These ten miniseries are slow-burns that invite viewers into their masterpiece stories, one careful step at a time. Miniseries don’t have a whole lot of time to get to the meat of their stories; they are mini, after all. With only a handful of episodes, a miniseries has a limited amount of time to get a viewer invested, keep them engaged, and ensure they’re satisfied by the end.
Still, plenty of shows make the mistake of going too fast, too soon, throwing information, characters, and stories at the viewer before they even have a chance to get settled in their seat. These ten shows don’t make that mistake, taking their time to slowly build into something incredible.
Generation Kill (2008)
Generation Kill is the forgotten fourth sibling of the Band of Brothers, The Pacific, Masters of the Air family. This HBO war drama from David Simon is based on reporting done by Evan Wright when he was embedded in the US Marine Corps’ 1st Reconnaissance Battalion during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, writing a story for Rolling Stone.
The series focuses on the opening weeks of the Iraq War, bringing attention to the danger, confusion, and boredom of the offensive that kicked off a nearly nine-year war. Generation Kill revels in the slow burn, depicting the mundanity of modern warfare, which makes the bursts of violence toward the end all the more shocking.
Olive Kitteridge (2014)
Olive Kitteridge burns as slowly as life does on the fictional seaside town of Crosby, Maine, where the misanthropic, depressed, but ultimately kind-hearted school teacher Olive Kitteridge (Frances McDormand) lives with her husband and son. Like a slow-burning candle, though, when you look away from life for too long and turn back, you may be surprised by just how much is gone.
Olive Kitteridge is a slow-moving, gorgeous, tragic, and human examination of life, particularly the last stages of life, when people move away, family members die, and the daily choices you make add up to something you may not be content with. It’s a slow-burning show all the way through, even to the end, but it’s a gorgeous flame.
The Night Of (2016)
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The first episode of The Night Of is very different from what the rest of the show ends up being. It’s a prologue that sets everything up for what the show will really be about, and begins a slow-burning criminal case. It makes for a challenging but rewarding entry into one of the darker miniseries of the 2010s.
The Night Of stars Riz Ahmed as Naz Khan, a Pakistani-American college student living in New York City who is accused of murdering a young woman after spending the night with her. As evidence is gathered, Naz is sent to Rikers Island, where he is forced to confront aspects of himself he’d kept buried.
Unbelievable (2019)
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The true crime drama Unbelievable is based on the 2008-2011 Washington and Colorado serial rape cases, which begins with Marie Adler (Kaitlyn Dever) reporting that she was raped to Detectives Parker (Eric Lange) and Pruitt (Biull Fagerbakke). When asked to retell the traumatizing event multiple times, the detectives decide Marie is lying, and she is charged with reporting a false report.
A few years later, it becomes clear that Marie’s attacker is still operating, and that she was telling the truth. It’s a harrowing, infuriating miniseries, but a masterfully acted one, with strong pacing that knows just when to drop clues about what’s to come, making the slow burn all the more satisfying.
Devs (2020)
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Alex Garland movies tend to be slow burns, so it’s not surprising that his 2020 miniseries, Devs, is just as slow a burn. The science fiction thriller series is set at Amaya, a quantum computing company run by the enigmatic Forest (Nick Offerman), who offers a job in the secretive “Devs” team to Sergei Pavlov (Karl Glusman).
Just a day later, Sergei’s girlfriend, Lily Chan (Sonoya Mizuno), watches, horrified, a video of her boyfriend taking his own life despite the viewers watching Forest kill Sergei just a few minutes before. It takes some time for Devs to unveil the truth of its story, but once it does, things quickly fall into place for a provocative, captivating show.
The Outsider (2020)
The Outsider is a ten-episode series that feels like a two-season show, with the first two episodes making up the first season and the last eight making up the second. While things kick off quickly in those first two episodes, they slow down considerably after the early, shocking twist.
So begins a very slow burn story centering on Detective Ralph Anderson (Ben Mendelsohn), who discovers the mutilated body of a young boy in his town of Cherokee City, Oklahoma. Ralph comes to realize that there is an entity among the population, and it’s a race against time to find the outsider before he, or it, kills again.
Mare Of Easttown (2021)
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Mare of Easttown is a crime thriller that takes its time, laying the tracks for one of the most compelling murder mystery TV shows of the last ten years. Set in the titular Philadelphia suburb, Mare of Easttown stars Kate Winslet as Mare Sheehan, a detective on the local police force and a hometown hero.
Well-liked and capable, Mare’s personal life is in turmoil after the tragic suicide of her son just two years prior. As she grieves in her own, emotionless way, Mare has to solve a murder case involving a teen mom, with culprits who could be anyone in town, from her best friend to her ex-husband.
Midnight Mass (2021)
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Many of Mike Flanagan’s horror TV shows tend to be slow burns. It’s his style, as he builds up the dread and the atmosphere before he starts unleashing monsters and startling jump scares. Midnight Mass needs this slow-burn atmosphere to develop the grim, dying tone of the show.
The series is set on the fictional, isolated Crockett Island, well past its heyday. The aging, lonely populace has tragic and shameful backstories they would rather forget, but the arrival of a charismatic young priest gives them something new. Unfortunately, the priest brings something else to Crockett, something that arrives in a coffin.
Station Eleven (2021-2022)
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Station Eleven, based on the 2014 novel of the same name by Emily St. John Mandel, is a slow-burn ten-episode post-apocalyptic drama series that takes a long time to get to the powerful center of the story. The journey there though, slow or not, is an amazing depiction of grief and confusion at the end of the world.
20 years after a worldwide pandemic killed most of the people on Earth and destroyed society as we know it, the world has reformed itself into a primitive but stable version of what society used to be. In this new world, people are still contending with the sadness of what they’ve lost but are still hopeful they can build something new.
The Curse (2023-2024)
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The Curse is a slow-burn, but it’s so weird, off-putting, and funny that you may not notice at first. Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie create and star in the Paramount+ series that follows Asher (Fielder) and Whitney Siegel (Emma Stone), co-stars of an HGTV show who are not nearly as sweet as their on-screen personas.
Their real lives are wracked with lies and insecurities, all secretly filmed by HGTV producer Dougie Schecter (Benny Safdie), and when a selfish decision by Asher results in a little girl’s curse, the Siegels’ lives take a steep nose dive. It’s horrifying, absurdly funny, and a joy to watch as the miniseries slowly brings you into its utterly unique world.
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