8 Miniseries Without a Single Flaw

Calling something flawless is usually asking for trouble, because someone will find the one weak episode or the one plot hole you missed. But every once in a while a miniseries comes along with such a tight grip on its own story that there really isn't a weak link anywhere, no padding episode, no dropped subplot, no bad performance dragging things down. That kind of control is rare even in film, and it's almost unheard of in television, where a show usually has to stretch itself to fill a season order no matter if the story needs it or not. These eight never had that problem. Every episode earns its place and every performance holds up, in short, nothing feels wasted. 8 'Sharp Objects' (2018) Image via HBO Camille Preaker (Amy Adams), a journalist with a history of self-harm, gets sent back to her hometown to cover the murder of two young girls, and the show spends most of its runtime showing you her scars in quick, disorienting flashes. Sharp Objects is based on a Gillian Flynn novel, and it keeps the same nasty, claustrophobic small-town dread that made her other books hits, except stretched across eight hours instead of two. Adora Crellin (Patricia Clarkson) and Amma Crellin (Eliza Scanlen), Camille's mother and half-sister, turn the family home into its own kind of crime scene. Jean-Marc Vallée directed every episode, and he uses sound and editing to put you inside Camille's head so completely that the show feels less like a mystery and more like a slow, controlled panic attack. The final twist, once it lands, recontextualizes almost every scene that came before it. 7 'The Night Of' (2016) Image via HBO Naz Khan (Riz Ahmed) borrows his dad's cab for one night, meets a woman, and wakes up next to her dead body with no memory of what happened, and from that first hour on, The Night Of treats the entire criminal justice system like its own slow-moving villain. Detective Box (Bill Camp) builds a case against him with genuine care and thoroughness, which makes the whole thing scarier, since nobody here is cartoonishly corrupt, the system just grinds Naz down anyway. John Stone (John Turturro), the eczema-covered lawyer nobody wanted to hire, ends up being the only person who actually fights for Naz, and Turturro plays him as scruffy and unglamorous in a way most legal dramas would never allow. Steven Zaillian and Richard Price wrote the show together, and they let Rikers Island change Naz almost as much as the trial itself does, until it's hard to tell which version of him is real by the end. It never once tells you whether he actually did it, and that refusal is the whole point. 6 'I May Destroy You' (2020) Image via HBO Arabella (Michaela Coel), a young writer riding the success of her first book, gets drugged and assaulted at a bar one night, and the rest of the show follows her trying to piece together fragments of memory while also just trying to keep living her actual life. Coel wrote, directed, and starred in nearly every episode herself, and she based large parts of it on something that actually happened to her, which gives the whole thing a rawness. Terry (Weruche Opia) and Kwame (Paapa Essiedu), Arabella's closest friends, get their own messy, complicated storylines about consent and identity that never feel like side plots, they're treated with the same weight as Arabella's own. The show refuses easy endings too, it plays out multiple possible endings for how Arabella might confront her attacker instead of picking just one, which is a strange and bold choice for a finale. 5 'Band of Brothers' (2001) Image via HBO Major Winters (Damian Lewis) leads Easy Company through D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge, and the eventual push into Germany, and Band of Brothers treats every one of those campaigns with the same care, nothing here feels like filler between the famous battles. Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks produced it together, and the budget shows in every frame, but what actually holds the show together is how specific and human each soldier feels, even the ones who only get one real episode. Captain Nixon (Ron Livingston) and Sergeant Lipton (Donnie Wahlberg) anchor two of the show's best episodes, and the decision to interview real surviving members of Easy Company before each episode gives the fiction an unusual weight, you know these people actually existed and actually went through this. Twenty-plus years later, it's still the standard other war shows get measured against, mostly because it never once tries to make war look exciting. 4 'When They See Us' (2019) Image via Netflix Five teenagers, Antron (Caleel Harris), Kevin (Asante Blackk), Yusef (Ethan Herisse), Raymond (Marquis Rodriguez), and Korey (Jharrel Jerome), get coerced into false confessions after a jogger is attacked in Central Park in 1989, and When They See Us spends four hours making sure you understand exactly how that coercion happened, lie by lie. Ava DuVernay directed the whole thing with precision. Moreover, she refuses to let the interrogation scenes feel distant or procedural, in fact, you sit in the room with these kids the entire time. Jerome plays Korey at every age from sixteen to adult, since Korey was the only one of the five tried and sentenced as an adult, and that single performance carries some of the heaviest material in the entire series, particularly the years spent at Rikers. The show doesn't soften what happened to any of them afterward either, and by the time it gets to their eventual exoneration, it's earned every bit of anger it's asking you to feel. 3 'Unbelievable' (2019) Image via Netflix Marie (Kaitlyn Dever) reports being raped, and instead of being believed, she gets pressured by police into recanting her own story, then charged for filing a false report, and Unbelievable spends its first hour making that failure almost unbearable to watch before it even introduces the two detectives who'll eventually solve the case years later. It's based on a real Pulitzer-winning news investigation, and that true-story thing going on here is actually the best part. Detective Duvall (Merritt Wever) and Detective Rasmussen (Toni Collette) catch a pattern of similar attacks in a different state years later, and their careful, patient investigative work is deliberately set against the dismissive way Marie's own case got handled, the show is basically arguing that good policing exists, it's just rare. Dever's performance holds the whole thing together though, and watching her get disbelieved by nearly every adult in her life is some of the hardest television made in the last decade. 2 'The Queen's Gambit' (2020) Image via Netflix The Queen's Gambit is all about Beth Harmon (Anya Taylor-Joy) who grows up in an orphanage where she gets hooked on both chess and tranquilizers at the same time, courtesy of the janitor, Mr. Shaibel (Bill Camp). He teaches her the game in the basement almost by accident. The show however turns competitive chess into something as tense and visually thrilling as any sports movie, which shouldn't really be possible given how little actual physical action is involved. Alma Wheatley (Marielle Heller), Beth's adoptive mother, becomes an unexpectedly moving presence in her life despite her own addictions, and Benny Watts (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) shows up as both rival and love interest later on, neither role ever feels like it's just there to fill space. Scott Frank adapted the Walter Tevis novel and directed every episode, and the show never punishes Beth for her addiction the way most stories like this tend to, it just lets her be brilliant and messy at the same time. 1 'Chernobyl' (2019) Image via HBO Valery Legasov (Jared Harris) is a nuclear physicist and he gets pulled into cleaning up a disaster that Soviet officials spend the first several hours actively denying even happened. Chernobyl takes the story and turns that denial into some of the most quietly terrifying television ever made, because the horror part is more than the radiation itself, it's the bureaucracy standing in front of it. Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgård) starts out as the government minder sent to keep Legasov in line and slowly becomes his closest ally instead. Ulana Khomyuk (Emily Watson), a fictional composite standing in for the dozens of real scientists who worked the case, gives the show a way to explain the science without ever feeling like a lecture. Craig Mazin wrote it and researched it obsessively for years, and director Johan Renck shoots the plant itself like a haunted building, all flickering lights and empty concrete corridors. It won practically every award it was eligible for, and unlike a lot of prestige TV, it earned every single one. Chernobyl Release Date 2019 - 2019 Network HBO