The 100 Best Miniseries of All-Time

Emotional and increasingly hard to watch over its five episodes, It’s a Sin nevertheless reminds us about an aspect of the AIDS crisis that often gets buried underneath accounts of suffering and injustice. We’re shown a truly supportive, joyful community that wasn’t simply engaging in shallow pleasures, but helping each other become their best selves. This optimism at the beginning gives the miniseries an even more tragic quality, as these characters struggle to recover from the initial shock and confusion of the spread of this disease. It’s a smartly paced and economical show that that still manages to show off the talents of a brilliant cast—in particular, Olly Alexander, Callum Scott Howells, and a star-making turn from Lydia West going toe-to-toe with the exceptional Keeley Hawes in a scene-stealing guest role.

Black Snow has the sleek style of a modern murder mystery, but its concern with Australia’s colonial past that sets this show apart. As a neo-noir series centered on a murder, the show has all the classic elements: the hardboiled detective, the suspicious townsfolk, and the murder. As the murder is set in 1994, nostalgic summer-tinged high school scenes make it easy to root for justice for the show’s young victim.

But the series stands out as it’s always mindful of Isabel Baker, always concerned with her and her dynamics with her friends, family, and her South Sea Islander (ASSI) community. Supported by the strong performance of newcomer Talijah Blackman-Corowa, and even consulting the ASSI community personally in the show’s development and production, Black Snow is excellent not just as a murder mystery but also as a depiction of a community that’s rarely portrayed on screen.

Starring the Cate Blanchett and directed by Alfonso Cuaron, Disclaimer is every bit as cinematic and enjoyable as you’d imagine it to be. It’s juicy and well-performed (Hoyeon’s unnatural acting notwithstanding), filled with enough twists and turns to keep you seated despite the occasionally melodramatic plot. It’s designed to make you crave more: more rich acting, more pulpy mystery, more explosive secrets, and more emotional breakdowns, which Blanchett has certainly mastered. It’s not as deep as it thinks itself to be, and the script can be overwrought at times (do we really need every single movement narrated?) but the fun twists, great performances, and beautiful cinematography more than makes up for them.

From Mike Flanagan, creator of The Haunting anthology, comes Midnight Mass, a miniseries that is just as gory, unsettling, and supernaturally twisted as any Flanagan horror flick. The series follows an ex-convict who returns to his small town just upon the arrival of a mysterious but alluring priest. As inexplicable events start to happen, the townsfolk hang onto the churchman’s words, seeking reassurance where they can.

With lots to say about religious fanaticism and perpetual grief, Midnight Mass is part of a new wave of layered and thoughtful scary stories currently dominating the genre. While its stately and meditative pace can be overbearing sometimes, it never runs out of things to shock and unnerve the soul.

In Under the Banner of Heaven, Andrew Garfield plays Detective Jeb Pyre, a devout Mormon whose faith is shaken when he takes up a violent case that involves his church. When he discovers the gruesome death of a fellow worshipper and her 15-month-old child, he is driven mad by the choices he needs to make about his faith, his family, and the threat of fundamentalism these two pillars present. Terrifying and compelling, Under the Banner of Heaven is not for the weak-hearted, but it is recommended to anyone up for a good, challenging watch. 

Shining Girls is painful to watch. How could it not be, when it follows the serial and brutal murders of female victims? Even when the series is told through the lens of sole survivor Kirby (played by the excellent Elisabeth Moss), we witness the indelible effects of assault and trauma. Kirby’s sense of reality shifts; time is circular and memories are provisional. She’s an unreliable source in her own story. 

And yet Shining Girls is also necessary to watch. It’s one of those stories where pain is the point, and it brings you close enough to the scene of the crime that it feels wrong to pull away too soon–not until you pull through the ending. 

As always, Moss is unrelentingly intense as she takes us through the deepest corners of the victim she portrays, but a strong supporting cast also rounds off the performances. Jamie Bell is particularly haunting as the yet-to-be-discovered killer. 

Once you get past its kiddy dialogue and somewhat overenthusiastic voice performances, Maya and the Three delivers one of the most thrilling action spectacles for children’s television. Taking its cue from Mesoamerican folklore, this nine-episode miniseries is draped from head to toe in lavish, intricate visuals and is directed with a surplus of stylistic choices, with characters frequently breaking out of the frame itself. And once the action starts, it almost never lets up. It never becomes too frightening for kids, and it’s mounted on a seriously impressive scale that any adult should appreciate. The fights are dynamic, intense, and beautifully constructed almost like dances—giving kids and kids-at-heart lots to marvel at together.

With the success of Narcos, Netflix has created multiple shows about drugs in Latin America to the point that the genre is a tad oversaturated, but with Sofia Vergara heading the miniseries on the real-life cocaine queenpin, Griselda is one that you have to watch. Unlike other depictions of Blanco, Vergara’s series puts her front and center, focusing on the initial struggles it took for her to be taken seriously and the darkness that emerged once she got her way. And of course, Vergara is fantastic, sliding into the drama with an ease that makes us want to see more. While the show isn’t fully accurate, and six episodes are too short to tackle her decades-long rule, Griselda nonetheless is compelling television.

If you’re a fan of dialogue-driven, single-setting shows, this series is perfect for you. It revolves entirely around suspect interrogations and dynamics between detectives, which lead to 3 “storylines” per episode: (1) whether the suspect is guilty or not, (2) the characterization of the suspects, and, (3) the characterization of the detectives. The third storyline might be necessary to push the series up an extra notch, but it’s easily the least interesting part of the series. The show creates tension layer by layer, and it has a way of keeping its premise fresh each time; I’m not sure that this is a format you want to binge. But it’s also 3-4 episodes a season, so you might as well?

When adapting a novel, television showrunners have to transform the text into video, so sometimes, things get cut, lines get shortened, and sometimes what you and the author imagine from the book doesn’t match up on screen. Luckily, for Interior Chinatown, that’s not the case– the novel is already in a screenplay format, and the mini-series is being handled by the very same guy who wrote it, Charles Wu. The satire novel was pretty experimental, so it’s no surprise that the series holds the same playful energy as the book, but this time, playing with stylistic expectations (see: every time the faux leads enters a room) and genre expectations to create a meta levelling up quest for a background character to finally shine through. And with a stacked cast (Jimmy O. Yang, Ronny Chieng, and Chloe Bennet), the humorous plot cleverly challenges the ways Hollywood has excluded and stereotyped Asian Americans, and the way this plays out in real life.