Miniseries are hands down better than long-running shows. They don't stretch stories for years, and there's no risk of a sudden cancellation that will leave fans with a half-finished plot. And when it comes to thrillers, miniseries often outshine multi-season shows because they stay focused and intense from start to finish. There's no waiting for filler episodes or sitting in confusion for years like with Lost or Severance before you finally get some answers.
In this list, we're ranking the most thrilling miniseries of the 21st century. While slow-burn gems like Midnight Mass and Sharp Objects have their place, we're solely focusing on the ones that move fast and don't waste much time setting the stage. These are the miniseries that will grab you from the very first episode and won't let go until the credits roll.
10 'Moon Knight' (2022)
Moon Knight is a Marvel miniseries, but it stands completely on its own; you don't need to watch any previous Marvel movie or show to enjoy it. The series stars Oscar Isaac as a man living with dissociative identity disorder, and he delivers an incredible performance. The transitions are so natural that you forget it's the same actor playing both identities.
The show immediately pulls you in with its clever use of mystery and disorientation. Steven, one of Isaac's personalities, keeps losing time. He'll wake up in the middle of a high-speed chase, completely clueless about what's happening, then black out again and return to find his enemies already dead. And once you start to piece together what's really going on, the series turns into a supernatural psychological thriller packed with horror undertones, top-tier stunts, and trippy sequences that mess with your head in the best way. If you loved movies like Memento or Split, Moon Knight is a must-watch.
9 'Black Bird' (2022)
Based on a true story, Black Bird follows Jimmy Keene (Taron Egerton), a man sentenced to 10 years in a minimum-security prison. Just when it seems like his life is over, the FBI gives him a deal he can't refuse: befriend Larry Hall (Paul Walter Hauser), a suspected serial killer locked up in the same facility, and get him to confess. If Jimmy succeeds, he walks free; if he fails, he stays behind bars and possibly doesn't make it out alive.
Every interaction between Jimmy and Larry is packed with tension. It feels like a dangerous game where one wrong move could cost Jimmy everything. Larry is unpredictable, manipulative, and terrifying in a meek, quiet way, and Jimmy has to play along without letting his real intentions slip. If you loved Mindhunter and want something in the same vein, Black Bird is a perfect follow-up. The series holds a near-perfect 95% audience score and an even higher 98% critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
8 'The Looming Tower' (2018)
The Looming Tower takes you behind the scenes of one of the most devastating events in history: 9/11. The series focuses on the rivalry between the FBI and CIA's counterterrorism units, and how their failure to share crucial intelligence with each other played a role in the tragedy. It's a story that burns with anger and frustration. Watching the politics, egos, and missteps that cost thousands of lives will leave you stunned and furious.
The cast is stacked with talent, including Jeff Daniels, Bill Camp, Michael Stuhlbarg, Peter Sarsgaard, and Tahar Rahim, and every performance feels authentic. But what sets this series apart is how it avoids the tired Islamophobic narrative that most 9/11 stories lean on. Instead, it digs into the real reasons behind radicalization and shows how extremists misuse religious texts to serve their agendas. It's eye-opening, powerful, and something everyone should watch at least once.
7 'The Night Of' (2016)
The Night Of follows a young Pakistani-American college student named Nasir Khan (Riz Ahmed), who wakes up in a woman's home to discover her dead, with no recollection of how it happened. In a panic, he flees the scene but gets caught by the police on his way home. The murder weapon is found on him, and witnesses place him with the victim. Nasir becomes the prime suspect and finds himself in handcuffs before he can even fully process what happened.
Nasir is a polite, naive kid, and watching him get chewed up by the prison system is heartbreaking. Ahmed delivers such a powerful performance that it earned him an Emmy, and that is the real core of the show. Don't go into this one expecting a typical murder mystery. The Night Of is a masterclass in tension, not about finding the killer as much as it is about the ugly reality of the justice system and how prison can destroy a life, even if it ends in an acquittal.
6 'Adolescence' (2025)
Netflix churns out crime miniseries almost every other day, and most are bland and forgettable. But Adolescence proves the platform can still deliver something truly original. The story follows 13-year-old Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper), who gets arrested for murdering his classmate. The first episode plays with your expectations of the genre and lulls you into thinking you know where it's going. Then the ending hits like a ton of bricks, and from that moment on, you realize this is going to be an entirely different kind of story.
One of the most impressive things about Adolescence is its execution. All four episodes are shot in a single take, and that one creative choice makes the entire series feel real and immersive in a way few shows can match. You see all the mundane processes of a criminal investigation that other shows typically skip, but it never feels boring because it's directed with such masterful precision. On top of that, Cooper delivers one of the most terrifying child performances ever seen on television. Adolescence truly feels like lightning in a bottle; it nails everything from start to finish and stands as a straight 10/10 in every department.
5 'Bodyguard' (2018)
Bodyguard focuses on a war veteran turned police sergeant named David Budd (Richard Madden). He is assigned to protect the Home Secretary Julia Montague (Keeley Hawes), who is pushing for a counterterrorism bill that would give the government expanded surveillance powers. Budd is a man scarred by war, and he's deeply resentful of government overreach, so protecting Julia turns into a moral nightmare for him.
Madden, best known as Robb Stark from Game of Thrones, delivers a career-defining performance here. He's so good that he won a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a TV Drama, and the show itself became a cultural phenomenon when it first aired in the UK. If you weren't watching it live, you were out of the conversation the next day. But now that it's on Netflix, you can binge it in one go, and trust me, you'll want to. The twists keep coming, and once you hit play, there is a very good chance you won't be able to stop until the finale.
4 'When They See Us' (2019)
When They See Us tells the true story of the Central Park Five, a group of Black and Latino teenagers who were wrongly accused of sexually assaulting a jogger in 1989. The series follows their brutal interrogations, the sham trial, the years they spent in prison for a crime they did not commit, and the aftermath of a life spent in jail.
The series will break your heart and make you furious as you watch innocent lives destroyed simply because these kids were minorities in the wrong place at the wrong time. The casting and performances are phenomenal across the board, but Jharrel Jerome's portrayal of Korey Wise is on another level. Korey was the only boy tried as an adult and got the harshest sentence, and his episode hits the hardest. It will make you cry multiple times, and it rightfully earned Jerome an Emmy.
3 'The Penguin' (2024)
The Penguin takes the minor villain introduced in Matt Reeves' The Batman and puts him in the spotlight. But you don't need to watch any previous DC movies or shows to enjoy it. This is a completely standalone crime drama that follows Oswald Cobb's (Colin Farrell) rise in Gotham's criminal underworld after the death of the city's top crime boss.
What makes this series truly unforgettable is Farrell. He vanishes so completely into the role that you forget an A-list actor is behind the makeup. Even if someone told you to look for him, you wouldn't see Farrell; you'd only see Oz. On top of that, the gangster politics and mob drama are some of the best in the genre, but it's the ending that seals its place among the greatest miniseries ever made. The show makes you root for Oz every step of the way and makes you empathize with him, only to remind you in the final moments that you've been rooting for an animal all along. It's like Breaking Bad condensed into one action-packed season, mixed with the grit of The Sopranos and Peaky Blinders.
2 'The Haunting of Hill House' (2018)
The Haunting of Hill House is, without a doubt, the most perfect horror series ever made. It holds a 93% critic rating and a 91% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes! The plot follows five siblings across two timelines. One takes us back to their childhood, when they lived in a haunted mansion. The other shows their adult lives, where the ghosts of their past continue to haunt them.
It's full of chilling reveals and heartbreaking twists that will leave you stunned. Just the ending of the first episode will shock you to your core. It really captures what an actual ghost encounter might feel like; not some vengeful spirit trying to kill you, but the kind of subtle, unexplainable experiences people actually talk about. And then there's the Bent-Neck Lady episode, which stands as one of the saddest and most beautiful hours of television ever created. Another brilliant thing the show does is change perspectives, much like what Weapons did recently. You'll see something strange in one episode, then a few episodes later you'll revisit the same moment from another sibling's point of view, and suddenly it all makes sense in the most devastating way.
1 'Chernobyl' (2019)
Chernobyl tells the true story of the 1986 nuclear disaster that shook the world. It begins with the moments leading up to the explosion, then follows the Soviet Union's desperate cover-up and the brave men and women who gave up their lives to contain the fallout. From the very first episode, the series pulls you in by revealing the scale of the disaster piece by piece.
At first, they think the radiation level is 3.6 roentgen per hour. Nobody panics because that's supposed to be the same as a chest X-ray. But then you find out it's actually the equivalent of 400 chest X-rays, and just when you're wrapping your head around that, you realize that 3.6 wasn't the real reading; it was just the limit of their meter. The actual level is 15,000 roentgen! The reactor is spewing out nearly twice the radiation of the Hiroshima bomb every single hour. Twenty hours later, that's forty bombs, and it won't stop in a week or a month -- it will keep burning until an entire continent is poisoned. Chernobyl is fear like you've never felt before because every horrifying detail actually happened in real life. This miniseries has great acting and a compelling true story as a basis, resulting in one of modern television's greatest achievements.
Chernobyl TV-MA Drama History 30 9.2/10 Release Date 2019 - 2019
Cast Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgård, Emily Watson, Paul Ritter, Jessie Buckley, Adam Nagaitis, Sam Troughton, Robert Emms, James Cosmo, Kieran O'Brien, Tomas Žaibus, Con O'Neill, Adrian Rawlins, Alan Williams, David Dencik, Mark Lewis Jones, Ralph Ineson, Barry Keoghan, Alex Ferns, Fares Fares, Michael McElhatton, Laura Elphinstone, Nadia Clifford, Sam Strike, Sammy Hayman Showrunner Craig Mazin Seasons 1 Powered by Expand Collapse