The Most Underrated TV Miniseries of the Last 10 Years
Occasionally dropped online with relatively little fanfare and usually spanning no more than 12 episodes, limited series can still appear quite obscure on the TV and streaming landscape — to the point that it’s probably no wonder why so many great ones go under the radar.
A solid go-to comparison for the 21st century streaming glut is to consider The Americans, a show which would easily have been one of the biggest things on television in the late '90s or early '00s, but today somehow still feels like a hidden gem. With the churn of the streaming schedule, miniseries are even more susceptible to this phenomenon, almost by design, which is why there are so many classics that are still worth recommending, even many years after they first aired.
In the list below, we’ve decided to focus on the last decade of limited series, as that’s also the time when content creation at Netflix, Apple, Disney and co. was at its most rampant, fuelled by competition and the demands of the lockdown years — a time when a brilliantly written, daringly original and/or star studded TV show could easily get lost in the noise. Read on for our selection of the most underrated shows of the last ten years.
Looking back, it's kind of crazy that this adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel Alias Grace didn't really seem to benefit from the sensational release of The Handmaid’s Tale (of course, another Atwood joint) a few months earlier.
This is a real shame, as Alias Grace, a fictionalised telling of the story of a real Irish immigrant who murdered her employer in Canada in the 1840s, boasts formidable talent on both sides of the camera — and all operating at the top of their game. The script was adapted by the great Sarah Polley (who won a screenplay Oscar for Women Talking in 2023) and every one of its six episodes is directed by Mary Harron (of American Psycho fame).
Oscar winner Anna Paquin appears in a supporting role, but the true mark of quality has to be David Cronenberg’s name on the cast list — the legendary filmmaker appears in all six episodes as a local reverend.
A few years before he started blowing audiences away with Severance, Ben Stiller dipped his toe into the showrunner world for the first time with Escape at Dannemora, a gripping, seven-episode dramatisation of a sensational real life prison break that happened in New York in 2015.
Like any good prison drama, the show is a riveting watch (it begins in the aftermath of the escape before flashing back to show how the breakout was planned), but it's the stranger than fiction aspects of the story that make it really stand out — namely that the two men who escaped were involved in a love triangle with the prison guard who assisted them.
Sound good so far? Now imagine that story with Benicio del Toro, Paul Dano and Patricia Arquette in the central roles. That’s Escape at Dannemora: a brilliant miniseries that maybe could have done with a snappier title.
A recent Stephen Graham joint that deserved considerably more attention than it received back in 2023 was Bodies, a looping, time-jumping sci-fi show based on an acclaimed DC graphic novel by the late Si Spencer.
The tangled, twisted crime story follows four police investigations of the same homicide case, the twist being that the murdered body has appeared at four different times — in 1890, 1941, 2023, and 2053. Graham features in three of these, as a suspect named Sir Julian Harker in the earlier sections and as Elias Mannix, a tyrannical leader in the dystopian future.
If you're a fan of the Netflix series Dark, this one should be right up your head-scratching alley.
In the last ten years, Stephen Graham has appeared in movies by Martin Scorsese (The Irishman) and Steve McQueen (Blitz), to name but two, but the great Liverpudlian arguably does his best work in the limited series format. No doubt, you’ll have already seen shows like Time, Boiling Point and Adolescence, but The Virtues — a four episode miniseries about guilt, trauma and addiction — deserves its place in the Graham pantheon.
Like all of Graham’s best work, it’s a tough watch at times, but the actor brings so much warmth and feeling to the role that it’s still a great watch — and one with moments of joy that hit even harder because they are so well-earned.
The Virtues was created by Shane Meadows, who directed Graham to one of his greatest ever performances in This is England in 2006, and who also based the story on his own experiences. It is not to be missed.
Hearing Alex Garland's name these days usually conjures images of the hottest movies of the year (Civil War, Warfare, 28 Years Later) or the most hotly anticipated of the future (Elden Ring), but there was a time when a Garland scripted and directed sci-fi show could land on Hulu without that many people noticing.
That show was released in 2020 and it was called Devs — a worrying allegory about tech billionaires and Silicon Valley overreach set in a quantum computing company in the not-so-distant future. The show stars Sonoya Mizuno (of recent House of the Dragon fame) alongside Nick Offerman and an even more fresh-faced than usual Cailee Spaeny. If you are a fan of Garland’s Ex Machina, you need to get onto this one fast.
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How an artist as adventurous as Boots Riley still manages to get his projects given the green light is a question that will one day be worthy a few dissertations. The one-time political rapper made the jump to filmmaking in 2018 with his remarkable debut Sorry to Bother You — a movie that broke out from Sundance at around the same time that Get Out was headed to the Oscars, and even though it was massively overshadowed by that other horror allegory, it still went on to turn a decent profit at the box-office.
Riley followed that low key success by going even more experimental with his follow-up miniseries, I’m a Virgo — a superhero story about a 13ft tall man child that appeared to be about as inspired by BLM movement as it was by the tactile approach of a Michel Gondry music video.
Unfortunately, budget cuts mean that Riley had to cleave 40% of his original script at a very late stage in the show’s production, which naturally left the show feeling disjointed and incomplete. But, even in that truncated version, it's one of the strangest and most original shows you are likely to ever see.
As the creator of The Wire, Homicide: Life on the Streets and Treme, David Simon is easily one of the most influential figures to emerge from the golden era of television. Since his last epic project, The Deuce (a triptych series about the evolution of the porn industry), ended, Simon has been keeping his projects more modestly sized.
In the 2020s, Simon has so far only released two limited series: the perfectly decent crime series We Own this City and the phenomenal alternative history show The Plot Against America — a six-episode adaptation of Philip Roth’s uncomfortably prescient 2004 novel, which imagined what might have happened if the doggedly non-interventionist and antisemitic mogul Charles Lindbergh had run for president in 1940 and started to turn the country towards fascism. John Turturro (him again), Zoe Kazan and a young Anthony Boyle star.
If you’re a fan of the alternative history in a show like For All Mankind, you are going to like it.
If I was feeling particularly pedantic, I could point out that The Night Of actually first aired on HBO in the summer of 2016, but given that this phenomenal show — which follows a young, New York muslim (a game-changing performance by Riz Ahmed) as he’s swallowed up and spat out by the American legal system after finding himself (perhaps) in the wrong place at the wrong time on the night of a murder — still feels undervalued, I'm willing to bend the rules when it comes to determining when the last decade began.
The basic sociological subtext of the setup for this show would be engrossing enough on its own, but The Night Of is also just a ripping courtroom yarn with an unlikely anti-hero in the form of John Turturro’s defence lawyer and a formidable antagonist in Bill Camp’s lead detective. On top of that, we get a prison drama in which Ahmed’s Nasir Kahn bulks up in front of our eyes, and under the watchful gaze of a Rikers Island prison alpha dog named Freddy Knight — which also happens to be the last great performance of Michael K. Williams' career.
If there is a Mt. Rushmore of great shows, limited or otherwise, The Night Of deserves its place in the conversation.
