6 Best Miniseries Released Between 1990 and Now

Image via HBO Published Oct 14, 2026, 4:28 PM EDT Sign in to your Collider account The most insulting thing a streaming service can do is recommend another show three seconds after a great miniseries ends. I've just spent an entire weekend with people whose lives have become unreasonably important to me, and now I'm supposed to watch a trailer about somebody else's problems? Absolutely not. Sometimes I need to sit there for a while. Sometimes I need to call the friend who recommended it and demand an explanation for what they've put me through. And that is precisely the reaction I'm hoping to get when I recommend any of these. I want the phone call. I want the furious message about a particular scene. I want somebody to tell me they had to stop watching for a few minutes because they couldn't handle what was happening. There is an enormous difference between finishing a series and having something to say about it afterward. I've got quite a lot to say about these 6 miniseries. 6 'When They See Us' (2019) Image via Netflix Five teenagers are arrested following the brutal assault of a woman in New York's Central Park in 1989. When They See Us follows Antron McCray (Caleel Harris and Jovan Adepo), Kevin Richardson (Asante Blackk and Justin Cunningham), Yusef Salaam (Ethan Herisse and Chris Chalk), Raymond Santana (Marquis Rodriguez and Freddy Miyares), and Korey Wise (Jharrel Jerome) as police interrogations produce false confessions, leading to wrongful convictions that devastate their lives and families. Ava DuVernay created and directed the four-part miniseries, and I genuinely struggle to remember another television production that made me feel this powerless as a viewer. Watching those interrogation sequences is maddening because we can see how frightened and exhausted the boys are. They keep trying to figure out what the adults want them to say, believing that cooperation might finally get them home. But the fourth episode is what I would insist you watch even if you know the case inside out. The attention shifts heavily toward Korey Wise, who endures years in adult prisons while his family struggles to help him. Jharrel Jerome portrays both the teenage and adult Korey, and the gradual change in his voice, posture, and mannerisms is extraordinary. The boy who entered the system is still somewhere inside him, desperately trying to survive. Watching the men eventually leave prison provides relief, although DuVernay refuses to pretend that exoneration restores everything they lost. I wanted to see these boys grow up. The series forces us to confront everything that was stolen from them instead. 5 'Mare of Easttown' (2021) Image via HBO Mare Sheehan (Kate Winslet) has lived in Easttown, Pennsylvania, long enough that investigating a murder means questioning people she might have known since childhood. Winslet's exhausted detective begins looking into the killing of teenage mother Erin McMenamin (Cailee Spaeny) while another girl's disappearance hangs over the community. Meanwhile, Mare is grieving her son, fighting for custody of her grandson, and somehow finding the energy to argue with practically everybody who enters her kitchen. Mare of Easttown understands small-town familiarity beautifully. Everybody knows Mare. That familiarity gives her access to information while making almost every discovery personally uncomfortable. I would have happily watched another six episodes of Mare and her mother Helen (Jean Smart) insulting each other over household inconveniences. Jean Smart is wonderful, and their constant bickering gradually reveals how much grief has accumulated inside that house. Series creator Brad Ingelsby also clearly understood that detective work becomes considerably messier when the investigator has her own unresolved history with the people involved. Even when Mare uncovers answers, she still has to live among the people affected by them. My favorite decision comes at the very end, after the investigation has finished and there is no professional reason left for Mare to be brave. She finally climbs the stairs to the attic where her son died. After all those suspects, interviews, and terrible discoveries, the person Mare has been avoiding most desperately is herself. 4 'The Queen's Gambit' (2020) Image via Netflix Beth Harmon (Anya Taylor-Joy) discovers chess in the basement of an orphanage, where the janitor, Mr. Shaibel (Bill Camp), reluctantly teaches her the game and realizes that the quiet little girl sitting opposite him possesses an extraordinary talent. The Queen's Gambit follows Beth into competitive chess during the 1960s, where her ambition takes her through increasingly prestigious tournaments while addiction and loneliness threaten the life she is building. Anya Taylor-Joy looks exotic. She is magnificent, particularly when Beth enters a room full of older male competitors who expect her to be intimidated. Beth studies the board, takes her time, and frequently leaves those men wondering what on earth just happened. The scenes I always return to takes place when Beth revisits the orphanage after learning of Mr. Shaibel's death. She discovers that he kept newspaper clippings documenting her achievements, quietly following the career he helped begin. It is such a small revelation compared with the international tournaments, yet it completely changes the emotional weight of everything she has accomplished. Beth's former competitors come together to help her analyze the decisive game against Borgov (Marcin Dorociński), and the girl who once treated independence almost as a survival requirement finally accepts that other people can contribute to her success. I adore the final walk through the park, where she sits down to play chess with an older stranger. All those elaborate competitions, and she still loves the simple pleasure Mr. Shaibel introduced her to. Scott Frank co-created and directed this amazing miniseries. Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes Which Netflix Character Would Be Your Best Friend? Dustin · Emily · Wednesday · Gi-hun Some friends drag you out of the house. Some sit with you on the worst night of your life. Netflix has written both, plus the one who tells you the truth you have been avoiding all week. Answer eight quick questions about how you actually do friendship, and find out which of them was always going to end up in your corner. 🧢Dustin(Stranger Things) 🗼Emily(Emily in Paris) 🕷️Wednesday(Wednesday) 🟢Gi-hun(Squid Game) FIND YOUR BEST FRIEND → 01 How do you usually end up making a new friend? The origin story says a lot about the friendship that follows it. AWe got loud about the same obsession and never stopped. BThey invited me somewhere before we had properly met. CWe bonded over disliking exactly the same thing. DThey noticed I was struggling and stayed with me. NEXT QUESTION → 02 What is a perfect Saturday with your best friend? Friendship is mostly built out of very ordinary hours. AA ridiculous plan neither of us should attempt. BSomewhere new, photographed heavily, ending very late. CSomewhere quiet, few people, zero small talk. DSomething simple, and a conversation that actually matters. NEXT QUESTION → 03 You call them at two in the morning. What happens? This is the real test of a friendship, and everybody knows it. AThey are already putting their shoes on. BThey answer instantly and turn it into a plan. CThey answer and say something unflattering and true. DThey listen for an hour and never check the time. NEXT QUESTION → 04 What do you want from them when you are clearly wrong? The best friendships are the ones that survive being corrected. ASupport first. We can review the mistake later. BA relentlessly positive reframe of the entire disaster. CThe blunt version. Do not soften it for me. DPatience, and no judgment about how I got here. NEXT QUESTION → 05 What do your friends actually value about you? The friend you attract says something about the friend you are. AI am all in, always, about everything. BI can turn almost any situation into a good time. CI say the thing nobody else in the room will. DI look after whoever is having the worst day. NEXT QUESTION → 06 You have a falling out. How does it go? How a friendship repairs itself matters more than how it breaks. ALoudly, briefly, then back to normal by Tuesday. BThey apologise first, enthusiastically, with a gift. CCold silence, then one dry joke that fixes everything. DWe talk until we both understand what actually happened. NEXT QUESTION → 07 What do you actually need a best friend for? Everybody is missing something. The right friend fills that gap. ATo make my life bigger than it would be alone. BTo push me out of the house and into my own life. CTo catch me when I start lying to myself. DTo be the person who never gave up on me. NEXT QUESTION → 08 Ten years from now, what keeps the two of you close? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides who you get. AWe would still drop everything for each other, instantly. BWe still make plans, and we still actually go. CWe still cut through each other's nonsense in one sentence. DThey stood by me once when it cost them something. REVEAL MY BEST FRIEND → The Group Chat Has Spoken Your Best Friend Is…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. Dustin HendersonYou 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. Emily CooperYou 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. Wednesday AddamsYou 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. Seong Gi-hunYou 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. ↻ RETAKE THE QUIZ 3 'Angels in America' (2003) Image via HBO New York, 1985. Prior Walter (Justin Kirk) has AIDS, his boyfriend Louis (Ben Shenkman) cannot cope with the prospect of watching him die, and a closeted Mormon lawyer named Joe Pitt (Patrick Wilson) is struggling with desires that threaten his marriage and everything he believes about himself. Somewhere in the middle of their interconnected lives is the notoriously ruthless Roy Cohn (Al Pacino), a powerful attorney who refuses to acknowledge his own AIDS diagnosis. Angels in America brings these people together during the Reagan administration, when the AIDS crisis exposed a particularly vicious combination of political indifference, prejudice, and fear. Tony Kushner adapted his own Pulitzer Prize-winning play, and Mike Nichols directed this remarkable television production. I desperately wish more people would watch it for Al Pacino's Roy Cohn alone. The man has spent his entire career exercising power over others, and even his own diagnosis becomes something he believes he can negotiate. Yet Justin Kirk's Prior is the character I find impossible to forget. His boyfriend abandons him when he needs love most, his body is deteriorating, and an actual angel arrives to burden him with a supernatural mission. The extraordinary thing is that Prior remains funny, angry, frightened, and fiercely attached to being alive. When he ultimately rejects the heavenly demand to halt humanity's progress, he chooses the uncertainty and suffering that accompany living. After six hours spent watching people struggle with death, identity, shame, and abandonment, his insistence on having more life feels wonderfully defiant. 2 'Chernobyl' (2019) Image via HBO On April 26, 1986, an explosion destroyed Reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (true story). Chernobyl reconstructs that disaster and its aftermath, following the scientists, firefighters, workers, government officials, and ordinary families caught inside a catastrophe that Soviet authorities initially struggle to acknowledge. Nuclear scientist Valery Legasov (Jared Harris) is portrayed alongside Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgård), who begins as a government official accustomed to issuing orders and gradually understands that political authority means very little when confronting a damaged nuclear reactor. Craig Mazin created the series, with Johan Renck directing all five episodes, and together they make scientific explanations feel as urgent as any conventional thriller. Consider the men sent onto the reactor roof to remove radioactive graphite. They have extremely limited time to work before their radiation exposure becomes dangerous, and they must physically push debris over the edge while an invisible threat surrounds them. There is barely any room for dramatic heroism. They run, shovel, and retreat. The series repeatedly returns to this awful imbalance between the enormous consequences of the disaster and the vulnerable individuals expected to contain it. Legasov's eventual explanation of what happened is satisfying. We witness the human cost of every suppressed warning and institutional failure. The production necessarily dramatizes and condenses historical events, but its central concern remains painfully recognizable. People responsible for terrible decisions can protect their reputations long after others have paid for those decisions. Heads up: Episode 4 is extremely intense. 1 'Band of Brothers' (2001) Image via HBO Band of Brothers follows Easy Company, a unit of American paratroopers in the 101st Airborne Division, from their training in the United States through the Normandy invasion, the fighting in the Netherlands, the brutal winter at Bastogne, and the final months of World War II. Based on Stephen E. Ambrose's nonfiction book, the miniseries gives us enough time with these soldiers that their relationships start feeling almost personal. Richard Winters (Damian Lewis) gradually becomes the kind of officer whose decisions inspire extraordinary loyalty. Even the soldiers who spend their time complaining about the Army understand the difference between following somebody's rank and genuinely trusting the man giving the orders. I could spend an entire evening talking about the Bastogne episode alone. Eugene Roe (Shane Taylor), the company's medic, moves among the freezing men in the forest, desperately searching for supplies and trying to keep soldiers alive while artillery tears through their positions. His brief connection with Renée (Lucie Jeanne), a nurse working at a nearby aid station, is especially affecting because their conversations offer a little warmth inside conditions that seem determined to crush every trace of it. The episode understands that these soldiers have become responsible for one another in ways their civilian lives could never have prepared them for. Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg helped develop the production, but its greatest decision was giving the surviving veterans opportunities to speak about their experiences. Their interviews appear throughout the series, with their identities revealed at the end. After spending ten episodes getting attached to the dramatized soldiers, hearing the actual men remember their friends is almost overwhelming. I can revisit the battles whenever I want. Those interviews are what make the whole thing feel irreplaceable. And the best part of it all? All the actors from this show went on to become huge. The actors in Band of Brothers include but aren’t limited to Damian Lewis, Ron Livingston, David Schwimmer, Donnie Wahlberg, Tom Hardy, Jimmy Fallon, and Michael Fassbender.