The 10 Worst HBO Miniseries, Ranked

There are few institutions in the world of American audiovisual entertainment more reliable than the HBO miniseries. For the past four decades, the premium cable network that become synonymous with high-production, high-quality television at the turn of the 21st century has been exercising particularly dutiful creative control when it comes to its short, one-season-only offerings; in some ways, those shows stand as even more direct and representative “HBO responses to auteur cinema” than even the network’s proper made-for-TV movies.

Still, in all those years, there have been some duds — including both co-productions between HBO and British networks and all-American concoctions. As evidenced by the number of miniseries that rank among the best HBO shows, the channel has a truly impressive track record in the miniseries department, such that even No. 10 on this list isn’t completely unwatchable or anything. But, as you move further down this list, you will find that even TV’s most consistent production pipeline has yielded its share of truly awful shows. From unfunny comedies to uninteresting dramas to ludicrous thrillers to insight-free multi-part biopics, here’s the worst of what HBO miniseries have to offer.

For the sake of clarity, we’ve only considered shows that were expressly intended, written, and produced as miniseries, which rules out would-be multi-season shows that just happened to be canceled after a single season. It’s a necessary rule to account for the particular flavor of badness of an unsuccessful limited series, but it does have the unfortunate collateral effect of not allowing us to place “The Idol” at the No. 1 spot.

A British-American co-production released on BBC Two in the U.K. and on HBO in the U.S., “Parade’s End” finds playwright Tom Stoppard adapting the eponymous novel tetralogy by Ford Madox Ford, originally published between 1924 and 1928. With direction by Susanna White across five one-hour installments, the 2012 series is notable as one of the early screen breakthroughs of then-up-and-comer Benedict Cumberbatch.

In a characteristically icy yet ever-mellowing turn, Cumberbatch plays Christopher Tietjens, the stuffy and conservative son of a Yorkshire lord, who throws himself into an impulsive quickie marriage with self-centered socialite Sylvia Satterthwaite (Rebecca Hall) in the early 1910s. Over the following years, Christopher finds himself divided between a dysfunctional relationship with Sylvia and a blooming infatuation with free-spirited suffragette Valentine Wannop (Adelaide Clemens), and the trio’s lives are dramatically impacted by the onset of World War I and the myriad transformations faced by British society over the following years.

Despite the level of pedigree involved — including not just the main trio, but also the likes of Miranda Richardson, Janet McTeer, Stephen Graham, and Rufus Sewell — “Parade’s End” is plainly on the less engaging end of the prestige period drama spectrum. For all the cast’s valiant efforts, they can’t quite smooth over the sheer preposterousness of the story’s sharper curves, and the theoretical dream team of Stoppard and White settles for correctness and respectability in their adaptational and creative choices, resulting in a passable but unmemorable and often stultifying 287 minutes.

Created by Alex Gregory and Peter Huyck, the 2023 HBO series “White House Plumbers” adds humor to history by filtering the Watergate scandal through a satirical but still largely dramatic lens. In five episodes spanning 45 to 63 minutes, it adapts the 2007 non-fiction book “Integrity: Good People, Bad Choices, and Life Lessons from the White House” by Egil and Matthew Krogh, centering on the real-life story of CIA agent E. Howard Hunt (Woody Harrelson) and attorney G. Gordon Liddy (Justin Theroux) — two members of the special White House unit whose efforts to stop or respond to press leaks during Richard Nixon’s presidency earned them the titular moniker.

With direction by David Mandel, known for his hilarious work as showrunner on “Veep” following Armando Iannucci’s departure, “White House Plumbers” strikes an indecisive, somewhat muddled tone between archness and seriousness, without ever committing enough to either mode to yield genuine political insight. Which wouldn’t be that much of a problem if the show were at least consistently entertaining to watch — but “White House Plumbers” can’t quite manage that either, even with Theroux delivering typically committed and tonally versatile work, Harrelson having a grand old time in a role tailor-made for his sensibilities, and Domhnall Gleeson, Lena Headey, and Judy Greer turning in fine supporting performances. At its most inane, the show feels like an utterly unfunny creation straining beyond its capabilities to be, or at least seem, hilarious. And it shouldn’t have been so difficult to mine absurdist comedy out of Watergate.

Co-produced between BBC Television and HBO Films, “House of Saddam” aired on both BBC Two and HBO in mid-2008, and marked one of the most high-profile attempts in Western media to take the measure of Saddam Hussein’s life and grapple with his impact on Iraq and the world. With writing by Alex Holmes and Stephen Butchard and direction by Holmes and Jim O’Hanlon across four 60-minute parts, the series spans the entire 27-year period between Saddam’s (Yigal Naor) appointment as president of Iraq in 1979 and his execution by the Iraqi Special Tribunal for crimes against humanity in 2006.

In theory, Saddam Hussein makes a lot of sense as the subject for a biographical miniseries; each episode of “House of Saddam” takes place at one particularly crucial juncture of one specific decade in Iraq history, allowing for the possibility of a searching, detailed panorama of the country’s turbulent two-and-a-half decades leading up to the Iraq War, and of the intricate machinations shoring up the rule of one of the 20th century’s most infamous despots. In practice, however, “House of Saddam” fails to find any actual angle on Saddam’s life, and instead moves through the events of his life with a gliding disinterest trying to pass itself off as dynamism; some stretches of the show feel like a “The Sopranos” xerox without interestingly-written characters, which is almost a feat given that the characters in question are based on real people. To top things off, the series is much too historically inaccurate to even be informative.

Helen Mirren is no stranger to playing royalty on both screen and stage — she won a Best Actress Oscar in 2007, as well as an Emmy and a Tony for it, in fact. But for all her immense talent, simply casting Mirren as a legendary monarch does not automatically result in a great piece of drama, as demonstrated by “Catherine the Great.” The 2015 Sky Atlantic and HBO miniseries about Russia’s most notorious empress and her momentous rule from 1764 to 1796 was written by Nigel Williams, who also authored 2005’s “Elizabeth I,” a.k.a. the miniseries that won Mirren a Leading Actress Emmy, and directed by British TV veteran Philip Martin. On paper, it should have been another winner in Mirren’s gallery of queens.

But, in order to be that, “Catherine the Great” would have to be something in the first place. And it is, instead, a prime example of a series that just sort of exists. Lacking the verve and sense of personal stakes that Williams brought to his telling of Elizabeth I’s life, “Catherine the Great” is a lifeless, purposeless plod through three interminable decades of history that never come alive on screen despite the best efforts of a star-studded cast. Mirren, for her part, is incredible as ever, but there’s little in the script for her to sink her teeth into; “Catherine the Great” takes one of the most fascinating and multifaceted women in world history and flattens not only her but also her associates, her milieu, and her time into a succession of biographical CliffsNotes.

Making art about harrowing real-life tragedies is always a complicated proposition, to be approached with immense tact and caution at minimum. And, by those parameters, “Tsunami: The Aftermath” was about as respectful and considerate as a bull in a porcelain shop. Jointly produced by HBO and BBC and released as a much-touted two-part TV event, the show dramatizes the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, which killed over 200,000 people and went down as one of the most destructive natural disasters in history … less than two years prior to the release of the show.

That temporal proximity wouldn’t be a problem in and of itself, of course, if “Tsunami: The Aftermath” actually did something productive or politically expedient with the memory of the tragedy. Instead, writer Abi Morgan and director Bharat Nalluri turn the tragedy into populist Hollywood hokum, setting the show entirely in Thailand (even going so far as to use real-life locations still reeling from the tsunami at the time) yet centering it near-entirely around Western characters. The series also utilizes the unfathomable horror experienced by Thai citizens as fodder for technically well-crafted but utterly rote and standard disaster movie dramatics. 

Not even some condemnation of Western aid initiatives and their exploitative unhelpfulness smooths over the sheer ickiness of the whole enterprise; on the contrary, even the most politically incisive moments on “Tsunami: The Aftermath” feel like preemptive exculpation. At its most toothless and conventional, meanwhile, the show feels outright disrespectful and rather exploitative in its own way.

Written by David E. Kelley, directed by Susanne Bier, and starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant, 2020’s “The Undoing” is yet another example of a series that seemingly had everything in place to be a home run for the HBO prestige TV brand. In terms of viewership alone, the response was encouraging: The whodunit thriller about a wealthy Manhattan couple who find themselves embroiled in the mystery surrounding the death of an artist (Matilda De Angelis) became one of HBO’s most popular TV shows in years. The quality, however, just wasn’t there.

It’s not hard to understand the fascination that “The Undoing” sparked on the way to its season finale; Bier’s direction is crisp as ever, taking full advantage of the knack for pulpy drama she previously displayed in films like “After the Wedding” and “Bird Box,” and Kelley knows how to fill the story with attention-commanding twists, turns, and capital-B Big moments. Unfortunately, the vast majority of those moments are straight-up ludicrous, the character motivations overall make no sense and turn on a dime depending on the needs of the plot, and the series rejects virtually every opportunity for depth, incisiveness, or actually searing drama in favor of sensationalistic schlock. The only thing that really kept it going at the time was the curiosity sparked by the central mystery, which ultimately got a flat and uninteresting resolution. And, once the cat was out of the bag, there remained little reason for anyone to ever think about “The Undoing” again.

A three-part miniseries released on BBC One in the U.K. and on HBO in the U.S., “Gunpowder” was developed by star Kit Harington himself alongside Daniel West, and written by Ronan Bennett with direction by J Blakeson — who was then fresh out of the moderately successful sci-fi flick “The 5th Wave,” and would later direct the Rosamund Pike Netflix hit “I Care a Lot.” Intended as Harington’s first big non-“Game of Thrones” screen acting showcase (with all respect to “Pompeii”), the show tells the story of Robert Catesby (a direct real-life ancestor of Harington), who led the group responsible for the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605 against King James VI of Scotland and I of England.

The story of Catesby and the Gunpowder Plot is a fascinating one, full of intense 17th-century British political intrigue, and vividly resonant with contemporary themes of resistance against oppression. But “Gunpowder” cannot approximate that fascination, and instead settles for merely delivering information in a droning, unimaginative manner that feels at once coldly encyclopedic and strangely perfunctory. For all his personal involvement in the project, Harington is never able to muster a performance that rises above “fine,” and the series never devotes enough time or attention to the characters to let emotional investment blossom. The hyper-gruesome, historically accurate scenes of torture and execution are just about the only thing that leaves a strong impression, but the absence of thoughtful storytelling leaves the violence of those scenes feeling like a tacked-on affect.

Another underwhelming BBC One and HBO miniseries of the 2010s centered around British political intrigue — contemporary in this case — is 2015’s “The Casual Vacancy.” Written by Sarah Phelps and directed by Jonny Campbell as a three-episode adaptation of the eponymous novel by J. K. Rowling, “The Casual Vacancy” brings together a starry cast including Rory Kinnear, Michael Gambon, Julia McKenzie, and Keeley Hawes in a would-be sweeping panorama of the small English village of Pagford and its would-be vibrant citizenry. After parish councilor Barry Fairbrother (Kinnear) dies, the people of Pagford begin to vie for the new open spot on the council, only for their various dark secrets to come out into the open through a mysterious internet forum, cracking the town’s façade of countryside idyll.

If that sounds like a fun setup for a juicy satire of small-town hypocrisy and English political tomfoolery, rest assured, it’s very much not in practice. Constantly undecided between cheekiness and seriousness without seeming to possess the chops to commit to either, “The Casual Vacancy” attempts to dig into thorny, uncomfortable truths about contemporary English life and the awfulness of the powerful. But the writing just does not possess the vision, the nuance, or, frankly, the basic understanding of the real world to bring that concept to bear. The characters are all stereotypes or nonentities or both, the politics bumble between shallow condescension and bizarre hostility towards the working class, and the whole thing just smacks unmistakably of a billionaire’s understanding of class conflict.

Making a political satire set in a fictional country is always a tricky proposition. If done thoughtlessly, it’s exceedingly easy to slip into clunky generalizations about entire regions of the Earth, and sacrifice the clarity, specificity, and savvy relationship to reality that are fundamental to truly hard-hitting satire. Stunningly, “The Regime” is devoid of anything to say — and, even more worrisomely, of anything to laugh at. The 2024 Will Tracy-created miniseries about the despotic chancellor (Kate Winslet) of an unnamed country in Central Europe wants to be a more serious, ambitious, and cinematic “Veep,” but instead winds up being more like an overproduced “1600 Penn” — a comedy with the depth of generic small-talk grousing about politics.

The canvas is bigger, to be sure — Kate Winslet, as committed as ever, huffs and puffs in a Luis Buñuel-esque tragicomic portrait of a once-almighty woman being reduced to a pathetic shell of her former power. But Will Tracy is not Luis Buñuel, and his conception of Winslet’s Elena Vernham and the various sycophants around her is never rich or deep or imaginative enough to compensate for the flatness of his attempts at humor and the utter disastrousness of his attempts at real-world political analogy. “The Regime” cycles through vague gestures towards a number of 21st-century news items, yet each of those gestures appears to have been informed by little more than a quick skimming of the headlines.

Time doesn’t always beget improvement, but sometimes it does, and, in the case of HBO miniseries, it definitely did. The network’s first stab at a limited multi-episode TV event is still, by some distance, its worst yet — a work of television so misguided and ham-fisted that it’s hard to believe it comes from the same production house that would one day make “Angels in America” and “Olive Kitteridge.”

Scripted by Julian Bond and directed by Peter Duffell, “The Far Pavilions” adapts the eponymous semi-autobiographical novel by British Indian Army daughter M. M. Kaye — released the same year as, and inadvertently supportive of every point made in, Edward Said’s “Orientalism.” Any adaptation of Kaye’s painfully dated and Westernized Romantic depiction of British-occupied India would probably be unsavory to contemporary viewers, but Duffell and Bond’s “The Far Pavilions” manages to be dated in more than content: Drawing only from the worst tendencies of the Hollywood Technicolor epics of the 1960s, the series repeatedly strains, over three chapters and 315 interminable minutes, to be Grand and Solemn and Impressive without once bothering to be engaging.

To make matters worse, while some villainous and unsympathetic characters were actually played by Indian characters, the central, heroic Indian roles were given to the likes of Christopher Lee and Amy Irving — donning unimaginably demeaning accents and utterly shameless brownface. “The Far Pavilions” would be followed a few years later by Robert Altman’s wonderful “Tanner ’88,” and HBO miniseries would keep getting better and better from there — but man, they sure got off to a rough start.