The best miniseries on HBO Max

From our list of :Adapting James M. Cain’s novel into the three-night, five-and-a-half hour sprawl of a miniseries may seem like an indulgence, but Todd Haynes uses the time for a luscious, evocative melodrama that doesn’t lack for period (or emotional) detail. Zagging where the 1945 noir version zigged, Haynes’ Mildred Pierce casts Kate Winslet as a much earthier Mildred than Joan Crawford and builds the film around her determined and methodical quest for self-determination. Being a housewife in Depression-era California, Mildred’s efforts to hold on to her middle-classic lifestyle in the wake of her separation from her adulterous husband (a stand-out Bryan F. O’Byrne) meet with strong resistance. Though Haynes views her plucky entrepreneurship with the empathy and awe it deserves, Mildred Pierce doesn’t spare the consequences of her ambition, either, particularly in her toxic relationship with a daughter (played as an adult by Evan Rachel Wood) who seems determined to hurt her. The miniseries format allows Haynes to give the film the feel of a great novel unfolding, so viewers not only know everything about the characters, but also how to open their own chicken-and-waffles restaurant in the early ’30s.

It’s still mildly astounding that a new small-screen masterpiece from one of the country’s most interesting living filmmakers has flown so far under the radar. Steven Soderbergh’s Mosaic is many things: a murder mystery, a deconstruction of narrative storytelling, a Robert Altman-like landscape of characters living their lives—but above all, it’s a damn good yarn, the kind of tale that sticks in your mind and lingers on long past the final cut to black. What begins as the tale of a grifter (Frederick Weller) hired to seduce a wealthy children’s author (Sharon Stone) as part of a plot to acquire her panoramic Utah property soon spins into a far more complicated tapestry of small-town politics, deadly intrigue, and a key plot point hinging on whether someone went to see one of the Star Wars prequels the night he claims he did.Soderbergh coaxes superlative performances from his entire cast, including Garrett Hedlund, Jennifer Ferrin, and what deserves to be a star-making turn from longtime character actor Devin Ratray, who has come a long way from Home Alone’s Buzz to deliver a powerfully soulful performance of understated grace as the local sheriff dealing with a growing fear that the wrong man might be in prison. Mosaic is smart, challenging, and electric in its gripping narrative; this is everything you could want from limited-series storytelling. []

Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels present a daunting task for anyone looking to adapt them—the Naples setting could easily fuel the imagination of a cinematographer, but Ferrante’s forthright and intensely personal prose is harder to translate, as so much of the story unfolds internally, in reverie. Elena’s (or Lenu) private thoughts as she gets to know Rafaella (or Lila) are fascinating to read, but could easily become unwelcome in a voice-over narration. Luckily, director Saverio Costanzo uses the latter sparingly in his Italian-language series. My Brilliant Friend tells the story of a most unforgettable friendship, between two girls who would seem to have nothing in common but a desire to disrupt their bucolic existence. But it’s also a specific tale of a female friendship that’s been bettered and fortified by conflicts on a personal and global scale. That’s a lot to rest on the shoulders of Elisa del Genio and Ludovica Nasti, the young actors who play the friends in childhood, but they are more than up to the challenge. []

was Paolo Sorrentino’s surreal, lushly produced drama about cultivating absolute power (and, to a lesser degree, putting together a fabulous wardrobe for Jude Law). Naturally, the follow-up series, The New Pope, is about holding onto it (the clothes, too). Law’s Pius XIII returns to battle Pope John Paul III, the eponymous New Pope played by John Malkovich in unfettered form. The official trailer for the series, which is once again an international collaboration by HBO, Sky Atlantic, and Canal+, is more bonkers than a million . It’s clear that John Paul III, who became pope after Pius XIII fell deathly ill, views his predecessor’s recovery as anything but a miracle. But he’s in for the fight of his life with Pius, a.k.a. Lenny, who’s packing Jude Law abs, a white Speedo, and an army of followers who are willfully ignoring that whole “false idols” things in the commandments. []

Richard Price likely leaped at the opportunity to adapt Criminal Justice based on its synopsis alone: Peter Moffat’s British miniseries follows one man through the entire justice system, a topic that Price had already thoroughly dissected in his novel  and in so many episodes of . But Price’s American adaptation, The Night Of (co-written with Oscar winner Steve Zaillian), is so much more than its elevator pitch, homing in on the metamorphoses of the supporting characters as well as the accused. Yes, it’s the protagonist—a Pakistani-American man named Nasir “Naz” Khan (Riz Ahmed)—who’s at the center of a legal cyclone after being suspected of murdering a young woman during a night he can’t remember. And yes, it’s Naz who undergoes the most obvious transformation, physically and mentally steeling himself while he’s incarcerated so he can survive. But his journey also has severe effects on his attorney (an eccentrically weary John Turturro), his parents (Peyman Moaadi and Poorna Jagannathan), and his mentor in prison (Michael K. Williams). Even the detective that put him there (Bill Camp) starts to question his once-unwavering faith in Naz’s guilt. In that way, The Night Of shows the vampiric effects of a high-profile court case, how it saps the energy and permanently alters all involved. When it’s over, how has it changed the characters’ views on race? On police? On family, on romance, on convicted criminals? Soberly presented with almost no stylization, all of these storylines depict the justice system as a dulled meat grinder—not chewing people up and spitting them out as much as slowly eating away at them over long periods of time. []

Set in the fictional small town of Crosby, Maine, the series follows moments in the lives of a small cast of characters in the orbit of junior high teacher Olive, be they family, acquaintances, or students. The series understands perfectly what so many other stories about cute, quirky small towns miss: Like overgrown briar patches, the people of small towns grow together, forming unwieldy bonds that are impossible to untangle, often impenetrable from the outside, thanks to a prickly exterior that, under the right circumstances, still bear the fruits of human kindness beating away somewhere deep within. There are many things that Olive Kitteridge gets right, but none so significant as how brilliantly it simultaneously captures the deep, pervasive stillness and the close, suffocating entanglement of small-town living. []

From the Inventory “”:The Paradise Lost documentaries—there are three—feel the closest in spirit to Making A Murderer, because they’re about people who were convicted seemingly just because of who they were. In this case, it was three Arkansas teenagers who liked metal, dressed in black (sometimes), and were sarcastic in the withering way that teenagers always are. In this case, it got them railroaded into a conviction for the murder of three young boys, and a death sentence for the “leader,” Damien Echols. The conviction was largely due to the confession of one of the alleged killers, which was obtained in the same coerced manner that Brendan Dassey’s was in Making A Murderer. (Both were teenagers with intellectual disabilities.) No one doubts that the Paradise Lost films brought the attention to the West Memphis Three that eventually freed them, and there’s obviously hope that Making A Murderer will have the same effect on public outrage that Paradise Lost did. []

Picking up the difficult-but-necessary-watch torch from 2019’s , The Plot Against America is a dystopian tale for these times. David Simon and Ed Burns’ adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel of the same name exposed the extent to which inequity is a feature, not a bug, of governance in this country. As the amply demonstrated, a story about fascism and demagogues needs to run on more than timeliness; thankfully, The Plot Against America dug into individual character motivations, exploring accountability at even the most seemingly insignificant level. The exceptional cast—including John Turturro, Morgan Spector, Zoe Kazan, and Winona Ryder—helped audiences make sense of a nightmare that is inching too close to reality. []

This miniseries adaptation of Pride & Prejudice is still the gold standard, with a stoney-faced Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy and Jennifer Ehle as the charming and willful Elizabeth Bennet. Six hours may seem like a long time for a slow-moving period piece, but there’s a reason this story keeps getting adapted: it’s thoroughly engaging, and this particular cast is especially so. The perfect backdrop for a long day of cooking, it’s as pleasant as other British imports like but even easier to drop in and out of (though we also recommend devoting your full attention to it at some point, perhaps a gray, snowy day in February; it’s worth every minute and goes great with hot cocoa). It’s a romance but not a saccharine one, and the female-heavy cast includes Julia Sawalha (Absolutely Fabulous) as the headstrong and carefree Lydia, and a small appearance from in her first television role. []

When the original Roots miniseries aired nearly four decades ago, it was unlike anything else on TV: an award-winning historical phenomenon (based on Alex Haley’s bestseller) that broke ratings records with an all-star cast. The story of Kunta Kinte and his descendants was the first honest, horrific TV depiction of slavery, making clear America’s foundation in white supremacy. []

sets its tone as a nightmarish Southern gothic in its first few minutes, spiraling down into a visceral story about gender, violence, control, abuse, and addiction. It’s one of the most striking depictions of self-harm in TV history, and Amy Adams and Patricia Clarkson give performances that sink in one’s skin. Family drama and murder mystery collide spectacularly in this incisively written, beautifully shot knockout. []

It’s the destiny of every David Simon show to toil in relative obscurity while on the air, only to find an audience and acclaim in the afterlife. Let’s hope that’s also the case for , which, despite being rooted in a different politician’s career, doubles as commentary on the Obama administration. The irresistible force that is a Yonkers mayor’s optimism meets with an immovable object—bureaucracy—grinding his progress to a halt in a beautifully rendered limited series marked by hope, despair, and exceptional performances across the board. []

Ahead of the 1988 Democratic presidential primaries, HBO reached out to Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau to create a fictional candidate to run alongside the real ones. Trudeau would only sign on to the project if HBO could get [Robert] Altman, his “boyhood hero,” to direct. Altman agreed and together they invented Jack Tanner, a Baby Boomer liberal with a telegenic, Kennedy-esque physique who could conceivably compete against Michael Dukakis and Jesse Jackson. [Michael] Murphy’s genial disposition and warm personality were instrumental to his viability as a fictional candidate, but they also helped endear him to real politicians, media personalities, and operatives with whom he hobnobbed during the primaries. Everyone quickly caught on to Altman and Trudeau’s game, and many subsequently played along by providing cameos throughout the series. In the beginning, however, Murphy and a young Cynthia Nixon, who played Tanner’s impassioned daughter, fooled people like Pat Robertson and Gary Hart into believing that he was “for real” (the cheeky slogan for Tanner’s campaign). A nice smile and a firm handshake go a long way in politics. []

Watchmen always deserved to be a miniseries. No one expected it to be this miniseries, a continuation untethered from theatrical run times, cinematic tidiness, or fidelity to the source material, arriving at something searing, surreal, and truly in the spirit of Alan Moore’s costumed-vigilantes-as-fascists philosophy—whether Moore likes it or not. Showrunner Damon Lindelof works from the blueprint (emphasis on “blue”) he set for one of the decade’s best shows: Like The Leftovers, Watchmen is a gutting, occasionally gut-busting contemporary parable set in the wake of a global catastrophe. But the psychic wounds inflicted by a Freudian space squid have nothing on the earthbound racism Watchmen exposes by unmasking American history, in sequences like Nicole Kassell’s harrowing re-staging of the Black Wall Street Massacre and It’s a superhero show about so much more for a superhero-obsessed, so-much-more era, every episode an “Avengers assemble” roll call of onscreen excellence. []

From :Spike Lee’s exhaustive, essential documentary lines up what must be a hundred interview subjects to talk about the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina, the flood that ensued, and—the most underreported part of the whole tragedy—the nightmare of trying to rebuild the city. The flood footage is as startling as ever, right down to the bloated bodies floating in submerged streets. But even more disturbing is the exhausted unanimity of the people Lee talks with. Whether they’re black or white, rich or poor, they’re all victims of a presumption that became more widely vocalized in the months after Katrina: that they were somehow asking for it. When The Levees Broke focuses on the frustrations of people who were stranded in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, facing gun-toting government agents telling them where they could and couldn’t go. Just for recording their descriptions of being herded into pens and scattered across the country, When The Levees Broke is as significant a piece of documentary reporting as The Sorrow And The Pity.

It was the marketing campaign that launched a  , an HBO offering earning the unbridled scorn of the internet on the basis of a ridiculous title, an absurd premise, and a seemingly stern tone. The Young Pope itself proved to be even more ridiculous in execution—completely to the show’s benefit. Much as the titular pontiff, Lenny Belardo (Jude Law), flew in the face of Catholic convention, The Young Pope was everything you wouldn’t expect from a prestige drama, a surreal and self-aware affair that replaced pretensions of subtlety with a rich sense of humor bordering on camp. At any point, its strangeness could have fallen apart, but writer-director Paolo Sorrentino held the unlikely enterprise together with a true craftsman’s hand, his gorgeously considered shots giving equal weight to the sacred history of the Vatican and the kangaroo randomly hopping through its gardens. And it was all driven forward by a marvelous performance from Law, who managed to wring every possible interpretation out of Lenny’s actions. Was he a true believer obfuscating to keep his enemies off track? An agnostic who doubted the Holy Spirit he ostensibly represented? The greatest hypocrite to take St. Peter’s throne since ? The Young Pope kept viewers constantly guessing, and managed to make the guessing infinitely more amusing than any snide tweet. []