By Drew Taylor

At 79, Helen Mirren has the career that most actors dream of. And we’re not talking past tense either. Mirren is busier than she’s ever been, holding down two prestige Paramount+ series almost concurrently: the final season of Taylor Sheridan’s epic Western “1923” and the inaugural season of “MobLand,” a British crime drama that was directed, in part, by Guy Ritchie.

In “1923,” she plays the strong-willed frontierswoman Cara Dutton, the matriarch of a family of ranchers who’s dealing with the encroachment of modernity and perpetually struggling to keep her farm afloat. And in “MobLand,” she’s Maeve Harrigan, the ruthless matriarch of a crime family operating in modern-day London. This is Mirren at her most venomous and unchained, as she pushes her capo husband, Conrad (Pierce Brosnan), into new lines of business and eggs on Eddie (Anson Boon), her more darkly villainous grandson (who might not even be her grandson at all). Concidentally, both characters are Irish.