How many times have you finished an HBO series and thought, “Wait, why is nobody talking about this?” The truth is, that happens more often than it should. HBO has a reputation for producing the greatest hits, the kind of shows that people dissect in Reddit threads and watch for college media courses. And that’s fair. Band of Brothers is untouchable 25 years later. Chernobyl made the nuclear disaster feel intimate. And Mare of Easttown turned a Pennsylvania murder mystery into a national quiz.
However, HBO’s library is so deep that stuff gets lost. Some genuinely great miniseries have aired, received decent reviews, maybe even won an award or two, and then… vanished. Some of them predate the streaming era and some of them had the bad luck of premiering in the shadow of bigger and more popular titles. Others have come out recently enough that there’s no excuse except the fact that the algorithm simply buried them somewhere. Here are 10 HBO miniseries that deserve a longer life than they got.
10
‘The Outsider’ (2020)
Stephen King adaptations carry a lot of baggage. For every It and Carrie, five projects get one thing right and the other completely wrong. The Outsider, unlike many King adaptations, is deliberately slow. It opens with the arrest of Terry Maitland, a beloved small-town Little League coach accused of a brutal child murder. The evidence against Terry is airtight, and the show lets that contradiction breathe across 10 episodes.
Jason Bateman plays the lead character, with Ben Mendelsohn playing detective Ralph Anderson and Cynthia Erivo arriving midway as Holly Gibney. Erivo got an Emmy nomination and deserved it. However, Mendelsohn’s performance steals the spotlight. The show aired in early 2020, right before the world shut down. While it received strong reviews at the time, it was swallowed by everything else that happened that March.
9
‘Generation Kill’ (2008)
You probably know David Simon from the beloved crime drama The Wire. You also know him from Treme. But few people seem to know Generation Kill, which is strange because it’s probably the most ambitious miniseries Simon has made. Adapted from Rolling Stone journalist Evan Wright’s book, it follows the First Reconnaissance Battalion during the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003. Wright himself appears as a character, played by Lee Tergesen, watching these men and trying to figure out who they are and what this war is doing to them.
Generation Kill is not for the faint of heart. It’s shot on ground level, and there’s no score manipulating your feelings and no civilian perspective to offer you relief. The series includes military jargon, acronyms, and institutional dysfunction, and you have to pay attention to keep up. However, the casting is a stroke of art. Alexander Skarsgård and James Ransone are worthy standouts. Ransone’s unhinged Corporal Ray Person often raps to stay sane during long stretches of convoy.
8
‘I’ll Be Gone in the Dark’ (2020)
I’ll Be Gone in the Dark is a six-part HBO miniseries adapted from Michelle McNamara’s posthumously published true-crime book about the Golden State Killer. He was the unidentified serial rapist and murderer who terrorized California in the 1970s and 80s. The show is less interested in the case and more focused on the woman who spent years trying to crack it.
McNamara, a true-crime writer and comedian Patton Oswalt’s wife, died in 2016 before finishing the book or learning the killer’s name. Her husband and collaborators finished it for her. The documentary, directed by Liz Garbus, uses that truth as a driving factor, showing how obsession has a cost and justice almost always arrives when it’s too late. I’ll Be Gone in the Dark was released the same year as Tiger King, which is why it got buried and nobody remembers it today.
7
‘We Are Who We Are’ (2020)
If you’ve seen Call Me By Your Name, Bones and All, and Challengers, you know that Luca Guadagnino makes movies the same way that we make playlists. He makes sure the “mood” drives the plot, and every scene evokes a certain feeling. We Are Who We Are, his first television project, is set on a U.S. military base in Veneto, Italy. It follows Fraser, a 14-year-old American boy who has just moved there with his two mothers, and Caitlin, a girl from a military family struggling with her identity.
The miniseries is a coming-of-age story, a romance, and a portrait of military life, all at once. It’s soaked in lush visuals, languid pacing, and bursts of raw emotions. The show is proudly obsessed with bodies, music, and a specific sense of adolescent confusion. It also features an incredible needle-drop moment featuring Ryuichi Sakamoto’s “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence.”
6
‘Tell Me You Love Me’ (2007)
Before Normal People, before Fleabag, before Scenes From a Marriage, and before streaming made emotionally honest conversations about sex and relationships a whole brand, Tell Me You Love Me aired on HBO to a lot of discomfort and immediate obscurity. It follows three couples at different life stages (20s, 30s, and 40s) as they each see the same therapist, played by the extraordinary Jane Alexander, who is also navigating her own long marriage.
Creator Cynthia Mort structured Tell Me You Love Me like a chamber piece. There are no villains and no revelations; just the slow buildup of distance between people who once chose each other. When the show was released, it was controversial because of the explicit sexual content. Since the sex scenes were quite graphic, viewers questioned whether the actors had used body doubles. But the point is that the series explores the gap between where marriages actually live and die quite beautifully.
5
‘The Plot Against America’ (2020)
Imagine an alternate history where Charles Lindbergh defeats FDR and cozies up to Nazi Germany. It’s a jarring thought, isn’t it? The Plot Against America, created by David Simon and Ed Burns, is a six-part miniseries that follows a Jewish family in Newark as they watch their country tilt toward authoritarianism. Winona Ryder, Zoe Kazan, and John Turturro deliver excellent performances.
Where the show truly shines is the period detail. The world feels plausible thanks to details like the radio broadcasts to the campaign rallies. However, the Trump-era allegory was so obvious that most media coverage reduced it to that and moved on. That’s a shame. Simon and Burns didn’t really make a show about Trump. They made a show about how fascism feels from the inside of a kitchen, a synagogue, or a family argument about whether to leave or stay.
4
‘I May Destroy You’ (2022)
I May Destroy You is easily the boldest miniseries to have aired on HBO in the 2020s. It revolves around Arabella, a writer navigating the aftermath of sexual assault on a night out in London. Michaela Coel created, wrote, directed, and stars in all 12 episodes. While the premise makes the show sound harrowing, Coel relies so much on tonal unpredictability that it becomes a blend of comedy, horror, and surrealism.
I May Destroy You got an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Limited Series. Coel didn’t submit herself in the acting category, which she later explained was a deliberate choice. However, none of that changes the fact that it’s a great miniseries about trauma, friendship, and identity, and it’s probably one of the most original pieces of television in years.
3
‘Olive Kitteridge’ (2014)
Although Frances McDormand won an Emmy for her role, nobody remembers Olive Kitteridge. A four-part adaptation of Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, it follows Olive, a difficult and deeply unhappy retired schoolteacher in coastal Maine, across several decades of her life. Richard Jenkins plays her long-suffering husband, Henry.
The central marriage in the story is both tender and brutal, which allows the series to elegantly capture grief, joy, the passing of time, and the stubbornness of human connection. McDormand’s Olive is not easy to love, but she’s impossible to forget, and Jenkins balances her sharp edges with his warmth. For fans of character-driven storytelling, it’s a hidden gem.
2
‘John Adams’ (2008)
John Adams strips away the polish of historical dramas and crafts an intimate portrait of the life of America’s second president across seven episodes. Directed by Tom Hooper, it chronicles Adams’ life from the Revolution to the early days of the republic. It also captures Adams’ brilliance and his complicated marriage to Abigail, played with grace by Laura Linney.
Adams was not a glamorous founder. He was prickly, vain, frequently wrong, principled, and completely unable to make himself likable even when his career depended on it. Paul Giamatti leans into that hard, playing Adams as a man who argues because he can’t help it. Shot on a $100 million budget, John Adams won 13 Emmys, which was a record at the time for a miniseries.
1
‘The Night Of’ (2016)
Finally, we have the Riz Ahmed-starring HBO miniseries The Night Of. Just as gripping as the rest, this one centers on Naz Khan, a Pakistani-American college student in Queens, who borrows his father’s taxi cab without permission one night, picks up a young woman named Andrea, ends up at her apartment, falls asleep, and wakes up to find her dead. He has no memory of what happened, and he runs.
We watch Naz make small and understandable, yet entirely catastrophic, decisions after another. And by the time the credits roll, the trap closes around him. Ahmed played Naz with extraordinary physical intelligence. You can actually feel his transformation from a clueless college kid to a man hardened and hollowed by incarceration. Although he won an Emmy, The Night Of’s reputation slowly faded, and it never became a certified HBO classic.
What HBO hidden gem did we miss? Let us know in the comments!
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
