The 10 Best Miniseries on Hulu Right Now

Over the Garden Wall consists of 10 episodes that together run just under two hours. While each episode stands alone, it’s easy to watch the entire series in one sitting. The story beckons you to go deeper into its fantastical forest called the Unknown, at the center of which lies a dark mystery, and two boys on a quest to return home.

Wirt (Elijah Wood) and his younger half-brother Greg (Collin Dean) are lost in these enchanted woods. Beatrice, a talking bird, befriends the boys and offers to guide them home. Here, the trio encounter singing frogs, beastly creatures, and sinister forces hidden in the shadows.

There is no other series quite like Over the Garden Wall, which so perfectly balances its comedic and melancholic moments. If you’re looking for something a little bittersweet, musical, and fun, this miniseries will surely hit the spot—that is, if you’re brave enough to enter its Unknown.

In the early 2000s, amid the rapid rise of online piracy and the consequent fall of paid music, tech genius Daniel Ek would find Spotify, a revolutionary streaming platform that served as a middle ground between user accessibility and artist rights. But even now, at its peak, Spotify’s success seems mystifying. How did they get away with providing free music to all? 

Enter The Playlist—an impressive attempt at answering that very question. In this fictionalized account, key players in Spotify’s success are given their own episode-long arc, starting with the visionary himself, Ek (played by Edvin Endre), followed by the artist, the coder, and the industry insider, to name a few. By employing multiple perspectives, each with its own cinematic style (a particular favorite is that of the lawyer’s, the most experimental out of all the episodes), The Playlist manages to spin the technical and complicated story of Spotify’s origins into something fresh, dynamic, and addictive. Despite utilizing the Rashomon effect—risky but rewarding in this case—The Playlist rarely strays from its main point and, the result is a lean, well-rounded story that’s just as credible as it is heightened. 

Plenty of things go on between love and separation, marriage and divorce. There is the pleasant high of intimacy, the devastating low of heartbreak, the frustration of misunderstanding, and the bliss of friendship. Fleishman is in Trouble explores all this from the point of view of recent divorcees Toby and Rachel Fleishman, but interestingly, this POV is narrated by their friend, Libby. The result is a multifaceted take on love, entertaining and enlightening in its nuance. Based on the bestselling book by essayist Taffy Brodesser-Akner, the series is also strikingly written. Whether it’s Libby’s storytelling you’re hearing, Toby’s witticisms, or Rachel’s dagger-sharp remarks, prepare to cry and laugh in equal measure.  

In a case of perfect casting, Jesse Eisenberg plays the neurotic Toby, Claire Danes his unhappy wife, and Lizzy Caplan their quick-witted friend. Other sitcom greats make appearances too, like Adam Brody and Josh Radnor, making Fleishman Is in Trouble highly watchable on all fronts. 

Based on the bestselling book of essays by Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things is, well, made of many tiny beautiful things. It’s at once a meditation on grief, a coming-of-age tale, a contemplation of family ties, a sobering look at a midlife crisis, a romance, a comedy, and an absolute tearjerker of a drama. It’s clunky on some fronts and much better on others, but overall the series packs a gut-wrenching punch with the ever-compelling Kathryn Hahn as the lead. 

It’s surprisingly light with each of its eight episodes running at just under 30 minutes, but in all, the show effectively tugs at the heartstrings and provides welcome insight into navigating the highs and lows of living a small but meaningful life.

Telling a thoughtful story about the Northern Ireland Troubles and the IRA, including all its crimes and glories, is quite the feat. But Say Nothing proves it up to the task. The nine-part miniseries features compelling performances, a whipsmart script, taut timing, and impeccable production design (despite spanning four decades, it always looks true to the era). Its most impressive trait, however, is that it manages to show all sides of this complex story in an understanding light. The rebellion has noble aims, but it’s still fallible. The British army establishes order, but their means don’t always justify their ends. The series isn’t appeasing all sides as much as it’s taking a long hard look at them. We’re invited to reexamine this crucial part of history and ask ourselves, under the circumstances, would we too say nothing or everything to save lives?

The latest addition to the murder mini-series genre is the incredible thriller “The Staircase.” It originally aired in 2004, but the producers took the same director and allowed him to add new episodes in 2018 to complete the story. 

The plot: A famous American novelist’s wife is found dead, and he is accused of killing her. His life comes under scrutiny as everyone asks whether she died in an accident or was murdered. If you liked their other hit, “Making a Murderer,” you will love this. You should also definitely check out “The Keepers” or Netflix’s binge-worthy crime documentary, “Evil Genius.”

The incredible script for this Hulu-produced series comes courtesy of Lawrence Wright, who wrote the Pulitzer-winning book the series is based on, and Dan Futterman, the Oscar-nominated writer who gave us Capote. It is an eye-opening, semi-fictional account of how the CIA and the FBI took conflicting approaches to counteract Al-Qaeda in the lead-up to 9/11, withholding information from each other, and obstructing a unified strategy to combat terror. The disagreements between the two security services are numerous and the relationship between their staff is hostile. At the top, Jeff Daniels plays John O’Neill, the seasoned head of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Center, while Peter Sarsgaard stars as Martin Schmidt, the chief of the CIA’s respective facility, who are both amazing. Then there’s Ali Soufan, played by Tahar Rahim, who is one of only handful FBI agents who speak Arabic back in 1998, just three years before the Towers fell. With all this testosterone flying about, the women in this show are marginalized to the fairly weak romantic storylines, but other than that the series gets a lot of stuff right. Writing, acting, and action are on point and make The Looming Tower a gripping as well as insightful watch.

Based on true events, the series follows the lives of Gypsy Rose Blanchard her mother Dee Dee, whose relationship is pushed to the brink when it’s discovered that Dee Dee has been faking Gypsy’s illnesses. The strange case that gained publicity following a viral 2016 BuzzFeed story and a 2017 HBO documentary works well as an absorbing, well-paced drama. Each episode is visually interesting, offering compelling imagery with a palpable tension. Haunting and spectacularly acted by both Patricia Arquette and Joey King, The Act is a highly-recommended television series, perfect for drama and true crime fans.

With years of films depicting Italian crime syndicates, most focus on their leaders – the Dons, the Capos, and the Consiglieres. Most of them focus on the mafia’s men. However, in this series, it’s the women who are the stars of the show. Based on the novel of the same name, The Good Mothers is a compelling crime drama, focused on the women, not the men, of the ‘Ndrangheta clan. It’s from their perspective we see the mafia. The masterful way the series unfolds makes it clear that their lives are constrained, that this dated way of life still prioritizes the family over their individual women. It makes it all the more satisfying when they’re given the opportunity to retaliate, and when they choose to take that opportunity. And it’s so much better knowing that this was real.

We don’t really know our parents the same way they know about us. Black Cake recognizes this, and takes that discrepancy to create a compelling mystery, expanding on that hidden world with themes of generational trauma, intercultural dynamics, and lost heritage. With the show doing justice to the book’s moments, the mystery of Eleanor Bennett’s former life is already compelling in and of itself, but it’s made even more so as her children try to make sense of it, changing their strained dynamic. It’s layered, well-written and deeply personal. It’s a unique story that has to be told.