The 6 Most Hopeless HBO Shows, Ranked

A hopeless HBO show is usually about crime happening, and audience rooting for the criminal. You immediately know this is going to be good but with a guilt. Someone finally gets out. That’s usually when I start worrying. They’ve survived the murderers, escaped the prison, defeated the enemy, or found the person they’ve spent years searching for. Surely they deserve one peaceful morning. But HBO has made an entire art form out of asking what happens after survival.

Sometimes the answer is so cruel that I wish the character had never started hoping in the first place. And I’m an absolute sucker for these stories. I get attached to people who make awful decisions, defend characters who probably deserve criticism, and celebrate tiny victories as though they’ve personally changed my life. These six shows have given me plenty of reasons to believe things might improve. That’s what makes watching those hopes collapse so bloody painful.

6

‘Game of Thrones’ (2011–2019)

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Nobody understands the cruelty of Westeros quite like the Stark family. Ned Stark (Sean Bean) arrives in King’s Landing believing that honor and duty still mean something, only to discover that the political world surrounding the Iron Throne operates according to considerably uglier rules. Game of Thrones follows the violent struggle between noble houses as betrayals, wars, and supernatural threats destroy entire families. What begins with one honorable man’s attempt to uncover a conspiracy becomes a continent-wide tragedy.

And I still haven’t forgiven this show for Shireen Baratheon (Kerry Ingram). She’s a gentle, intelligent child who loves reading and offers kindness to Ser Davos (Liam Cunningham), one of the few adults who treats her with genuine affection. Then her father Stannis (Stephen Dillane) permits her sacrifice in a desperate attempt to improve his military fortunes. Watching Davos discover what happened is devastating. Shireen did nothing to deserve that fate. Her death doesn’t even secure the victory Stannis wanted. That’s Westeros at its most merciless. Innocence offers no protection, and enormous suffering can accomplish absolutely nothing.

5

‘The Sopranos’ (1999–2007)

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Christopher Moltisanti (Michael Imperioli) wants to become a respected gangster, build a career in Hollywood, and enjoy a future with Adriana La Cerva (Drea de Matteo). Unfortunately, he’s devoted his life to Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), a New Jersey mob boss whose affection often comes with terrifying conditions. The Sopranos follows Tony’s criminal empire and troubled family life, exposing how greed, insecurity, and violence gradually poison practically every relationship around him.

The moment Christopher chooses Tony over Adriana still makes me furious. She’s been cooperating with the FBI and finally tells Christopher the truth, hoping they can escape together. He initially appears willing. Then he sees a miserable-looking family at a gas station and decides against abandoning his comfortable criminal life. Adriana pays for that decision with her life. And Christopher eventually dies at Tony’s own hands. That’s the terrible logic running through David Chase‘s masterpiece. These people repeatedly recognize the possibility of changing their lives, then retreat into the very behavior destroying them. Tony attends therapy for years. He can articulate his unhappiness beautifully. Somehow, that rarely makes him kinder.

4

‘The Last of Us’ (2023–)

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Joel (Pedro Pascal) has already endured the death of his daughter when he’s entrusted with escorting Ellie (Bella Ramsey) across an America devastated by a fungal pandemic. Ellie may be humanity’s best hope of developing a cure, but their dangerous journey gradually turns two lonely survivors into something resembling a family. The Last of Us builds its emotional foundation around that relationship, then confronts them with the terrible consequences of Joel’s determination to protect her.

There’s a birthday when Joel takes Ellie to an abandoned museum, places an astronaut helmet on her head, and plays a recording of a rocket launch. For a few minutes, she’s simply a happy child imagining space. God, I love that moment. Then I remember their later conversation on the porch, where Joel finally admits what he did to save her from the Fireflies. Ellie tells him she wants to try forgiving him. That possibility is painfully precious because we know how little time they have left. Her subsequent pursuit of revenge only spreads the suffering to more people. This world can take practically everything from someone, then turn their love for the dead into another source of destruction.

3

‘The Leftovers’ (2014–2017)

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Nora Durst (Carrie Coon) loses her husband and two children in an instant. They simply vanish, along with two percent of the world’s population, leaving everybody else without an explanation. The Leftovers begins three years after that event, following people who have developed increasingly desperate ways of coping with an absence nobody can understand. Police chief Kevin Garvey (Justin Theroux) struggles with his own psychological turmoil, while religious movements emerge around competing interpretations of what happened.

Nora breaks my heart because she cannot even mourn in a way people recognize. There are no bodies to bury, no confirmed deaths, and no reason she can accept for why her family disappeared while she remained. Her suffering becomes something strangers are fascinated by, although their curiosity offers her nothing. Then the series introduces the possibility of sending people wherever the departed went, and Nora must decide whether to risk everything for an answer. Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta created this drama.

2

‘The Wire’ (2002–2008)

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Baltimore’s police officers, drug dealers, politicians, teachers, and working families inhabit the same city while experiencing completely different versions of it. The Wire begins with a criminal investigation led by detective Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) before expanding into an extraordinary portrait of institutions that repeatedly fail the people depending on them. The tragedy isn’t simply that bad things happen. It’s that the machinery responsible for preventing those things often helps them continue.

Bodie Broadus (J. D. Williams) is the character I keep returning to. He starts as a young drug dealer working for Avon Barksdale’s organization and spends years surviving changes in leadership, violence, and constant threats to his position. Eventually, he recognizes how little his loyalty has earned him. Yet when Marlo Stanfield’s men come to kill him, Bodie refuses to abandon his corner. He dies defending a tiny patch of Baltimore that never offered him anything resembling a future. That image is almost unbearable.

1

‘Oz’ (1997–2003)

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Emerald City sounds like somewhere people might find a fresh start. Instead, it’s an experimental unit inside Oswald State Correctional Facility, where inmates are supposedly given a better chance at rehabilitation. Oz quickly destroys that promise. Tobias Beecher (Lee Tergesen), a lawyer imprisoned after killing a child while driving drunk, enters expecting punishment and encounters a world where humiliation, violence, and exploitation become everyday realities. Tom Fontana, who created the series, makes the prison’s supposedly progressive ambitions feel like a particularly cruel joke. People enter hoping to serve their sentences and eventually leave. Some barely survive their first week.

But Cyril O’Reily (Scott William Winters) is the character whose suffering I find hardest to accept. Living with a brain injury and dependent on his manipulative brother Ryan (Dean Winters), Cyril is drawn into murder and eventually faces execution. Watching Ryan desperately try to save the one person who loves him unconditionally is devastating, especially knowing how much suffering Ryan himself has caused. And that’s the horrible thing about Oz. It doesn’t ask us to pretend these prisoners are innocent. It makes us recognize their humanity even after confronting their worst actions. Beecher becomes increasingly brutal just to survive. Cyril never fully understands the machinery determining his fate. The institution promises justice but repeatedly manufactures more suffering. I’ve watched countless television characters lose everything. Few have frightened me like the men of Oz, because even surviving their punishment can mean losing whatever remains of themselves.

Oz

Release Date

1997 – 2003-00-00

Network

HBO Max