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15 Miniseries You Can Finish Before Christmas

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Done by December 25.

Nazarii Verbitskiy

TV Shows & Movies - November 4th 2026, 23:30 GMT+1

Cropped the penguin — 15. The Penguin (2024)
Colin Farrell spent hours in a makeup chair every single day to become Oswald Cobb, the character The Penguin builds its entire eight episodes around. Prosthetic designer Mike Marino led the transformation, and the result is unrecognizable enough that HBO ran teaser ads just daring people to guess who was under there. The show picks up right after The Batman, skipping Gotham's hero entirely to focus on street-level crime. It runs eight episodes, short enough to finish in a weekend. | © HBO

Cropped The Perfect Couple — 14. The Perfect Couple (2024)
A wedding on Nantucket turns into a murder investigation within the first episode of The Perfect Couple, and nobody on screen seems shocked enough by that. Nicole Kidman stars as the matriarch holding the family together while detectives pick it apart. The show is based on Elin Hilderbrand's 2018 novel of the same name. Six episodes cover the whole wedding weekend, which is about how long the actual chaos would take to unravel. | © Netflix

Godless — 13. Godless (2017)
Frontier towns rarely got gender ratios like the one in Godless, where a mining accident leaves La Belle, New Mexico run almost entirely by women. Jeff Daniels plays the outlaw threatening to undo all that, and he spent months learning to ride and shoot for the role. Scott Frank wrote and directed every one of its seven episodes himself. That kind of single-handed control over a western is rare enough to notice. | © Netflix

The Night Manager — 12. The Night Manager (2016)
Tom Hiddleston plays a hotel manager recruited by British intelligence in The Night Manager, adapted from John le Carré's 1993 novel. Hugh Laurie takes the arms dealer role, a sharp turn from the doctor that made him famous on American TV. The series won a Golden Globe for Best Miniseries in 2017. Six episodes get the job done, and none of them waste time getting there. | © AMC/Sundance Now (via Amazon Prime Video in the US)

Midnight Mass — 11. Midnight Mass (2021)
A priest arrives on a dying fishing island and strange things start happening almost immediately in Midnight Mass. Mike Flanagan wrote and directed the whole thing, drawing on his own Catholic upbringing and his history with alcoholism for the material. Hamish Linklater plays Father Paul, delivering monologues that run several minutes uncut. Seven episodes is all it takes to turn a quiet island into something unrecognizable. | © Netflix

The Haunting of Hill House — 10. The Haunting of Hill House (2018)
Ten episodes of The Haunting of Hill House hinge on a single unbroken shot that runs nearly 17 minutes across episode six. Mike Flanagan built the scene around two funerals happening at once, with actors hitting marks through multiple rooms without a cut. Netflix released the show in 2018 loosely based on Shirley Jackson's 1959 novel. The ghosts are easy to miss on first watch because several are hidden in the background long before the story explains them. | © Netflix

The Undoing — 9. The Undoing (2020)
Nicole Kidman plays a therapist whose life collapses after her husband becomes a murder suspect in The Undoing. HBO aired the limited series in 2020, adapted from Jean Hanff Korelitz's novel "You Should Have Known." Hugh Grant plays against type here, trading charm for something colder and harder to read. Six episodes is all the show needs to make you distrust nearly everyone in it. | © HBO

Sydney sweeney Sharp Objects 2018 — 8. Sharp Objects (2018)
A woman returns to her Missouri hometown to cover a murder and finds her own family stranger than the case in Sharp Objects. Amy Adams plays the journalist, and director Jean-Marc Vallee reportedly shot the whole thing without rehearsals to keep the performances raw. HBO released it in 2018 based on Gillian Flynn's debut novel. Words carved into skin appear throughout the show, a detail lifted straight from the book's most disturbing image. | © HBO

Cropped The Night Of — 7. The Night Of (2016)
Riz Ahmed spends most of The Night Of in a cell, and the show never lets you forget what that does to a person. HBO aired the eight-episode series in 2016, following a Pakistani-American student accused of murder after one chaotic night in Manhattan. John Turturro plays the lawyer, a role originally meant for James Gandolfini before his death in 2013. By the final episode the courtroom barely matters next to what Rikers Island has already done. | © HBO

When They See Us — 6. When They See Us (2019)
Ava DuVernay built When They See Us around the real Central Park Five, five teenagers wrongfully convicted in a 1989 case that gripped New York City. Netflix released the series in 2019, with Jharrel Jerome playing Korey Wise across multiple time periods in a single performance. Donald Trump took out newspaper ads at the time calling for the death penalty against the boys. All five convictions were vacated in 2002 after another man confessed. | © Netflix

Unbelievable — 5. Unbelievable (2019)
Marie Adler was an 18 year old whose rape report got treated as a lie by the Washington detectives assigned to it. Unbelievable is based on an actual 2015 ProPublica investigation by T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong called "An Unbelievable Story of Rape." Toni Collette and Merritt Wever play the detectives who eventually connect her case to a serial predator across state lines. Eight episodes, and the ending is one of the few in this genre that actually delivers justice. | © Netflix

Mare of Easttown — 4. Mare of Easttown (2021)
Kate Winslet trained with a Pennsylvania dialect coach for months to get the Delco accent right in Mare of Easttown. The show is set in a fictional Delaware County town but was shot almost entirely around Philadelphia's suburbs. Mare herself is a detective working a murder while her own house is falling apart around her. HBO built the whole thing around that texture, and it's the reason the show feels lived in rather than staged. | © HBO

The Queens Gambit — 3. The Queen's Gambit (2020)
Walter Tevis wrote the novel The Queen's Gambit in 1983, decades before Scott Frank adapted it for Netflix in 2020. Anya Taylor-Joy plays Beth Harmon, a chess prodigy whose addiction issues run as deep as her talent. Garry Kasparov and Bruce Pandolfini consulted on every match shown on screen, down to the actual moves played. Seven episodes later, chess set sales in the US had reportedly jumped by double digits. | © Netflix

The Fall of the House of Usher — 2. The Fall of the House of Usher (2023)
Mike Flanagan built The Fall of the House of Usher around Edgar Allan Poe, stitching together nearly a dozen of his stories into one family's collapse. Roderick Usher, played by Bruce Greenwood, watches his children die one by one as a mysterious woman from his past resurfaces. Carla Gugino plays that woman across two different timelines spanning decades. Netflix released it in October 2023, and Flanagan has said it's the last project he made under his old deal with the company. | © Netflix

Chernobyl — 1. Chernobyl (2019)
Jared Harris plays Valery Legasov, the Soviet scientist who tried to tell the truth about what happened at reactor four. The real Chernobyl disaster occurred on April 26, 1986, and the show HBO built around it took years to research against declassified Soviet records. Craig Mazin wrote all five episodes himself, a rare move for a production this large. What lands hardest isn't the explosion itself but the quiet bureaucratic decisions that made it inevitable. | © HBO

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Short on time but not on appetite for a great story? These miniseries wrap up in a handful of episodes, so you can start this week and finish well before the holidays. Here are 15 miniseries you can finish before Christmas.

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Short on time but not on appetite for a great story? These miniseries wrap up in a handful of episodes, so you can start this week and finish well before the holidays. Here are 15 miniseries you can finish before Christmas.