The 6 Best Miniseries Released Between 2010 and Now

Image via BBC One Published Nov 3, 2026, 6:55 AM EST Sign in to your Collider account The best thing about a miniseries is that nobody has to stretch the plot to fill a third season. There’s no “it gets good in season two,” so no one has to wait a year to find out if the show got better. You watch it, it ends, and you can tell a friend to go see it without adding a list of warnings. These six are the ones I’d push on someone without thinking twice. A few of them will make you cry, one will probably make you check your phone a little less, and none of them waste a single hour of your time. They also happen to be some of the best-acted shows of the last fifteen years. 6 ‘The Night Manager’ (2016) Image via Prime Video Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston), a former soldier, works as a hotel night manager until he’s recruited to get close to the arms dealer Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie). Jed (Elizabeth Debicki), Roper’s girlfriend, becomes a key piece of the plan, and Corky (Tom Hollander), Roper’s loud, sweaty right-hand man, steals nearly every scene he’s in. Susanne Bier directed all six episodes of The Night Manager, which is rare for a series this size. Hiddleston won a Golden Globe for the role, and so did Laurie and Olivia Colman, who plays the intelligence officer chasing Roper. The show also set off a wave of speculation that Hiddleston would be the next James Bond, since he looked so at ease in a tuxedo. Bier won an Emmy for her directing, and the series still is the best modern version of a John le Carré story. 5 ‘Sharp Objects’ (2018) Image via HBO Camille Preaker (Amy Adams), a newspaper reporter in St. Louis, goes back to her small hometown in Missouri to cover the murders of two young girls. She stays with her controlling mother, Adora (Patricia Clarkson), and her teenage half-sister, Amma (Eliza Scanlen), and old wounds open up fast. Sharp Objects comes from Gillian Flynn’s first novel, a few years before she wrote Gone Girl, and Jean-Marc Vallée directed all eight episodes. Camille has carved words into her own skin, and the show hints at this by flashing single words on screen in the background, on posters and signs, as if they’re surfacing in her head. Vallée cuts quickly between the present and her memories, so the story always feels slightly off balance. Clarkson won a Golden Globe for her role, and Adams, who also produced, delivers one of her best performances. 4 ‘Chernobyl’ (2019) Image via HBO Craig Mazin, who wrote the series, was mostly known for comedies like The Hangover Part II and Scary Movie 3 before this, which surprised a lot of people. Chernobyl follows the 1986 nuclear disaster through scientist Valery Legasov (Jared Harris), and through ordinary people like Lyudmilla Ignatenko (Jessie Buckley), whose husband is a firefighter sent to the burning reactor without proper protection. Composer Hildur Guðnadóttir built the score from sounds she recorded at an actual nuclear power plant, the rumble of machinery, the hum of the walls, and it’s a big part of why the show feels so tense. The cast speaks English with British accents instead of Russian ones, a choice that bothered a few viewers but made the show easier to follow for others. It won ten Emmys, including Outstanding Limited Series. 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 ‘I May Destroy You’ (2020) Image via HBO Arabella (Michaela Coel) is a young writer in London who goes out for a night, gets her drink spiked, and slowly pieces together that she was sexually assaulted. Her friends Terry (Weruche Opia) and Kwame (Paapa Essiedu) deal with their own troubles, and the show talks about consent in friendships, dating, and social media. Coel created, wrote, co-directed, and starred in I May Destroy You, drawing on her own experience. She reportedly wrote 191 drafts of the script. When Netflix wanted to buy the project and own the rights, she walked away, and HBO and the BBC picked it up instead, letting her keep control. Coel won an Emmy for writing, and she’s spoken about how important that decision was. It’s funny, painful, and honest about how messy recovery can be. 2 ‘Mare of Easttown’ (2021) Image via HBO Mare Sheehan (Kate Winslet) is a detective in a small Pennsylvania town where everyone knows her as the high school basketball star who won the state championship in 1989. A young mother is found murdered, and Mare juggles the case with her family and a young county detective, Colin Zabel (Evan Peters), assigned to help her. Guy Pearce plays Richard Ryan, a writer who moves into Mare’s orbit. The show is full of local details, from Wawa coffee and hoagies to the way people say “wooder” for water. Winslet won an Emmy, and so did Julianne Nicholson and Jean Smart, who played her friend Lori and her mother, Helen. Winslet reportedly insisted that HBO not airbrush her in the promotional photos, and she looks like a real woman on screen. That’s part of why the series feels so believable. 1 ‘Adolescence’ (2025) Image via Netflix Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper), a thirteen-year-old boy, is arrested for killing a girl at his school, and his father, Eddie (Stephen Graham), tries to understand how it happened. Graham co-created Adolescence with writer Jack Thorne, and each of its four episodes is filmed in one unbroken take, planned over months of rehearsal. The third episode, in which a psychologist (Erin Doherty) talks with Jamie, is the one most people remember, since the whole hour is one tense conversation. Cooper was only about fourteen during filming and later became the youngest male actor to win an Emmy in an acting category. The show sparked a national conversation in the UK, reaching Parliament, and Netflix made it available to schools. It runs just four hours, and almost nobody forgets it.