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A good miniseries usually announces itself fast. You put on the first episode half expecting to bail, and about twenty minutes in you’re already texting a friend to say start watching this with me. That happened with every show on this list, and most of them took me a weekend or less to finish.
I called them nearly perfect because I’d argue about a stray episode here and there, a slow middle or a subplot that overstays its welcome. But the highs are high enough that it barely matters, and a few of these have stuck in my head long after the credits. Here they are, ranked from the one that cooled off a little to the one that never let up.
8
‘The Queen’s Gambit’ (2020)
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Image via Netflix</figure>
Beth Harmon (Anya Taylor-Joy) is a quiet girl in a Kentucky orphanage who learns chess from the janitor in the basement, and before long she’s beating grown men who’ve been playing for decades. The Queen’s Gambit comes from a 1983 novel by Walter Tevis, and writer-director Scott Frank spent years trying to get it made, with Heath Ledger reportedly once lined up to direct before he died. Netflix finally said yes, and the wait paid off, since about sixty million households watched it in the first four weeks.
Jolene (Moses Ingram), the older girl who looked out for Beth at the orphanage, shows up again when Beth needs her most. Benny Watts (Thomas Brodie-Sangster), a cocky American champion, turns into both her rival and the closest thing she has to a friend. The Moscow tournament builds toward a finish in a public park, where Beth plays strangers on a plain street board, and it works because the show has spent seven episodes teaching you that chess is the only place she feels at home.
7
‘Mare of Easttown’ (2021)
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Image via HBO</figure>
Mare Sheehan (Kate Winslet) is the detective everyone in her Pennsylvania town knows by name, partly because she won a state basketball championship back in 1989 and people still bring it up at the grocery store. Mare of Easttown starts when a young girl goes missing, then another, and Mare tries to solve the case while her family keeps needing her at home. Winslet wears baggy Eagles sweatshirts and drags herself out of bed at odd hours, and she never once looks like she’s acting.
The shoot started in 2019, stopped when the pandemic hit in March 2020, and picked up again months later, which might explain why the whole thing feels like a held breath. Angourie Rice plays Mare’s daughter, Siobhan, who’s trying to make her own way after growing up in her mother’s shadow, and the scenes between the two of them are some of the warmest in the show.
6
‘The Night Of’ (2016)
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Image via HBO</figure>
Nasir Khan (Riz Ahmed), a quiet college student from Queens, borrows his dad’s taxi without asking, and a girl climbs into the back seat thinking he’s working. They spend the night together, and he wakes up to find her stabbed to death with no memory of what happened. John Stone (John Turturro), a low-rent defense lawyer who wears sandals because of a terrible foot rash, takes the case almost by accident. The Night Of originally cast James Gandolfini as Stone, and he shot the pilot before he died in 2013, which is when Turturro stepped in.
Ahmed won an Emmy for the part, and Michael K. Williams, who plays a prison boss named Freddy, is the other big reason to keep watching. Freddy takes Naz under his wing for a price, and the scenes inside Rikers Island, where Naz slowly changes from a scared kid into someone harder, are painful to sit through. Stone adopts a stray cat in the middle of all this, and somehow that odd little side plot tells you a lot about him.
5
‘Sharp Objects’ (2018)
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Image via HBO</figure>
Camille Preaker (Amy Adams) is a struggling newspaper reporter whose editor sends her back to Wind Gap, Missouri, to cover the murders of two young girls. Home means her controlling mother, Adora (Patricia Clarkson), and her teenage half-sister, Amma (Eliza Scanlen), who is sweet at home and a completely different person once she’s out with her friends. Sharp Objects was directed by Jean-Marc Vallée, who handled all eight episodes and filled the soundtrack with Led Zeppelin, a band that almost never says yes to TV.
The show was filmed in Georgia, and you can almost feel the sticky heat coming off the screen. Amma has a miniature replica of the family’s house that turns out to matter far more than it first seems. Adams also served as an executive producer, and her performance, full of small habits like sipping vodka from a water bottle, shows how much of herself she put in. It’s a hard watch, but you won’t want to look away.
4
‘I May Destroy You’ (2020)
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Image via HBO</figure>
Arabella (Michaela Coel) is a young writer in London who goes out for a few drinks, wakes up with only fragments of a memory, and slowly works out that she was sexually assaulted. Coel created, wrote, and starred in I May Destroy You, drawing from something similar that happened to her while she was working on another show. Her friends Terry (Weruche Opia) and Kwame (Paapa Essiedu) deal with consent in their own ways, and Kwame’s storyline about a date gone wrong is one of the few times TV has shown that happening to a man.
The final episode gives Arabella three different endings, a revenge fantasy, a quiet moment of closure, and something in between, and you can tell Coel spent a long time deciding which would feel right. Arabella is also a writer struggling to finish her second book, which echoes Coel’s own pressure while making it. The show picked up BAFTAs along with its Emmy for writing, and it manages to be funny, angry, and kind in the same scene.
3
‘Baby Reindeer’ (2024)
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Image via Netflix</figure>
Donny (Richard Gadd) is a failing comedian working behind a bar in London when a lonely woman, Martha (Jessica Gunning), walks in and he offers her a free cup of tea. She starts showing up every day, then sending him tens of thousands of emails, and she nicknames him Baby Reindeer, after a toy he had as a boy. Gadd first performed the story as a one-man show at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2019, and Baby Reindeer lets it show how the stalking slowly takes over his life.
Nava Mau plays Teri, a trans woman Donny starts dating, and their relationship gives the show some of its warmest scenes, even as his own mess keeps getting in the way. Gunning won an Emmy for playing Martha, and she somehow makes her both frightening and heartbreaking. It’s only seven episodes, but the one where Donny finally tells the story of what happened to him years earlier is hard to get through and even harder to forget.
Four Netflix characters, four completely different ways of showing up
for somebody. This is the one who fits how you actually do friendship, and what having them in your
life would be like.
You do not do friendship at half volume, and neither does he.
What you want is somebody who says yes to the plan before you have finished describing the
plan.
- Dustin is the friend the entire show runs on: loyal past the point of sense,
enthusiastic about everything, and incapable of leaving anybody behind. - You have the same instinct. Your friendships are loud, specific and slightly ridiculous,
and they last for decades because of it. - He is also the one person who would take your strangest interest completely seriously,
which is far rarer than it sounds. - You would have a group chat. It would never once be quiet.
You are the friend who makes things happen, and so is she.
Together you would be mildly exhausting to everyone around you and completely delighted with
yourselves.
- Emily treats an ordinary Tuesday as something that could be turned into an occasion,
which is either the best or the worst quality in a friend depending on your energy
levels. - You share her refusal to sit still. Neither of you has ever accepted a night in when
something was happening somewhere else. - She is far more loyal than people give her credit for. She defends her friends loudly,
publicly, and occasionally before checking the facts. - She would post the photo without asking. You would forgive her, because it is a very
good photo.
You have no patience for pleasant lies, and she has no ability to
tell them. What looks like coldness from the outside is the most reliable friendship on this
list.
- Wednesday never says a kind thing she does not mean, which makes the rare ones count for
an enormous amount. - You would rather be told the truth than be made comfortable. She is constitutionally
incapable of offering you anything else. - Underneath all of it she is ferociously protective. She simply refuses to make a
performance out of caring. - Do not expect a birthday message. Do expect her to ruin anyone who wrongs you.
You look after whoever is having the worst day. So does he. It is
the least strategic way to move through the world and the best possible quality in a friend.
- Gi-hun is not the strongest player in Squid Game, or the cleverest. He is the one who
keeps choosing to protect somebody else, over and over, at genuine cost to himself. - You have the same instinct. You notice who is struggling and you stay with them, long
after anybody would blame you for leaving. - He is a flawed friend, and that is part of why it lands. He lets people down, then comes
back and tries again, which is more than most manage. - He would give you his last chance and never once mention that he had done it.
2
‘Chernobyl’ (2019)
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Image via HBO</figure>
Chernobyl opens with Valery Legasov (Jared Harris) tapping his memories in his apartment, then flashes back to the explosion at the nuclear plant in April 1986. Harris is the son of Richard Harris, who played Dumbledore in the first two Harry Potter films, and he plays Legasov as a tired scientist who knows exactly how bad things are. In one of the most famous scenes, people in the nearby town of Pripyat stand on a bridge to watch the fire, with no idea the ash falling on them is deadly.
Another episode follows three men who volunteer to swim through a flooded basement and open valves, and another shows miners digging a tunnel under the reactor in terrible heat, stripping off their clothes to cope. Craig Mazin, who wrote the series, also made an official podcast explaining what he changed and why. It won ten Emmys, and Jessie Buckley’s scenes as Lyudmilla, a firefighter’s pregnant wife, are some of the hardest to sit through.
1
‘Adolescence’ (2025)
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Image via Netflix</figure>
Adolescence opens with armed police breaking into a family’s home at dawn to arrest a thirteen-year-old boy, Jamie (Owen Cooper), for murdering a classmate. His father, Eddie (Stephen Graham), a plumber, stands in the hallway, stunned, certain it’s all a mistake. Each episode was filmed in one long take, and the second has a camera that lifts off from the school and flies across town in a drone shot before settling in a new location, which is a pretty wild thing to pull off.
The final episode jumps ahead a year and shows Eddie and his family trying to get on with life, ending with Eddie sitting on Jamie’s bed with a teddy bear, wondering what he could have done differently. Cooper was picked from hundreds of boys who auditioned, none of whom had much acting experience. Graham has said he was inspired by news reports of young boys committing violent crimes in the UK, and it’s clear he wanted people to talk about what they saw.
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