8 Greatest Netflix Shows With Fewer Than 40 Episodes
Jessica is a journalist, editor, TCA critic, and multimedia storyteller with a decade of experience covering pop culture, film, TV, women's sports, lifestyle, and more. She earned her degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington with a focus in creative writing before moving to N.Y.C. and getting her start at The Huffington Post. (She still misses those nap pods.) She's covered multiple film festivals, recapped some of your favorite series, worked too many red carpets to count, and even yapped on a podcast or two. When she’s not interviewing your favorite showrunner or ranking Ryan Gosling's best roles for places like UPROXX, Teen Vogue, Marie Claire, The Daily Beast, and Cosmopolitan, she’s busy being a full-time hype woman to her cat, Finn. You can find her on Bluesky and, sadly, Twitter.
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Content Warning: This list contains a brief mention of assault.Netflix's algorithm loves to shove the same titles at you every time you open the app, but some of the platform's strongest work lives a few scrolls deeper. These are the shows that kept their episode counts lean and their quality ridiculously high. They might be a limited series, a canceled-too-soon gem, or an international pick that never got the eyes it deserved. But they're all sitting there on the streamer, ready to be demolished in a weekend.
Whether you want a chess prodigy spiraling through Cold War hotel rooms or a German time-travel puzzle that’ll make you build a conspiracy board in your living room, these are the Netflix series worth pausing your day plans for. The best part? These shows don't even crack 40 episodes!
'Baby Reindeer' (2024)
Richard Gadd wrote, created, and stars in this seven-episode limited series based on his own Edinburgh Fringe one-man show, and the autobiographical roots are what make it so disorienting. Gadd plays Donny Dunn, a struggling London comedian who offers a cup of tea to a woman named Martha (Jessica Gunning) at the bar where he works, and that small kindness kicks off a stalking campaign that takes over his entire life. Baby Reindeer veers between laugh-out-loud funny and deeply, physically uncomfortable without warning, and it refuses to let Donny off the hook as a passive victim. He keeps making choices that make his situation worse, and Gadd's writing is honest enough to interrogate why.
Gunning's Martha is terrifying, pitiable, delusional, and lonely, but the show never flattens her into a villain. The series also digs into a traumatic experience from Donny's past that reshapes how you understand everything that's been happening. Netflix dropped it in April 2024, and it took over the internet within days. That's impressive for a show that makes you physically cringe every ten minutes, but Gadd and Gunning are just that good.
'Sex Education' (2019–2023)
Otis Milburn (Asa Butterfield) is the teenage son of a sex therapist (Gillian Anderson), and he starts giving other students sex advice out of a disused bathroom at school. The funny part is that his advice is usually right on the money while his own emotional life is a complete disaster. Ncuti Gatwa plays his best friend Eric, who brings all the confidence and openness Otis lacks, and Emma Mackey is Maeve Wiley, a whip-smart loner living in a trailer park who pushes Otis to start the clinic and challenges him at every turn.
Sex Education runs 32 episodes across four seasons with a massive cast, and almost nobody gets shortchanged. Connor Swindells' Adam Groff goes from the school bully to one of the most vulnerable characters in the whole series. Aimee Lou Wood's assault storyline in Season 2 is handled with a patience and care you don't always see on TV. Everything takes place in this fictional British school that looks borderline imaginary, which gives the show room to talk frankly about sex without the heaviness a more realistic setting would bring.
'East of Eden' (2026)
Zoe Kazan adapted John Steinbeck's 1952 novel as a seven-episode limited series for Netflix, and the big swing here is the focus. Where the 1955 Elia Kazan film zeroed in on the father-son conflict (and made James Dean a star), this version recreates the story around Cathy Ames, played by Florence Pugh. Christopher Abbott plays Adam Trask, Mike Faist is his brother Charles, and the series spans generations of the Trask family in California's Salinas Valley as they collide with a woman the novel once described as a "monster."
What Pugh does with Cathy is unnerving in the best way. She's charming and ice-cold and always a step ahead, and the series finally lets the character be as dangerous as Steinbeck wrote her. Garth Davis directed the first four episodes, Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre took the last three, and Jeb Stuart took on showrunning duties alongside Kazan. Steinbeck adaptations are famously tough to get right, and this one somehow does.
'The Queen's Gambit' (2020)
Beth Harmon (Anya Taylor-Joy) is an orphan in 1960s Kentucky who learns chess from a janitor in the basement of her group home and turns out to be good at it. Like, really good. Scott Frank's seven-episode limited series, based on Walter Tevis' 1983 novel, follows Beth from childhood through the international tournament circuit. But the show is as interested in her growing drug and alcohol dependency as it is in the games themselves.
The production design alone would be worth watching for. The show is filled with mid-century color palettes and era-specific fashion and shag carpeting, but the show has more than vibes. The story earns your investment in its supporting cast. Thomas Brodie-Sangster's Benny Watts is a cowboy-hat-wearing speed chess savant who doubles as a surprisingly patient mentor, and Marielle Heller brings a sad, warm gravity to Beth's adoptive mother Alma. The whole thing builds toward a final match in Moscow that turns a board game into a genuine white-knuckle sequence.
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)
01
How do you usually end up making a new friend? The origin story says a lot about the friendship that follows it.
02
What is a perfect Saturday with your best friend? Friendship is mostly built out of very ordinary hours.
03
You call them at two in the morning. What happens? This is the real test of a friendship, and everybody knows it.
04
What do you want from them when you are clearly wrong? The best friendships are the ones that survive being corrected.
05
What do your friends actually value about you? The friend you attract says something about the friend you are.
06
You have a falling out. How does it go? How a friendship repairs itself matters more than how it breaks.
07
What do you actually need a best friend for? Everybody is missing something. The right friend fills that gap.
08
Ten years from now, what keeps the two of you close? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides who you get.
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 Henderson
You 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 Cooper
You 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 Addams
You 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-hun
You 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.
'Derry Girls' (2018–2022)
Set during the tail end of the Troubles in Derry, Northern Ireland, Lisa McGee's comedy uses the backdrop of sectarian conflict as its secret weapon. Erin (Saoirse-Monica Jackson), her cousin Orla (Louisa Harland), their friends Clare (Nicola Coughlan), Michelle (Jamie-Lee O'Donnell), and Michelle's English cousin James (Dylan Llewellyn) are Catholic schoolgirls (and one boy) navigating the ordinary humiliations of adolescence while army checkpoints and bomb scares happen in the background. That juxtaposition is what makes the laughs land harder and the quiet moments more meaningful.
The humor in Derry Girls is rooted in its place and time in a way that somehow makes it universally funny. The ensemble chemistry, including the parents, who are nearly as chaotic as the kids, holds the entire thing together.
'Adolescence' (2025)
Every episode of this 2025 limited series is filmed in one unbroken take, and the style works because the story demands it. Stephen Graham co-created the show with Jack Thorne, and Philip Barantini directed all four episodes. In it, a 13-year-old named Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper) is arrested for murdering a classmate, and each episode follows a different corner of the fallout: the arrest itself, the school’s reaction, a forensic psychologist sitting down with Jamie, and his family trying to hold it together a year later.
Graham plays Jamie's father Eddie, and he's as good here as he's ever been. The single-take format means you're stuck in each scene in real time, and Barantini's camera moves through police stations, school corridors, and courtrooms without ever calling attention to itself. The standout though is Cooper's interrogation episode, which is just a full hour of a child sitting across from a psychologist and slowly reckoning with what he did. You've never seen anything quite like it, we promise.
'Dark' (2017–2020)
Kids start disappearing in a small German town called Winden, and what looks like a missing-persons case turns into a time-travel conspiracy that stretches across decades and, eventually, into alternate realities. Yes, Dark is in German. Yes, that means subtitles. No, that is not a reason to skip it. Creators Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese build a puzzle across 26 episodes so dense that fans made family trees and timelines just to follow along, and the finale actually manages to tie it all together.
Louis Hofmann holds the whole thing together as Jonas Kahnwald, a teenager searching for his missing father who gets pulled into something much bigger than he expected. The cast around him plays their characters at multiple ages across different time periods, and the fact that you never get lost is a minor miracle of casting.
'Mindhunter' (2017–2019)
In David Fincher's Mindhunter, two FBI agents in the late 1970s decide the best way to catch serial killers is to sit across from the ones already in prison and simply ask them how their twisted brains work. Jonathan Groff plays Holden Ford, a young agent whose enthusiasm for criminal profiling starts to turn into something that worries the people around him. Holt McCallany is Bill Tench, his older, steadier partner who keeps the duo's dynamic from going off a cliff.
The serial-killer interviews are the whole reason to watch. Cameron Britton's Ed Kemper is terrifyingly polite and physically enormous, and every scene he's in makes you want to lock your doors. Season 2 shifts to the Atlanta child murders and opens the world up without losing that suffocating tension. Netflix shelved the show after two seasons and 19 episodes, and Fincher has since confirmed it's done. We're still mad about that, but the limited count makes it perfect for this list.
Mindhunter
- Release Date
- 2017 - 2019
- Network
- Netflix
- Showrunner
- Joe Penhall
- Directors
- David Fincher, Carl Franklin, Andrew Dominik, Andrew Douglas, Asif Kapadia, Tobias Lindholm
-
Bill Tench
-
Holden Ford
In the late 1970s, two FBI agents broaden the realm of criminal science by investigating the psychology behind murder and end up getting too close to real-life monsters.
- Writers
- Joe Penhall, Jennifer Haley, Joshua Donen, Courtenay Miles, Carly Wray, Pamela Cederquist
- Main Genre
- Crime
- Seasons
- 2
- Producers
- Jim Davidson, Mark Winemaker, Liz Hannah
- Creator(s)
- Joe Penhall
- Story By
- Joshua Donen, Josh Douglas, Mark Olshaker, Courtenay Miles
- Streaming Service(s)
- Netflix
- Executive Producer(s)
- Beth Kono, Ceán Chaffin, Charlize Theron, Courtenay Miles, David Fincher, Jennifer Erwin, Joe Penhall, Joshua Donen
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