The 6 Most Hopeless HBO Shows, Ranked

A hopeless HBO show is usually about crime happening, and audience rooting for the criminal. You immediately know this is going to be good but with a guilt. Someone finally gets out. That's usually when I start worrying. They've survived the murderers, escaped the prison, defeated the enemy, or found the person they've spent years searching for. Surely they deserve one peaceful morning. But HBO has made an entire art form out of asking what happens after survival. Sometimes the answer is so cruel that I wish the character had never started hoping in the first place. And I'm an absolute sucker for these stories. I get attached to people who make awful decisions, defend characters who probably deserve criticism, and celebrate tiny victories as though they've personally changed my life. These six shows have given me plenty of reasons to believe things might improve. That's what makes watching those hopes collapse so bloody painful. 6 'Game of Thrones' (2011–2019) Image via HBO Nobody understands the cruelty of Westeros quite like the Stark family. Ned Stark (Sean Bean) arrives in King's Landing believing that honor and duty still mean something, only to discover that the political world surrounding the Iron Throne operates according to considerably uglier rules. Game of Thrones follows the violent struggle between noble houses as betrayals, wars, and supernatural threats destroy entire families. What begins with one honorable man's attempt to uncover a conspiracy becomes a continent-wide tragedy. And I still haven't forgiven this show for Shireen Baratheon (Kerry Ingram). She's a gentle, intelligent child who loves reading and offers kindness to Ser Davos (Liam Cunningham), one of the few adults who treats her with genuine affection. Then her father Stannis (Stephen Dillane) permits her sacrifice in a desperate attempt to improve his military fortunes. Watching Davos discover what happened is devastating. Shireen did nothing to deserve that fate. Her death doesn't even secure the victory Stannis wanted. That's Westeros at its most merciless. Innocence offers no protection, and enormous suffering can accomplish absolutely nothing. 5 'The Sopranos' (1999–2007) Image via HBO Christopher Moltisanti (Michael Imperioli) wants to become a respected gangster, build a career in Hollywood, and enjoy a future with Adriana La Cerva (Drea de Matteo). Unfortunately, he's devoted his life to Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), a New Jersey mob boss whose affection often comes with terrifying conditions. The Sopranos follows Tony's criminal empire and troubled family life, exposing how greed, insecurity, and violence gradually poison practically every relationship around him. The moment Christopher chooses Tony over Adriana still makes me furious. She's been cooperating with the FBI and finally tells Christopher the truth, hoping they can escape together. He initially appears willing. Then he sees a miserable-looking family at a gas station and decides against abandoning his comfortable criminal life. Adriana pays for that decision with her life. And Christopher eventually dies at Tony's own hands. That's the terrible logic running through David Chase's masterpiece. These people repeatedly recognize the possibility of changing their lives, then retreat into the very behavior destroying them. Tony attends therapy for years. He can articulate his unhappiness beautifully. Somehow, that rarely makes him kinder. Collider Exclusive · Villain Personality Quiz Which Criminal Mastermind Would Be Your Nemesis? Lecter · Joker · Moriarty · Chigurh Four of the finest criminal minds ever put on screen. One of them would look at you and see something worth their time. Eight questions decide which one comes for you, why they picked you, and what they would want when they arrived. 🍷Lecter 🃏Joker ♟️Moriarty 🪙Chigurh MEET YOUR NEMESIS → 01 What would a criminal mastermind notice about you first? Great villains choose their opponents carefully. Something about you got their attention. AMy manners, and everything I am careful not to say. BThat I still believe people are basically decent. CThat I am clever, and quietly enjoy proving it. DThat I handle things myself, and always have. NEXT QUESTION → 02 How do they make first contact? The introduction tells you everything about what is coming next. AA polite letter. Beautiful handwriting. Quietly wrong. BSomething on fire, with a message left beside it. CA puzzle, left where only I would look. DNo contact. Just the aftermath, and a coin. NEXT QUESTION → 03 What do you actually believe about right and wrong? Every nemesis is really an argument about the thing you believe most. AThere are lines. Mine are private and absolute. BRules are the only thing keeping us from being animals. CMorality is a system, and systems can be solved. DThings happen. Most of it was never up to me. NEXT QUESTION → 04 What finally gets under your skin? Everybody has a pressure point. Finding yours is the whole plan. ABeing seen clearly by somebody I cannot read. BWatching good people do something ugly. CLosing to someone who was simply better prepared. DHaving no move left that changes anything. NEXT QUESTION → 05 They have made their move. How do you fight back? This is the part of the film where the audience finds out who you are. ACarefully, and never where they expect to be touched. BLoudly. I would rather lose than play their game. CWith a better plan. I can out-think this. DDirectly, once, with whatever is closest to hand. NEXT QUESTION → 06 What would they use against you? A good villain never brings a weapon you have not already handed them. AMy privacy. I have kept far too much to myself. BMy conscience. I will not cross the line they want. CMy ego. I cannot resist a worthy opponent. DMy certainty that I can handle it alone. NEXT QUESTION → 07 What do they actually want from you? The money is never the point. Something else always is. ATo understand me better than anyone ever has. BTo prove I am no better than they are. CTo finally be beaten by someone worth the trouble. DNothing at all. I stepped into the wrong path. NEXT QUESTION → 08 How does it end between the two of you? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides who comes for you. AA conversation I will be replaying for years. BA choice forced on me that has no clean answer. COne final move, and the better mind wins. DA coin in the air, and nothing I can say. REVEAL MY NEMESIS → The Case File Is Complete Your Nemesis Is…Four criminal masterminds. One of them was always going to be yours. Here is who comes for you, why they picked you out of everyone available, and what they want from the encounter. Hannibal LecterYour nemesis does not want to beat you. He wants to know you completely, and he is patient enough to wait for it. The frightening part is how good the conversation is. Lecter is the most dangerous kind of opponent: the one who finds you interesting. He never raises his voice, because he has never needed to. You keep a great deal to yourself and you are careful about what you show. That reserve is exactly the door he would knock on. The films understood something other thrillers missed. The horror is not the violence. It is being perfectly understood by the wrong person. He would be unfailingly polite about all of it. That is the worst part. The JokerYour nemesis is not after money, territory or revenge. He is after a demonstration, and you are the person he has chosen to prove his point on. The Joker only picks opponents who believe in something. Your decency is not a defence against him. It is the entire reason he showed up. He has no plan you can predict and nothing you can take away, which removes every tool you would normally reach for. His whole argument is that you are one bad day away from being him, and you would spend the rest of your life proving him wrong. He would call it a magic trick. You would call it the worst night of your life. MoriartyYour nemesis respects you, which sounds flattering until you work out what it means. He chose you because nobody else was worth his time. Moriarty is the original criminal mastermind, the template every later one borrows from: a mind the equal of the hero's, pointed the wrong way. You enjoy being the cleverest person in the room. He is counting on exactly that, and he has already built the room. This is the rare nemesis who would be genuinely disappointed if you lost badly. He needs the game to be worth playing. It ends the way these things always end. Two people, one problem, and only one way down. Anton ChigurhYour nemesis has no personal interest in you whatsoever, and that is precisely what makes him unsurvivable. You are not a rival. You are a stop on the way. Chigurh does not negotiate, gloat or explain. He arrives, he asks one question, and the answer was decided long before you opened your mouth. You trust yourself to handle things. He is the one problem in the world that has no interest in how capable you are. No Country for Old Men rewrote the screen villain by removing the thing audiences quietly rely on: the sense that talking might work. Call it. He will wait. ↻ RETAKE THE QUIZ 4 'The Last of Us' (2023–) Image via HBO Joel (Pedro Pascal) has already endured the death of his daughter when he's entrusted with escorting Ellie (Bella Ramsey) across an America devastated by a fungal pandemic. Ellie may be humanity's best hope of developing a cure, but their dangerous journey gradually turns two lonely survivors into something resembling a family. The Last of Us builds its emotional foundation around that relationship, then confronts them with the terrible consequences of Joel's determination to protect her. There's a birthday when Joel takes Ellie to an abandoned museum, places an astronaut helmet on her head, and plays a recording of a rocket launch. For a few minutes, she's simply a happy child imagining space. God, I love that moment. Then I remember their later conversation on the porch, where Joel finally admits what he did to save her from the Fireflies. Ellie tells him she wants to try forgiving him. That possibility is painfully precious because we know how little time they have left. Her subsequent pursuit of revenge only spreads the suffering to more people. This world can take practically everything from someone, then turn their love for the dead into another source of destruction. 3 'The Leftovers' (2014–2017) Image via HBO Nora Durst (Carrie Coon) loses her husband and two children in an instant. They simply vanish, along with two percent of the world's population, leaving everybody else without an explanation. The Leftovers begins three years after that event, following people who have developed increasingly desperate ways of coping with an absence nobody can understand. Police chief Kevin Garvey (Justin Theroux) struggles with his own psychological turmoil, while religious movements emerge around competing interpretations of what happened. Nora breaks my heart because she cannot even mourn in a way people recognize. There are no bodies to bury, no confirmed deaths, and no reason she can accept for why her family disappeared while she remained. Her suffering becomes something strangers are fascinated by, although their curiosity offers her nothing. Then the series introduces the possibility of sending people wherever the departed went, and Nora must decide whether to risk everything for an answer. Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta created this drama. 2 'The Wire' (2002–2008) Image via HBO Baltimore's police officers, drug dealers, politicians, teachers, and working families inhabit the same city while experiencing completely different versions of it. The Wire begins with a criminal investigation led by detective Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) before expanding into an extraordinary portrait of institutions that repeatedly fail the people depending on them. The tragedy isn't simply that bad things happen. It's that the machinery responsible for preventing those things often helps them continue. Bodie Broadus (J. D. Williams) is the character I keep returning to. He starts as a young drug dealer working for Avon Barksdale's organization and spends years surviving changes in leadership, violence, and constant threats to his position. Eventually, he recognizes how little his loyalty has earned him. Yet when Marlo Stanfield's men come to kill him, Bodie refuses to abandon his corner. He dies defending a tiny patch of Baltimore that never offered him anything resembling a future. That image is almost unbearable. 1 'Oz' (1997–2003) Image via HBO Emerald City sounds like somewhere people might find a fresh start. Instead, it's an experimental unit inside Oswald State Correctional Facility, where inmates are supposedly given a better chance at rehabilitation. Oz quickly destroys that promise. Tobias Beecher (Lee Tergesen), a lawyer imprisoned after killing a child while driving drunk, enters expecting punishment and encounters a world where humiliation, violence, and exploitation become everyday realities. Tom Fontana, who created the series, makes the prison's supposedly progressive ambitions feel like a particularly cruel joke. People enter hoping to serve their sentences and eventually leave. Some barely survive their first week. But Cyril O'Reily (Scott William Winters) is the character whose suffering I find hardest to accept. Living with a brain injury and dependent on his manipulative brother Ryan (Dean Winters), Cyril is drawn into murder and eventually faces execution. Watching Ryan desperately try to save the one person who loves him unconditionally is devastating, especially knowing how much suffering Ryan himself has caused. And that's the horrible thing about Oz. It doesn't ask us to pretend these prisoners are innocent. It makes us recognize their humanity even after confronting their worst actions. Beecher becomes increasingly brutal just to survive. Cyril never fully understands the machinery determining his fate. The institution promises justice but repeatedly manufactures more suffering. I've watched countless television characters lose everything. Few have frightened me like the men of Oz, because even surviving their punishment can mean losing whatever remains of themselves. Oz Release Date 1997 - 2003-00-00 Network HBO Max