Entertainment
The 7 Most Fun Miniseries of All Time, Ranked
I’ve put every one of these on for someone during a lazy weekend and watched them get hooked within one episode, that’s basically the whole criteria here. Covering all kinds of subject matter based in reality or entirely fictional, they all move fast enough that you don’t check your phone even for once.
A couple of these are just pure comfort watching. But there are also some properly intense, with subject matter like murder or the actual end of the world sprinkled around, still just as easy to binge in one sitting. So here are seven shows, ranked by how hard they are to stop watching once you’ve started.
7
‘The Lost Room’ (2006)
This one’s just weird in the best way. A motel room disappeared back in the sixties, and now there’s a whole underground world of collectors chasing cursed objects that came out of it, a pen that makes people believe anything you write with it, a comb that freezes time, sunglasses that do something nobody ever fully explains. It is all just so exciting to watch. Joe Miller (Peter Krause) is a cop who gets pulled into all of it after his daughter vanishes into the room itself.
Nobody in the show ever really explains where these objects came from or why they work the way they do, and that’s honestly what makes it fun instead of frustrating, you’re just along for the ride with him. Jennifer Bloom (Julianna Margulies) plays one of the more dangerous people chasing the same objects, and the whole thing only runs six hours total, so it never overstays its welcome trying to explain everything, you are only meant to enjoy.
6
‘Good Omens’ (2019)
An angel and a demon team up to stop the actual apocalypse, and mind you they do not care about humanity’s soul or whatever, the sole reason is because they’ve both gotten way too comfortable living on Earth and don’t want it to end. Aziraphale (Michael Sheen) runs a bookshop he refuses to actually sell books out of, and Crowley (David Tennant) drives around in a vintage Bentley causing just enough chaos to keep hell happy without really meaning any of it.
The two of them have technically been enemies since the Garden of Eden, and by now they act more like a bickering old married couple than opposing forces of good and evil. Based on the novel by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, the whole show is funnier than a story about the end of the world has any right to be, and Frances McDormand narrating as the literal voice of God is one of the best casting choices in the whole thing.
5
‘The Queen’s Gambit’ (2020)
Watching someone get really, really good at chess should not be this entertaining, and yet here we are. Beth Harmon (Anya Taylor-Joy) grows up in an orphanage where she gets hooked on tranquilizers and chess at basically the same time, taught by the janitor, Mr. Shaibel (Bill Camp), almost by accident. Every match she plays gets edited like an actual sports movie, quick cuts, tight framing, that satisfying feeling of watching someone outplay everyone in the room.
The costumes and the sets alone are worth watching this for, every outfit Beth wears gets more confident as she does, and the sixties production design looks incredible in almost every frame. Benny Watts (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) shows up later as both a rival and something more, and the show reportedly caused a real spike in chess set sales after it came out, which says something about how fun it is to watch even if you’ve never played a game in your life.
4
‘WandaVision’ (2021)
Every episode of this show is styled after a different decade of sitcom, black and white in the fifties, warm and cheesy in the seventies, single-camera mockumentary by the later episodes, and for a while you don’t fully know why Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision (Paul Bettany) are living inside all of it.
It’s a clever gimmick on its own, watching the visual style shift every episode, but it turns out to be hiding something much sadder beneath all the sitcom jokes and laugh tracks. Once the actual reason behind everything gets revealed, you realize the show was playing a much longer game than it let on early, and it’s rare for something built on a joke premise to also end up being this moving.
3
‘Watchmen’ (2019)
This one opens with the real 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre and turns that into the backstory for an entire superhero universe, masked cops, a hidden clone army, and Angela Abar (Regina King), a detective secretly moonlighting as a vigilante called Sister Night.
Damon Lindelof basically remixed the original graphic novel instead of just adapting it straight, and it’s a weirder, angrier show for it. Jeremy Irons plays an aged Ozymandias doing increasingly bizarre stuff on what turns out to be a strange country estate, and the show balances that absurdity with real, serious history without either side undercutting the other.
2
‘The Night Manager’ (2016)
This is just an incredibly good-looking show, filmed across places like Mallorca, Cairo, and the Alps, and it knows exactly how to use all that luxury to make its actual villain more disturbing. Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston) goes undercover to get close to Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie), an arms dealer who’s charming enough that you almost forget what he actually does for a living.
Angela Burr (Olivia Colman) is the intelligence officer who is running the whole operation. She was actually a man in the original John le Carré novel, and the show gender-swapped the role and then wrote Colman’s real pregnancy straight into the character. It’s a slow burn, but it’s dressed up so well, gorgeous locations, sharp suits, yachts, that the slowness never actually feels slow, only enjoyable.
1
‘The Haunting of Hill House’ (2018)
There’s a ghost hidden somewhere in the background of almost every shot in this show, and most people don’t notice them the first time through, which makes it one of the most rewatchable horror shows out there for that reason alone. Each episode focuses on a different sibling from the same family, years after they all grew up and left the haunted house that’s still messing with their lives.
Mike Flanagan shot one entire episode as a series of nearly unbroken long takes, one stretch runs close to seventeen minutes without a single cut, moving between three different timelines in the same house without you even noticing the transitions. It’s one of the most technically impressive things ever done on television, which actually serves the story.
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