Extremely common in Chinese period drama, and to a lesser extent in Korean Series (sageuk in particular) and Japanese Series (especially in taiga drama). Their historical accuracy varies wildly from "reasonably accurate" to "completely fictional".
Asylum, an alive Anne Frank in the 1960s, though subverted, as she was actually a housewife who developed postpartum psychosis and an obsession with Anne Frank.
Coven uses this trope the most with famous New Orleans residents Marie Laveau the Voodoo Queen, Delphine LaLaurie and The Axe-Man all members of the cast.
Another Period, set in 1902, has seen appearances by the likes of Helen Keller, Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, and Charles Ponzi — all of whom have risked getting sucked into the insanity of the Bellacourt clan.
Babylon Berlin, which is set in the twilight years of The Weimar Republic, features such Real Life personalities as German Foreign Minister and former Chancellor Gustav Stresemann, French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand, Berlin mayor Gustav Böß, "Buddha of criminal investigators" Ernst Gennat, and even Reichspräsident Paul von Hindenburg.
Charite is set in late 19th century Berlin and deals with the lives and medical research of some of the most famous German scientists of the time, such as Robert Koch, Emil Behring, Paul Ehrlich, and Rudolf Virchow. Minor characters include Arthur Conan Doyle.
The follow-up series Charité at War plays between 1943 and 1945, featuring Ferdinand Sauerbruch, his wife Margot and his son Peter, but also several more medics such as Adolphe Jung, Max de Crinis, and Georg Bessau, plus spy Fritz Kolbe. Smaller roles include resistance fighter Hans von Dohnanyi and his wife, the latter's father Karl Bonhoeffer, Max Planck, Magda Goebbels, and Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg.
Season two also features appearances by Frederick Law Olmsted (the designer of Central Park) and Edgar Allan Poe.
Walt Whitman appears in Season 3 as a hospital nurse tending to wounded soldiers (which he really did, along with Alcott, as she notes).
When she time-travels into 1955 with Lavinia, Emily is met by Sylvia Plath, who professes herself to greatly admire Emily's poems. Emily is unhappy at the inaccurate view of her in the future though, and disturbed by Plath casually talking about suicidal ideation (foreshadowing her real suicide later).
The classic Doctor Who series had a few scattered around as well, particularly in the First Doctor's era: Marco Polo, Kublai Khan, Maximilien Robespierre and Napoléon Bonaparte, Nero and Richard the Lionheart, Abraham Lincoln, Catherine de Medici, Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp, just to name a few. The Fourth Doctor nearly met Leonardo da Vinci. The Fifth Doctor had a run in with King John (who turned out to be an android copy). The Sixth Doctor also ran into George Stephenson and H.G. Wells, while the Seventh Doctor had to deal with the Rani kidnapping Albert Einstein and Louis Pasteur. References to other famous figures of history were constantly dropped by each incarnation of the Doctor, although no real historical figures were actually depicted on screen between the various Tombstone characters in "The Gunfighters" (1966) and George Stephenson in "The Mark of the Rani" (1985).
The official headcount of historic characters, as of the 50th anniversary, is 51.
The Twelfth Doctor's run didn't have any historical figures (no, Robin Hood doesn't count), but the Thirteenth Doctor's first season makes up for that by having Rosa Parks and King James I show up.
Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman: Black Kettle, General Custer, Walt Whitman, and a few other historical figures show up in the series.
Fellow Travelers: Senator Joseph McCarthy, Roy Cohn and David Schine are supporting characters who appear in the 1950s sequences. Robert F. Kennedy, Stormé DeLarverie, Joe Alsop and Cleve Jones are minor characters. (Episode 7 also includes archival footage of Harvey Milk and Dianne Feinstein.)
Eleanor Roosevelt, First Lady of the US (1933-1945), her husband Franklin Delano Roosevelt, daughter Anna, Sara Delano Roosevelt (Franklin's mother) and Lenora "Hick" Hickok.
Several more minor supporting characters are also real historical people too.
Forever: A flashback to a party in 1929 Paris shows that Henry was part of the in-crowd among the artists of the time. His friends (or at least acquaintances) knew he wouldn't knowingly show up to a party, so Pablo Picasso suggested tricking him into coming by having the hostess tell him she was sick. Ernest Hemingway thinks Henry needs to get out more, seeing as they're in Paris, and mentions he'd stolen Henry's girlfriend the week before and has already moved on from her.
Valerie: I won't have you spoiling my celebration by fighting with Hemingway again.
Comes up in Highlander: The Series when Lord Byron turns out to be an Immortal and acquaintance of MacLeod's. Mary Shelley appears in the same episode, where it's revealed she was inspired to write Frankenstein after witnessing Lord Byron return to life following a Quickeningnote Byron took his opponent's head, but was mortally wounded during the fight.
As Duncan has been kicking around since the 16th Century, a number of historical figures, including Klaus von Stauffenberg, Adolf Hitler, Bonnie Prince Charlie, Winston Churchill, and Nefertiri, among many, many others appear.
The television adaptation of Horatio Hornblower doesn't have as many historical cameos as the books, but there are a few. Horatio's mentor, Captain Pellew, could have an interesting series done about his own life. (He also considers Horatio to be Like a Son to Me, making it unclear if the fictionalized version is meant to have the real Pellew's large family.) Hornblower takes part in the failed Quiberon Expedition, and General Charette is used as a character. The third series also includes Betsy and Jerome Bonaparte, who end up separated after Hornblower rescues them from a storm and the diplomatic service orders him to put Jerome ashore alone (rather than both of them reaching France and Betsy being refused entry, as happened in Real Life).
Houdini & Doyle is based on the real-life friendship of the title characters, with a healthy dose of Wunza Plot, and features cameos by Bram Stoker, Thomas Edison, and then-President William McKinley.
Interview with the Vampire (2022): Jelly Roll Morton was a ragtime/jazz pianist and composer (one of the songs he wrote was the "Wolverine Blues"). He's a background character in the series premiere (he's playing the piano at the Fairplay Saloon just before Louis de Pointe du Lac meets Lestat de Lioncourt for the first time). In "Is My Very Nature That of a Devil", he works for Louis at the Azalea, and Morton gets into a disagreement with Lestat in front of the audience after the latter criticizes his piano playing for being repetitive.
Ying Zheng, better known as Qin Shi Huangdi, is the most famous character in the series. His historical counterpart founded the Qin dynasty, united China, and was its first emperor. China itself is named after him.
Jing Ke really did attempt to assassinate Ying Zheng.
Zhao Gao was just as bad as his fictional counterpart, and his actions helped destroy the Qin empire.
Li Si really was paranoid about anyone who could threaten him, and he did force Han Fei to commit suicide.
The Man in the High Castle: The Crown Prince and Crown Princess of Japan (while unnamed, they're presumably Akihito and Michiko) feature prominently as characters at the start of the first season, as does Reinhard Heydrich and Heinrich Himmler in later episodes. Adolf Hitler appears in a cameo in the Season 1 finale.
Mad Men went the obscure route. Despite being a period drama with a setting (the Manhattan advertising industry in The '60s) that would have been a natural for this, the show only featured one semi-major historical character: the season 3 client Conrad "Connie" Hilton (of the hotel chain).
Prince Albert Victor, though with some creative license, since in real life the prince died in 1892, several years before the events in the series are supposed to have taken place
He doesn't appear on the show, but when she returns in Season 4 Ruby Ogden tells Crabtree about her interview with a man named Vladimir Ulyanov and warns the constable to "watch out for him!"
In "Twentieth Century Murdoch", the professor with the time machine meets with Murdoch and mentions the work of one of his brilliant students in Berlin—none other than Albert Einstein.
Offscreen, Dr. Ogden goes to learn psychiatry from Sigmund Freud himself.
Andrew Carnegie and the conwoman Cassie Chadwick in "The Murdoch Sting". Chadwick (who famously claimed to be Carnegie's daughter) just manages to avoid being confronted by him.
Clara Brett Martin, the first female lawyer in the British Empire, in "On the Waterfront - Part 2" and "Election Day".
Bat Masterson in "Glory Days". But not Butch and Sundance.
Jack the Ripper is believed to be murdering young women in Toronto in one episode. Murdoch is joined by a Scotland Yard detective who has been chasing the Ripper through Europe. He is later revealed to be the Ripper himself, and is killed by Doctor Ogden in self-defense.
The Myth: Many of the characters really existed, including Qin Shi Huangdi, Liu Bang, and Xiang Yu. Meng Yi and Zhao Gao also existed, though it's safe to say their historical equivalents weren't really time-travellers from the 21st century.
New Gold Mountain takes place during the Ballarat gold rush in Victoria during the 1850s, and two of the characters featured are Frederick Standish, the Chinese Protector, and Commissioner William Wright, both of whom are political figures in the early colonial history of Australia.
In "Ripper", Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride and Mary Jane Kelly, four of Jack the Ripper's victims, are killed by the alien creature vacating their bodies. It is also mentioned that Inspector Harold Langford's superior is named Sir Charles, a reference to Sir Charles Warren, the Commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police at the time of the Ripper murders. Lady Ellen's friend Lady Sophie says that her cousin Charlotte recently visited Dr. Sigmund Freud in Vienna. When Lady Ellen tries to convince her fiancé Dr. Jack York to give up opium, he counters that Oscar Wilde uses it frequently.
In "Gettysburg", Vince Chance and Andy Larouche briefly see General Robert E. Lee on the outskirts of Gettysburg on July 1, 1863 and again two days later just before Pickett's Charge.
The Plot Against America: In this Alternate History tale, Charles Lindbergh and his wife Anne Morrow Lindbergh become president and first lady. Politician Henry Wheeler becomes his vice-president. The antisemitic Henry Ford gains a seat on his cabinet. Anti-Nazi broadcaster Walter Winchell starts a presidential campaign against Lindbergh. Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop makes a diplomatic visit to America.
Preacher (2016): Adolf Hitler is among the damned of Eugene's cell block in Hell.
Red Dwarf features Lister travelling back in time and inadvertenly preventing John F. Kennedy 's assassination, which leads to his impeachment and replacement by a Mafia-frendly candidate, who endorses the building of Russian missile bases in Cuba, which in turn leads to major cities being abandoned in panic. Lister's only solution is to travel back to Kennedy's arrest and persuade Kennedy to go back to Dallas and assassinate himself.
Salem: Most of the main cast. Cotton Mather, a very influential Puritan minister who is shown taking a direct role in hunting witches by the show (whereas in Real Life he did not attend any of the trials although witnessing two hangings, while his writings have been alleged to be the groundwork behind the witch panic). His father Increase Mather also gets portrayed as a directly involved witch hunter, while in actuality he merely attended one of the trials. Tituba, a slave woman who was among those accused of witchcraft, gets portrayed as a ''real'' witch. In reality there's speculation that she may have inadvertently helped instigate the affair by dabbling in occult rituals at the insistence of her master's daughter, who panicked along with her friends when they were caught, accusing people left and right. John Alden and Giles Corey were also real people that have been fictionalized in the show. The real Alden did none of the things he's portrayed as doing, and he was in his sixties by then. In fact, Alden was among those accused, but fled town, returning when the witch trials had ended, at which point he was cleared by acclamation.
Scarlet Heart has the Kangxi Emperor, many of his sons (including the future Yongzheng Emperor), and several of his wives.
Shaka Zulu is a semi-fictionalized dramatization of the life of, well, Shaka Zulu, along with some other historical figures of colonial-era South Africa.
Sons of Liberty revolves entirely around these characters. Every major named character was a real person: Sam Adams, Joseph Warren, Paul Revere, John Adams, John Hancock, General Thomas Gage, Margaret Gage.
Leonardo da Vinci was a recurring role in Star Trek: Voyager. Much of Janeway's downtime was spent working as his assistant in a Holodeck recreation of his apartments. One episode also revealed that Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan were alive and well and living in the Delta Quadrant.
In "Beyond the Sky", Mac Brazel, the ranch foreman who reported that he had found wreckage of a UFO in Roswell, is a minor character. Owen Crawford and Thomas Campbell interview him about his discovery (which is actually the wreckage of a Mogul surveillance balloon) on July 5, 1947 and ask him to keep it to himself.
In "High Hopes", John F. Kennedy visits the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base Research Center in Ohio on October 10, 1962. He gives Crawford one month to prove that the aliens are a clear and present danger to the United States or he will shut the UFO project down.
Timecop: Lots of them, since Time Travel is a Once an Episode thing. There's Jack the Ripper, Al Capone, Adolf Hitler, Elliot Ness, the Village People, and others.
Timeless: Common, since it's a time travel show. Special mention goes to when Rufus (who is black) meets Sophia Hayden, MIT's first female graduate. When he says he's also an MIT graduate, she is confused for a moment, before concluding that he must be Robert Robinson Taylor, MIT's first African-American graduate. Rufus, who has never studied history, just awkwardly says that he was "the other black guy" who was there at the time.
Elvis Presley is used as a character in "The Once and Future King". The Sun Records producer Sam Phillips, his receptionist Marion Keisker and Elvis' backing musicians Scotty Moore and Bill Black also make brief appearances.
William Still was a real abolitionist and much of the series is even based on his writings about the Underground Railroad and the lives of fugitive slaves.
Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist and orator, appears a couple times as well.
After being teased on the last episode of the first season, Harriet Tubman, the famed abolitionist and badass conductor on the Underground Railroad, has an increasing role and an entire episode focused on her in season two.
Vikings has King Egbert of Wessex, King Ælla, King Hórik I, Aethelwulf, Ivar the Boneless, Kwenthrith, Princess Judith and Rollo aka Robert of Normandie. That's not counting the semi-legendaryfigures.
Wonder Woman: In "Beauty on Parade", Wonder Woman foils a plot to assassinate General Dwight David Eisenhower. She saves him personally by catching a bazooka round in midair with her bare hands! In "Judgement from Outer Space", Andros speaks with President Roosevelt, but it's all off screen. And , of course, Adolf Hitler is mentioned frequently.
and Tokugawa Iesada