HBO has spent the better part of two decades convincing us that prestige television lives or dies with names like Tony Soprano, Carrie Bradshaw, and Daenerys Targaryen. But some of the network’s most rewatchable and memorable work has happened inside the strict containment of a single season.
Miniseries don’t have to wring a fifth installment out of a story that should’ve wrapped at the end of Season 1. They get in, gut you, and get out. Below are 10 that more than earn their place on this list, even if you slept on a few of them the first time around.
1
‘Sharp Objects’ (2018)
Amy Adams plays Camille Preaker, a St. Louis crime reporter dragged back to her dying Missouri hometown of Wind Gap to cover the murders of two young girls in this Gillian Flynn adaptation. Reuniting with her toxic mother (Patricia Clarkson, in a performance so toxic you’ll want to fumigate your TV) and an unsettling teenage half-sister she barely knows (Eliza Scanlen, also frighteningly good), Camille drinks her way through the assignment while peeling back layers of family dysfunction more horrifying than the case itself.
Jean-Marc Vallée’s eight-episode descent into Southern Gothic dread is the kind of show that gets under your fingernails. The director likes to linger on the details of Wind Gap — the sweat-splattered bodies of teenagers rollerblading down Main Street, the rotting wood of a plantation porch. He cuts past and present together so fluidly you sometimes don’t realize you’ve slipped into Camille’s traumatic memories until you’re already drowning in them, a tactic that pays off in the show’s nastiest reveals. Adams, who’d spent a career being cast as a bright young thing until this show, is doing something different here. She’s playing a woman who has clearly not eaten a real meal in years, carves words into her own skin, and flirts with a teenage suspect because she can’t resist the temptation to self-destruct. It’s truly thrilling to watch.
2
‘The Night Of’ (2016)
Riz Ahmed plays Naz, a Pakistani-American college kid who borrows his dad’s cab to hit a Manhattan party, brings a beautiful stranger home, wakes up next to her bloody corpse, and proceeds to make every catastrophic decision the criminal justice system rewards with a Rikers Island bunk. From there, an eczema-ridden, sandal-wearing John Turturro takes over as Jack Stone, the bottom-feeder defense attorney who sees something in Naz worth fighting for. Eight slow, meticulous episodes that double as a procedural and an autopsy of how easily American justice grinds a brown kid into something unrecognizable follow.
Naz gets processed, gets a cellmate (Michael K. Williams, magnetic as always, playing a Rikers shot-caller who takes an interest in him), gets a neck tattoo, a heroin habit, and, eventually, gets very good at survival in a place he should never have ended up. Meanwhile, Stone is shuffling around Manhattan in those flip-flops, building a defense on phone records, autopsy timelines, and a dogged refusal to let his client become a statistic. Ahmed’s transformation is the spine of the whole thing, and Turturro is the heart. The finale doesn’t give you the catharsis you want, but it does give you something messier and truer to life, which is exactly why it works.
3
‘Watchmen’ (2019)
Damon Lindelof’s audacious sequel to Alan Moore’s graphic novel opens with the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre and never quite lets up on our necks after that. Regina King plays Angela Abar, a Tulsa cop moonlighting as the masked vigilante Sister Night in an alternate America where police hide their identities behind hoods because white supremacists have made that necessary. Jeremy Irons mutters around an English manor, Jean Smart busts vigilantes and busts out homemade sex toys as an FBI agent with an axe to grind, and Tim Blake Nelson wears a reflective head sock with conviction.
Watchmen is nine episodes of pulpy, big-swing television that somehow manages to be a faithful comic-book sequel and a piercing meditation on American racial trauma at the same time. The episode “This Extraordinary Being” remains one of the most stunning hours of TV in the streaming era, and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score will haunt your driving playlist for years to come.
4
‘Chernobyl’ (2019)
Who would’ve thought the guy who wrote The Hangover Part II had this in him? Craig Mazin pivoted from broad studio comedy to prestige drama and somehow delivered the most harrowing piece of historical reconstruction HBO’s ever put on the air. Across five episodes, Jared Harris (as Soviet scientist Valery Legasov), Stellan Skarsgård (as a reluctant Party functionary), and Emily Watson (as a composite scientist who refuses to swallow the official story) walk us through the infamous 1986 nuclear meltdown from the moment the reactor blows to the courtroom postmortem of who let it happen.
It’s bleak, obviously, but it’s also a masterclass in how to make policy malfeasance feel like edge-of-your-seat suspense. The cold open alone, Harris recording his confession before he hangs himself, ranks among the bleakest first scenes of any TV show. So, maybe try to watch this in two sittings?
5
‘Mare of Easttown’ (2021)
Kate Winslet plays Mare Sheehan, a vape-puffing, Wawa-grazing, hoagie-clutching Delco detective in this moody crime drama that became something of a pop culture phenomenon when we were all confined to our couches during the COVID-19 lockdowns. She’s newly separated, still grieving the death of her son, sharing a house with a mom (Jean Smart, Emmy-winning per usual) who keeps pinching her sleep aids, and getting nagged by the entire town to solve the murder of a local teenager. Evan Peters drops in as a sweet outside detective brought in to help, Julianne Nicholson plays her best friend with surprisingly deep ties to the case, and Guy Pearce smolders through a side plot as the visiting professor-with-benefits.
Brad Ingelsby’s creation is a whodunit that isn’t really about the whodunit. Mare of Easttown earns its emotional gut-punch by treating everything from grief to opioid addiction and casual misogyny with the same importance as the central murder mystery. Winslet’s accent (the show’s most viral export) props up one of the best performances of her career, a woman who is bone-tired in every frame. By the end, you’ll totally understand why.
6
‘Empire Falls’ (2005)
Adapted from Richard Russo’s Pulitzer-winning novel, this two-part Maine-set miniseries gathered Ed Harris, Helen Hunt, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Aidan Quinn, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Robin Wright into the orbit of a dying mill town and the diner that anchors it. Harris plays Miles Roby, a passive divorcé running the Empire Grill at the whim of a powerful matriarch (Woodward), while his deadbeat father (Newman, having an absolute ball) drinks and schemes around the margins. It’s a subtler, slower list entry, but one with a knockout supporting cast that reads like a roundup of America’s best character actors.
Newman is the obvious scene stealer, devilish and twinkly in what would become one of his last great roles, but Hoffman, in particular, gives a small, pre-Capote performance so fascinating that it functions as its own little movie. This show is the kind of mid-2000s prestige TV no one talks about anymore, but they really should.
7
‘The Young Pope’ (2016)
Paolo Sorrentino dropped the most beautifully blasphemous show of the decade onto HBO, and most of America was too busy meme-ing the title to notice. In The Young Pope, Jude Law plays Lenny Belardo, a chain-smoking, Cherry Coke Zero-craving young American cardinal who’s just been elected the first U.S. pope, and who promptly reveals himself as the most reactionary pontiff in modern memory. Diane Keaton plays the nun who raised him in an American orphanage, wearing a habit and a Knicks jersey, sometimes simultaneously.
This is 10 episodes of Sorrentino in his element, delivering gorgeous visuals and monologues that land somewhere between profound and unhinged. Law’s performance is indulgent and eccentric and deliciously off-kilter. He should’ve won more awards for it. Instead, the show became a punchline before audiences realized it was funnier and weirder than anyone gave it credit for.
8
‘The Undoing’ (2020)
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David E. Kelley adapted Jean Hanff Korelitz’s novel into the most expensive-looking limited series of pandemic-era HBO with The Undoing. Nicole Kidman plays Grace Fraser, an Upper East Side therapist whose oncologist husband (Hugh Grant, in full reptilian-charm mode) becomes the prime suspect in the murder of a beautiful art-mom from their son’s private school. Donald Sutherland looms grandly as Grace’s wealthy father, his eyebrows doing most of the heavy lifting.
This show is a six-episode whodunit dressed in cashmere and filmed in townhomes and the lobbies of buildings most New Yorkers can’t afford to even walk past. The mystery itself is fine, though the ending is still divisive. But the real reason to watch is Grant’s mid-career renaissance, that floppy-haired rom-com lead now playing men whose surface charm conceals something rotten underneath. It’s a role he feels born to play, compliment intended.
9
‘The Investigation’ (2020)
A Danish-Swedish co-production picked up by HBO, Tobias Lindholm’s six-part series fictionalizes the real-life investigation into the murder of journalist Kim Wall by Peter Madsen aboard his homemade submarine. Søren Malling plays detective Jens Møller, the patient, exhausted lead investigator working alongside divers, prosecutors, and Wall’s grieving parents to build a case against a defendant the show pointedly never names or shows on screen. That choice, refusing to give the killer a face or a single moment of screen time, is what elevates The Investigation above the parade of true-crime adaptations that have chased it.
Lindholm centers the victim and family, here, resisting the seductive impulse of serial-killer prestige TV. The show is sad, gray, and devastating, and a model for how the genre might responsibly exist going forward.
10
‘The Regime’ (2024)
This Kate Winslet turn couldn’t be more different from her Philly-twanged hard-ass in Mare of Easttown. As Elena Vernham, the fictional dictator of a fictional Central European nation, who rules her marbled palace with the help of an ex-soldier (Matthias Schoenaerts) she essentially keeps as a pet, Winslet is at her most deranged. Across six episodes, she fears mold spores, communes with her father’s preserved corpse, croons Chicago at state functions, and drives her country off a slow, gilded cliff.
Will Tracy, the Succession alum behind The Menu, brings his signature brand of acidic political comedy to a show that pairs slapstick autocracy with genuine geopolitical dread, and Winslet is having a hell of a time, lisping and over-pronouncing her way through a performance she herself described playing “an awful, awful cow.” What’s not to like?
The Regime
- Release Date
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2024 – 2024-00-00
- Showrunner
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Will Tracy
