# Sybil (1976)

> A troubled young woman and her psychiatrist confront the childhood trauma behind her many fractured personalities.

Canonical page: https://ember.film/tv/17567

## Facts

- Seasons: 1
- Episodes: 2
- Episode runtime: 198 min
- Status: Ended
- Genres: drama
- Network: NBC
- Cast: Sally Field, Joanne Woodward, Brad Davis, Martine Bartlett, Jane Hoffman, Charles Lane, Jessamine Milner, William Prince
- TMDB rating: 7.9/10
- IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075296/

## Ember's analysis

- Pacing: measured
- Intensity: strong
- Complexity: layered
- Violence: mild
- Tone: somber, intimate, melancholic, harrowing, sincere

## What critics say

Audiences rated the miniseries positively, praising its dramatization of a young woman's dissociative identity disorder and the lead performance.

## Synopsis

Sybil (1976) is an American television miniseries created for NBC, presented as a two-part true story drama. Sally Field stars as Sybil, a young woman whose harrowing childhood has left her with at least thirteen distinct personalities, and Joanne Woodward plays Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, the psychiatrist who patiently works to coax the buried memories into the open. Brad Davis appears among the principal cast as a figure from Sybil's world. The engine of the story is the slow, painstaking therapy itself: each session peels back another layer of the past while the fragmented selves resist, surface and compete for control. Told across a single feature-length event of roughly three hours in total, the miniseries moves at a deliberate pace, building tension through clinical conversations, unsettling glimpses of childhood cruelty, and the fear of what the next personality might reveal. Its tone is sober, intimate and melancholic, with a strong sense of compassion for a woman whose survival depended on splitting herself apart. Set in mid-century America, it belongs to the tradition of prestige television biopics and dramatized case histories of the era. Fans of The Snake Pit and Ordinary People will find resonance in its portrait of psychiatric treatment, inner trauma and the hard path toward recovery.

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