6 Miniseries That Will Entertain You From Start to Finish

Image via HBO Published Oct 13, 2026, 12:55 PM EDT Sign in to your Collider account There's something a regular show can't really do that a miniseries can, it gets to end, on time. No filler season to justify a renewal, no dragging a mystery out past the point it still makes sense. These six all know exactly how many hours they need and use every single one of them well. A couple of these are true stories, one's basically someone's real diary turned into television. What they share is pacing, you sit down for one episode and somehow it's three hours later and the show gives you the full feel of it. Ranked from great to unmissable, here are the six best miniseries worth your time. 6 'The Queen's Gambit' (2020) Image via Netflix Beth Harmon (Anya Taylor-Joy) grows up in an orphanage where she's handed tranquilizers along with all the other kids, and that's where her chess obsession and her addiction both start, tangled up together from the very beginning. She's a genuine prodigy, and the show actually choreographed her matches with help from Garry Kasparov and a real chess coach, so the games hold up. Beth visualizes moves on the ceiling above her bed, whole boards floating there while she works out a play, and it's one of the simplest tricks the show uses to get you inside her head. Her wardrobe tracks her arc too, she starts in plain, dark clothes and slowly moves into these sharp black-and-white outfits that mirror the chess pieces themselves. Marielle Heller plays Alma, Beth's adoptive mother, an alcoholic herself who ends up being oddly good for Beth in odd ways. The show did so well that chess sets and chess apps saw a real sales spike after it came out, which isn't something you'd expect from a period drama about a card game's stuffier cousin. 5 'Mare of Easttown' (2021) Image via HBO Mare Sheehan (Kate Winslet) is a small-town Pennsylvania detective working a murder case while quietly falling apart over her son's suicide. Winslet trained hard to nail the specific Delco accent, all those flat vowels, and it grounds the whole thing in a very real, very unglamorous version of small-town life. Jean Smart plays her mother, sharp-tongued and living in the same house, and their scrapping back and forth ends up being some of the best writing in the whole show. Creator Brad Ingelsby actually grew up in the area, and it shows this never feels like outsiders doing poverty tourism with a nice cable budget. Nearly everyone in town ends up a suspect at some point, which keeps you guessing right up until the final reveal. It's not flashy, but it earns every bit of its ending. 4 'The Night Manager' (2016) Image via Prime Video Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston) works as a hotel night manager until an intelligence officer, Angela Burr (Olivia Colman), recruits him to infiltrate an arms dealer's whole operation from the inside. That arms dealer is Richard Roper, played by Hugh Laurie, who's so used to playing charming and kind that watching him be quietly, casually monstrous here is genuinely unsettling. John le Carré wrote the original novel during the Cold War, but the show moves the setting into the Arab Spring era instead. Angela Burr was a man in the book, and changing that role for Colman turned out to be one of the smartest calls the whole production made. The locations alone are worth watching for, Mallorca, Cairo, the Alps, all shot to look as expensive as Roper's own lifestyle. It swept a bunch of Emmys and Globes on release, and none of that felt undeserved. 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 'Baby Reindeer' (2024) Image via Netflix Donny (Richard Gadd) is a struggling comedian based directly on Gadd himself, and the woman stalking him, Martha (Jessica Gunning), is based on someone who really did stalk him for years, which makes every uncomfortable scene land that much harder. Gadd built this from his own one-man stage show, and he doesn't spare himself in it either, the series digs into his own history of abuse by a mentor figure with a level of honesty most people wouldn't put on television. Once it came out, people online started trying to figure out and expose the real woman Martha was based on, and Gadd had to publicly ask people to stop. It's only seven episodes, short even for a miniseries, and it became a massive word-of-mouth hit almost entirely through people telling each other to watch it. Few shows have ever reached that many people. 2 'Adolescence' (2025) Image via Netflix Eddie (Stephen Graham), who also co-created the show, plays the father of a thirteen-year-old boy accused of murdering a classmate, and every episode gets shot in one continuous take, no cuts, no breaks. Director Philip Barantini, who pulled off the same trick on his restaurant drama Boiling Point, uses the format to trap you in real time with these characters, no cutaways to look away from anything. Owen Cooper, a total newcomer, plays the accused boy Jamie, and the performance is unnervingly convincing for someone this young with basically no experience. The show dives into incel culture and how teenage boys get radicalized online, down to the specific coded language and emojis kids actually use that most adults have no idea about. It sparked a real, wide conversation in the UK about phones and boys and what's happening online that parents just aren't seeing. 1 'Chernobyl' (2019) Image via HBO Valery Legasov (Jared Harris) leads the investigation into the 1986 nuclear disaster, working alongside Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgård), a Soviet official, and Ulana Khomyuk (Emily Watson), a scientist character built as a composite of several real people. Creator Craig Mazin stuck close to the real history throughout, and the production even filmed inside a decommissioned nuclear plant in Lithuania to get the look exactly right. The sound design leaned on actual Geiger counter recordings, and that constant clicking does more to build dread than any score could. The show talks about the cost of lying, how a government covering up a disaster made everything worse than the disaster itself. It doesn't rush through the bureaucratic denial either, it lets you sit in rooms full of officials refusing to say the word "meltdown" out loud. When it came out, it briefly became the highest-rated show on IMDb ever, and for something this bleak, that's a strange kind of achievement. Chernobyl Release Date 2019 - 2019 Network HBO