Instead of rating movies or rating TV series, what about miniseries? Googling “best miniseries” produces several lists, with Band of Brothers and Chernobyl at the top, and those are my two top favorites. (Roots completes the popular Top 3, but I’ve not seen it.)
I liked Unbelievable (true crime) and Sharp Objects (crime fiction) but there are several popular choices I wouldn’t rate highly. The Pacific shows up as “If you liked Band of Brothers” but I stopped after a few episodes. B of B was a pure and compelling story of real-life combat soldiers but The Pacific, to my eye, combined random violence with pointless flirtation.
Big Little Lies Season 1 was a great miniseries, with a great story and interesting conflicts. Season 2 was good in its own way, I suppose, but I like good stories.
One of my favorite miniseries doesn’t appear with the Google query: Smiley’s People, with Alec Guiness playing John le Carré’s famous hero. Curiously I liked Smiley’s People MUCH more than Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy with almost the same cast. Can anyone explain to me Why? Smiley’s People has lots of “time-wasting” scenes: Smiley spends much of one episode interviewing Connie Sachs just to jog his memory of the name of a particular Soviet agent, and “wastes” much of the next episode confiming with Toby Esterhase that said agent is the man in a photograph. And so on, over and over throughout the miniseries. Somehow the irrelevancies and the delicious script and acting appeal to me.
(There’s a similarly-titled thread that’s not been bumped in 21 years. A new thread seems best.)
Behind Your Touch: a 16 episode Korean comedy thriller about a woman who can read the memories of an animal when she touches it on the bum.
I’m not a big fan of based-on-a-true-story shows like Chernobyl or Band of Brothers; I’d rather watch a legitimate documentary or a purely fictional story.
I’m going to say, in no particular order, Chernobyl, Wolf Hall (series one), and The Pacific.
Leaving Band if Brothers on the table because, like so many older (yep) mini-series, it really slumps in the middle. Roots is guilty of the same: first episode is really good, but then it quickly turns to bloated filler, and… I never made it to the last episode for that reason. See also North and South (which to be clear is too sympathetic to slavers to warrant mention of this list apart from its flaws) and 1981’s Masada. They clearly put all their focus on the first/last installments and just used the middle as an excuse to sell more ad time.
Smiley’s People has lots of “time-wasting” scenes: Smiley spends much of one episode interviewing Connie Sachs just to jog his memory of the name of a particular Soviet agent, and “wastes” much of the next episode confiming with Toby Esterhase that said agent is the man in a photograph. And so on, over and over throughout the miniseries. Somehow the irrelevancies and the delicious script and acting appeal to me.