The 6 Most Hopeless Netflix Shows, Ranked

I know a television show has thoroughly destroyed my optimism when somebody receives good news and my first reaction is suspicion. A witness has come forward? Wonderful. Who's going to murder them? The family finally has enough money to escape? Excellent. Which terrible decision will ruin it? I've watched enough fictional people get punished for believing in a better tomorrow that even an innocent smile can make me nervous. Netflix has done it brilliantly, and more than once at that. And yet, I keep hoping. That's the embarrassing part. I'll spend six episodes watching somebody get crushed by circumstances beyond their control, then convince myself that one brave decision might finally change everything. These shows understand that stubborn little piece of human nature. They make you care enough to believe the impossible, then force you to confront just how difficult it is to escape the world that created the suffering. 6 'Narcos' (2015–2017) Image via Netflix Narcos follows the drug lord Pablo Escobar's rise and downfall before turning its attention to the equally powerful Cali Cartel. Pablo Escobar (Wagner Moura) builds a cocaine empire in Colombia, becoming unimaginably wealthy while unleashing violence against anybody threatening his business. American DEA agents Steve Murphy (Boyd Holbrook) and Javier Peña (Pedro Pascal) pursue him through a country where political corruption, cartel influence, and ordinary fear make justice extraordinarily complicated. There's a terrible irony in watching Escobar's enemies celebrate his death. They've eliminated one extraordinarily dangerous man, but the cocaine business barely hesitates before producing another group of powerful criminals. Peña understands this increasingly well. His attempts to dismantle the Cali Cartel expose uncomfortable connections between traffickers, political interests, and the institutions supposedly fighting them. I particularly admire how the third season makes Jorge Salcedo's desperate attempts to protect his family so nerve-racking. He risks everything to help destroy the organization. Yet even when the major players are brought down, the larger machinery remains. The victory is real. The problem is nowhere near solved. 5 'Mindhunter' (2017–2019) Image via Netflix Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff) believes the FBI can understand serial murderers by interviewing them, studying their behavior, and identifying patterns that might help prevent future crimes. Alongside veteran agent Bill Tench (Holt McCallany) and psychologist Wendy Carr (Anna Torv), he begins developing criminal profiling techniques during the late 1970s. Mindhunter makes those interviews fascinating, particularly when the investigators discover how intelligent, manipulative, and disturbingly ordinary some offenders can appear. But I find Bill's domestic life even harder to watch than the interviews. His young son becomes involved in a horrifying incident, and Bill's professional expertise offers almost no comfort to his terrified wife Nancy. Here's a man who spends his days examining the psychology of killers but cannot understand what is happening inside his own household. Meanwhile, the Atlanta child-murder investigation exposes the painful limitations of profiling and the pressure surrounding an investigation with grieving families demanding answers. David Fincher's meticulous direction gives this uncertainty an oppressive weight. And those recurring glimpses of the BTK killer? They promise another nightmare the canceled series never got to confront. Two extraordinary seasons, with far too much darkness left unexplored. 4 'Ozark' (2017–2022) Image via Netflix Marty Byrde (Jason Bateman) relocates his family from Chicago to Missouri's Lake of the Ozarks after a money-laundering arrangement with a Mexican drug cartel goes catastrophically wrong. His wife Wendy (Laura Linney) gradually becomes an increasingly ruthless partner in their criminal enterprise, while local teenager Ruth Langmore (Julia Garner) gets pulled into their dangerous world. Ozark initially makes the Byrdes' predicament understandable. They're frightened people trying to survive a mistake. Then you notice how comfortable they're becoming with destroying other lives. Ruth deserved so much better. She grows up surrounded by poverty and criminality, possesses extraordinary intelligence, and spends years struggling to escape the circumstances that shaped her. Watching Garner portray her fury after Wyatt's murder is almost physically painful. And when Ruth finally seems capable of building something independent of the Byrdes, Camila orders her death. The wealthy family survives, having traded its remaining moral integrity for influence and protection. Ruth, who had so much less to begin with, pays the price. I remain furious about it, especially because the ending understands exactly how unfair that outcome is. The Byrdes don't escape corruption. They become powerful enough to live with it. 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 'When They See Us' (2019) Image via Netflix Korey Wise goes to the police station because he wants to accompany his friend. That apparently harmless decision changes his entire life. In 1989, five Black and Latino teenagers are wrongfully accused of assaulting a woman in New York's Central Park, and investigators pressure them into false confessions. When They See Us follows the boys through their convictions, imprisonment, and the devastating consequences for their families. Ava DuVernay directed this four-part dramatization with an understanding that wrongful imprisonment destroys far more than a person's freedom. Jharrel Jerome, who portrays Korey as both a teenager and an adult, is extraordinary. Watching him spend years in adult prisons, endure violence, and struggle through solitary confinement is devastating. His mother Dolores (Niecy Nash) keeps loving him across a distance neither of them can overcome. The eventual exonerations bring enormous relief, but I cannot stop thinking about the ordinary experiences these men lost. Birthdays, friendships, relationships, the simple freedom to grow up without fear. Nobody can hand back an adolescence. The legal system finally recognizes their innocence, long after their lives have been permanently changed. 2 'Squid Game' (2021–2025) Image via Netflix Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) is drowning in debt when a mysterious recruiter offers him the opportunity to compete for an enormous cash prize. He enters a competition where childhood games carry fatal consequences, and desperate contestants must decide whether their own survival is worth sacrificing other people. Squid Game initially presents the nightmare as a grotesque contest. Eventually, it becomes clear that the competition merely reproduces the cruelty many participants were already experiencing outside its walls. I still haven't recovered from Ali's (Anupam Tripathi) betrayal during the marble game. He trusts Sang-woo (Park Hae-soo), believing his friend has discovered a way for them both to survive. Instead, that trust becomes the very thing used against him. And Gi-hun's eventual victory is practically unbearable because everyone he cared about inside the competition is gone. Creator Hwang Dong-hyuk pushes that cruelty further when Gi-hun returns, determined to destroy the games themselves. His rebellion fails, his closest friend Jung-bae (Lee Seo-hwan) is killed, and his attempt to dismantle the organization ends with another devastating sacrifice. If I reveal anything more, it will ruin the show. So just go and watch this masterpiece. 1 'Dark' (2017–2020) Image via Netflix A child disappears from the German town of Winden, and the investigation begins exposing a network of family secrets stretching across generations. Young Jonas Kahnwald (Louis Hofmann) discovers that the caves beneath the town connect different periods of history, allowing people to travel through time. Dark transforms this mystery into an extraordinary tragedy about families whose attempts to protect one another repeatedly become the causes of their own suffering. There's a conversation between Jonas and his father Michael (Sebastian Rudolph) that I genuinely find unbearable. Jonas has traveled into the past hoping to prevent Michael's suicide. But Michael doesn't yet know he's supposed to kill himself. Imagine going back in time to save somebody you love and discovering that your attempt to protect them may help create the tragedy you're desperate to prevent. That cruel contradiction runs through the entire series. People sacrifice relationships, betray their families, and commit terrible acts because they believe they can change what happens next. Dark leaves you feeling devastated. Even its salvation feels like a farewell to people I desperately wanted to see happy. Dark Release Date 2017 - 2020-00-00 Network Netflix Cast Louis Hofmann Jonas Kahnwald Lisa Vicari Martha Nielsen