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Some miniseries come in with a bang but come out with a fizzle; they stay for a short time, maybe win some awards, get talked about for a moment, and then vanish like it was all just a nice, well-made dream. That doesn’t mean these shows have failed; it rather indicates that television moves quickly and forgets even faster.
The seven hidden gems below are powerful stories, and none require more than a few hours of your time. They’re the shows you’ll want to recommend at parties, just to be that niche person who has the best recommendations — a trustworthy TV watcher like none other. These are seven binge-worthy miniseries no one remembers today.
1
‘Landscapers’ (2021)
Landscapers is a somewhat forgotten masterpiece that premiered on HBO and Sky Atlantic to rave reviews, but a sudden wave of true-crime shows at the time overshadowed it. Olivia Colman and David Thewlis are captivating as two people so immersed in their shared fiction, while the show’s visual inventiveness pairs well with its compassionate, emotional writing. Landscapers, in a strange way, treats its heinous true crime romantically, portraying the series as a love story about two people who believed their own fairy tale a little too deeply.
Landscapers follows Susan and Christopher Edwards (Colman and Thewlis), a quiet English couple who live in France and are obsessed with old Hollywood films. After Nottingham police discover two bodies buried in their former home’s garden, Susan and Christopher are extradited back to England. Landscapers is a true-crime story told in four episodes that has been reimagined as a genre-bending exploration of delusion, trauma, and survival. Director Will Sharpe portrays the Edwardses’ lives as their own private film, complete with fourth-wall-breaking sets, black-and-white Hollywood pastiches, and Colman delivering a cinematic monologue.
2
‘The Lost Room’ (2006)
The Lost Room is in the same vein as Backrooms, since it seemingly inspired Creepypasta. Not inspired by, but it itself may have been one of the reasons online content like Creepypasta ever came to be. The Lost Room aired on Syfy in December 2006 and quickly vanished from the cultural conversation, which is a crime because it’s one of the most tightly plotted, endlessly imaginative miniseries ever made. It’s like Christopher Nolan meets Stephen King, a combo that earned the show a devoted cult following and briefly spawned talk of a comic book continuation, which never happened. Author of Sharp Objects, Gillian Flynn, described The Lost Room as “stark noir, pulpy fiction, spiritual thriller, hero’s-quest fantasy, and brainy videogame all at once.”
The Lost Room follows Detective Joe Miller (Peter Krause) as he stumbles into a case that starts with a mysterious motel-room key and spirals into one of the most inventive sci-fi miniseries on TV. The key can open any door with a lock and transport him to a specific, now-destroyed motel room. That room is a gateway, and scattered across the world are one hundred ordinary-seeming “objects,” each with its own set of unbreakable rules. Joe must unravel the entire mythology in order to retrieve his daughter, who has been lost inside the room itself. A religious order, a shadowy group of collectors, and a dying man who knows the room’s origin all want what Joe now possesses.
3
‘The Shadow Line’ (2011)
Written and directed by Hugo Blick (The Honourable Woman), The Shadow Line earned rave reviews before it was erased from the collective memory like someone used a neuralyzer on all of us. It came at a time when dark, arty British thrillers were in fashion, but its theatrical dialogue, slow pace, and moral ambiguity made it a tough sell for casual viewers. Every scene is handled like a stage play in this miniseries, which is a meditation on corruption and guilt that you can feel in your bones. If you enjoy philosophical, dark mysteries, this is the seven-hour British series you didn’t know you needed.
This BBC miniseries combines a murder investigation and a sprawling criminal conspiracy, but the term “crime drama” understates how strange, theatrical, and hypnotic it is. Detective Inspector Jonah Gabriel (Chiwetel Ejiofor) returns to duty after being shot in the head, suffering from partial amnesia and persistent pain behind his eye. Meanwhile, professional criminal Joseph Bede (Christopher Eccleston) is running one final large drug shipment before his wife’s early-onset dementia consumes her. The two storylines converge while a parade of seedy characters around them weave a web that forces them to search for meaning in the lives they lead, pushing their own moral boundaries.
4
‘The Fear’ (2012)
The Fear is a four-part Channel 4 miniseries that debuted to positive reviews in late 2012, won Peter Mullan a Scottish BAFTA, and then abruptly and unjustly vanished from the face of the earth. The tone is consistently gloomy, but it’s also strangely sympathetic and Shakespearean, expressing remorse and compassion for a protagonist who is obviously violent. The Fear is a masterclass in witnessing a powerful man lose his mind, the most valuable weapon he used to build his entire criminal empire; if you enjoy character studies, this is the perfect show.
The Fear centers on Richie Beckett (Mullan), a former gangster who is now a respectable businessman in Brighton. However, dementia is causing gaps in his memory, and his past is slowly returning. He can’t always recall which son he can trust, where he’s put things, or whether he’s already killed someone. You forget you’re watching a crime thriller and begin to feel as though you’re trapped in someone’s collapsing consciousness thanks to Mullan’s physically intense and emotionally devastating performance. When violence does occur, it is brutal and depressing rather than glamorous, and Brighton’s fading seaside glamour adds a layer of decay.
5
‘Empire Falls’ (2005)
Empire Falls premiered on HBO in 2005, won the Emmy for Outstanding Miniseries, and gave Paul Newman his last major acting award (a Golden Globe and an Emmy) before his death. The cast is absurdly stacked: besides Newman, there are Ed Harris, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Helen Hunt, Dennis Farina, Robin Wright, and Aidan Quinn, yet the show has all but vanished from collective memory. Empire Falls may have been too literary in an era when HBO was defined by the bombastic success of The Sopranos and Deadwood. It is still a masterpiece of tone and performance, a story about disappointment and small-town inertia, and a miniseries that captures the sadness of a life spent waiting for something.
Empire Falls centers on Miles Roby (Harris), who has spent his entire life in the dying mill town of Empire Falls, Maine, managing the Empire Grill diner for the wealthy Whiting family, who owns most of the town — everything from factories to churches. His wife left him, his daughter is facing the harsh realities of high school, and his father, Max (Newman), is a charming, irresponsible troublemaker. Over two episodes divided into eight chapters, the town’s secrets gradually emerge. The miniseries, based on Richard Russo‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, is a deeply lived-in portrait of a town where economic decay and class resentment wrestle for domination and take over the lives of every resident.
6
‘The Corner’ (2000)
Before The Wire became the definitive television portrait of Baltimore, David Simon and Ed Burns turned their nonfiction book The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood into a six-part HBO miniseries that is every bit as unflinching and human. The Corner swept the 2000 Emmys, winning Outstanding Miniseries, Directing, and Writing. The extraordinary cast consists of T.K. Carter, Khandi Alexander, and Clarke Peters, who together create a critical darling of a series that directly paved the way for Simon to pitch The Wire. It’s an intimate, empathetic, and essential piece of television; a document of systemic failure that leaves you shaken.
The Corner follows the McCullough family, including 15-year-old DeAndre (Sean Nelson) and his drug-addicted parents Fran and Gary (Alexander and Carter), as they spend a year on the corner of West Fayette and Monroe Streets. The camera remains at eye level as people shoot heroin in abandoned houses, scraping together money for a fix, attempting and failing to get clean, and dealing with a police presence that ranges from indifferent to hostile. There are no heroes or tidy arcs, just the relentless, compassionate observation of lives that the world would rather not see. If The Wire is a sprawling novel, The Corner is an unflinching documentary that deserves to be remembered as one of HBO’s greatest achievements.
7
‘The Company’ (2007)
Before prestige spy dramas became a streaming staple, there was The Company, a sprawling three-part TNT miniseries that followed the dealings of the CIA from the beginning of the Cold War to the fall of the Soviet Union. The Company received positive reviews, six Emmy nominations, and the eternal title of “that thing I saw my dad watch once.” It aired in the summer of 2007 on TNT, which was then known more for sports than prestige dramas. Michael Keaton, Alfred Molina, and Chris O’Donnell star, while the production values still hold magnificently. It’s a clear precursor to shows like The Americans and Slow Horses, but it’s more limited in form and scope than those two.
The plot of The Company spans four decades and follows three Yale graduates recruited into the Agency in the 1950s: the brilliant Jack McAuliffe (O’Donnell), his best friend Leo Kritzky (Alessandro Nivola), and the tragic Yevgeny Tsipin (Rory Cochrane). Keaton steals the show as James Jesus Angleton, the paranoid counterintelligence chief who believes a traitor exists at the heart of the CIA. The series progresses from the Berlin Tunnel operation to the Hungarian Revolution to Kim Philby‘s betrayal, all supported by brilliant direction and a keen eye for depicting the melancholy of working in intelligence. If you enjoy slow-burning spycraft, moral compromise, and Keaton chain-smoking in a dimly lit office while reciting poetry, this is a great show to spend your weekend watching.
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Anja Djuricic
Almontather Rassoul
