Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.

IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: June 22, 1949

WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: There are no superlatives I can deliver that will be novel as applied to Meryl Streep. She’s been the avatar of American actressing for almost four decades now. She’s won three Oscars and has been nominated for roughly 400 more. She’s a movie actress through and through. But she’s also won two Emmy awards. Her TV work has been infrequent, but no less accomplished. Her first Emmy was for the 1978 NBC miniseries Holocaust. 25 years later (!), she came back for her second one, for her peerless work playing multiple characters in HBO’s Angels in America.

It probably helped that Streep was being directed in this endeavor by Mike Nichols, who had previously director her in Silkwood, Heartburn, and Postcards from the Edge. The ambition of Angels in America dwarfed all three of those previous projects, as evidenced by the four roles Streep played in the film. In order of their importance:

The Angel Australia

Least consequential. Only involved in the scene where Prior goes to heaven and demands more life. Still, she radiated human decency even in the guise of celestial bureaucracy.

Rabbi Isador Chemelwitz

When people talk about Streep playing four roles in Angels in America, talk quickly goes to the rabbit. It’s the flashiest of the four roles in that it draws the most attention to Streep as a premier actor. Look, she can even play men! Old men! Old, Jewish men! So, yes, it’s a stunt, however in keeping it is with Tony Kushner’s play and its tradition of actors doubling/tripling/quadrupling in roles of thematic import. But once Streep steps up to deliver that opening monologue, it ceases to become a stunt. Instead, she’s a vessel for Kushner’s story.

Ethel Rosenberg

Streep’s best work in the film is probably as Ethel, who starts off as a snickering spectre straight out of Roy Cohn’s guilty conscience. He’s dying, and she’s there to haunt him right into his grave. But as the film goes on, as Ethel keeps returning, as her patience with Roy’s declining state wears thin, she becomes less a ghost in Roy’s imagination and more an avenging spirit in her own right. By the time she’s leading Louis in a recitation of the kaddish, she’s become a whole other thing entirely.

Hannah Pitt

The most central role Streep has in Angels is as Hannah, Mormon mother of a gay Republican who migrates to New York despite not being particularly wanted there. Her odd-couple scenes with Prior are some of the more unexpectedly touching in the film’s latter half.

Bottom line: celebrate Meryl Streep’s birthday the right way by watching Angels in America today.

[You can stream Angels in America on HBO GO.]