercial icons in the world. Yet few people know the story of the man behind the chicken franchise.

BIOGRAPHY® interviews his two daughters and official biographer to tell the rags-to-riches story of the country boy from Indiana. Family photos show him in the days before he became famous, behind the counter of the 6-seat dining room attached to a gas station where he perfected his blend of 11 herbs and spices. Discover how a fire launched him on the road to riches, and how he built an empire of 600 stores in just a decade. But even then, some of his old poor luck stayed with him when he sold the business, he opted for a $40,000 annual salary for life rather than stock options!

Fellow fast-food maven Dave Thomas who cut his teeth at KFC helps tell the story of America's Chicken King.

BetaSeries' opinion

Secrets d'histoire Season 20 Finale: Stéphane Bern's Messalina Episode Ends a Season About Reputations on Trial

Twenty seasons in, "Secrets d'histoire" can still surprise its audience. The Season 20 finale aired on Wednesday, October 21, 2026, at 9:10 p.m. on France 3, and Stéphane Bern closed the season with one of the most notorious women of antiquity: Messalina, the third wife of Emperor Claudius. If you watched it, you already know it was more than a parade of Roman scandal. It was a careful re-examination of a woman whose name has been shorthand for depravity for almost two thousand years. If you haven't caught up yet, this debrief shows why the episode, and the whole season, deserves a place in your watchlist.

A finale that puts history's verdict on trial

The question at the centre of the finale was simple: does Messalina deserve the brutal nickname history gave her? Roman writers handed down a woman driven by insatiable desire and a hunger for power. Bern's team took that portrait apart piece by piece. They asked who wrote the story, why they wrote it, and what they gained from it. This is the series at its best. It doesn't simply retell a legend. It looks into how the legend was made. Messalina's world gave the episode plenty of drama: Caligula, Nero, Agrippina and the freedman Narcissus all appear, each with their own agenda in the deadly politics of the Julio-Claudian court. Without spoiling anything for latecomers, the finale's real emotional pull comes from the gap between the caricature and the young woman caught up in a machine much bigger than she was.

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