6 Most Perfect Miniseries Released Since 2010, Ranked
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Four of these six are based on real events, actual court cases, disasters, people who had to live through what's on screen, and that adds a kind of pressure most fiction never really has to deal with. Get it wrong and you're not just making bad television, you're distorting someone's actual life or death.
All six handled that pressure carefully, no matter if the story was true or not. Nothing here rushes toward a tidy ending just because six or eight episodes were the contract, and that patience is exactly what makes the word “perfect” fit. These miniseries were loved and cherished for years, and for all the right reasons.
6 'The Night Of' (2016)
James Gandolfini was originally set to play the scruffy, eczema-covered lawyer defending Naz (Riz Ahmed), and the role passed to John Turturro only after Gandolfini passed away before filming began. The show is loosely reworked from a British series called Criminal Justice, though the American version slows everything down and stretches the story out much further. The entire first episode covers just one night, the night of the murder itself, and it takes the full hour before anyone even gets arrested.
Turturro's makeup for the character's eczema took hours to apply every single shooting day, and the show treats that physical detail as seriously as any plot point, a small, constant reminder of how exhausted this lawyer actually is. Naz ends up adopting a stray cat while inside Rikers, and that relationship becomes one of the clearest signs of how much prison has already changed him by the time the trial starts. The show never confirms whether Naz actually committed the murder, and that is kind of the best part.
5 'I May Destroy You' (2020)
Michaela Coel reportedly turned down a seven-figure deal from Netflix specifically because the offer would've taken away her ownership of the show, and she took a smaller deal with BBC and HBO just to keep creative control. The show has Arabella (Coel) piecing her memory of the assault back together in fragments across the season, revealing those fragments out of order, matching how trauma actually resurfaces.
Terry (Weruche Opia) and Kwame (Paapa Essiedu), on the other hand, each go through their own separate experiences. The show also explores a condom removal scene and a confusing same-sex encounter as their own forms of violation, expanding what the whole series is actually about. Coel cast mostly unknown actors, which keeps the whole thing looking like something genuinely lived in. In the end, the show plays out several different imagined confrontations with Arabella's attacker so you have different versions of how it ends.
4 'Unbelievable' (2019)
This is based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning piece of journalism, "An Unbelievable Story of Rape," co-written by T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong after years of actual reporting. Marie (Kaitlyn Dever), based on a real survivor whose name was changed for her protection, gets pressured by police into recanting her own report and then charged for filing a false one. The show deliberately avoids showing her assault in any graphic detail, choosing to focus almost entirely on how she gets treated afterward.
Detective Duvall (Merritt Wever) and Detective Rasmussen (Toni Collette) pick up a similar case years later in a different state, and their careful, patient interviewing style gets shown in direct contrast to how badly Marie's original case was handled. The real detectives who worked the actual case consulted on the show, which explains how procedurally accurate the investigation scenes actually are.
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.
3 'When They See Us' (2019)
Donald Trump took out full-page newspaper ads in 1989 calling for the death penalty against the five teenagers at the center of this case, and the show includes those actual ads as part of the historical record it's working from. The real men, now known as the Exonerated Five, served as consultants on the project. Ava DuVernay funded much of the project through Netflix after other studios passed on it, unwilling to take on a story this politically direct.
The show splits into four distinct chapters, the arrest, the trial, the years actually spent in prison, and life after release, giving each stage its own story. Jharrel Jerome plays Korey at every age from sixteen through adulthood, since Korey was the only one tried and sentenced as an adult, and that single performance does more heavy lifting than almost anything else in the series. The show doesn't soften what happened to any of them after their release either, and it makes sure you feel every single emotion of what was actually taken from them.
2 'The Queen's Gambit' (2020)
Former world chess champion Garry Kasparov helped design every match shown in this series, making sure each game followed real, legitimate chess strategy. Chess consultant Bruce Pandolfini, who also advised on the original 1983 novel the show is based on, worked directly with Anya Taylor-Joy to help her memorize actual board positions and notation. The novel's author, Walter Tevis, also wrote The Hustler and The Man Who Fell to Earth, and all three stories share a similar fascination with obsessive, self-destructive genius.
Despite becoming one of the most-watched limited series Netflix had ever released at the time, the creators never developed a second season, treating the story as complete exactly as written. Beth's addiction is treated with complexity throughout, and it does not ever become the show's only point, which is rarer in stories about genius than it probably should be. The costume and set design track her growing confidence almost as closely as her chess record does, getting sharper and more controlled with every match she wins.
1 'Chernobyl' (2019)
People reportedly gathered on a nearby railway bridge to watch the reactor burn the night of the actual disaster, drawn by the strange blue glow in the sky, and most of them are believed to have died from radiation exposure in the years after. The show was filmed largely inside a real decommissioned Soviet nuclear plant in Lithuania, built to the same design specifications as the actual Chernobyl reactor, which gives every hallway and control room a disturbing sense of accuracy.
The sound design team used recordings pulled from actual Geiger counters throughout the show, as they layer that specific crackle under scenes where the danger isn't visible on screen at all. Each episode ends with a short written epilogue explaining what really happened to the people involved, and the true final death toll from the disaster is still disputed by scientists and historians today. Craig Mazin researched the disaster for years before writing a single line of the script, and that depth of research shows just how specific and procedural the entire series is.
Chernobyl
- Release Date
- 2019 - 2019
- Network
- HBO
- Showrunner
- Craig Mazin
- Directors
- Johan Renck
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