Between school getting back into full swing and the holiday season quickly approaching, Fall can be hectic. Which makes fitting time in to watch new shows or revisit old favorites on the best streaming services into your schedule a bit trickier.
Fortunately, Max has you covered with a bunch of great (but relatively short) miniseries that you can easily watch from start to finish in just a couple of days. Also known as limited series, miniseries have surged in popularity over the past decade. Shows like The Queen's Gambit, WandaVision and I May Destroy You have garnered widespread acclaim and dominated water cooler conversations upon release.
If you’re looking for a compelling but short watch as we head into fall, here are the best miniseries on Max to binge over a weekend.
Chernobyl
When brainstorming contenders for this list, this was the first show I thought of. Before Craig Mazin led Ellie and Joel's television debut in The Last of Us, he cut his teeth at Max as executive producer on Chernobyl. One of the best HBO Max shows ever, Chernobyl is a bleak but powerful story about the people whose lives were forever altered by the 1986 disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.
Jared Harris stars as Valery Legasov, a nuclear physicist brought in to deal with the unfolding nightmare, alongside politician Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgård) — two real people who worked to help the cleanup efforts. Their investigation uncovers the rotting stench of negligence, and while everyone else is busy pointing fingers, authorities continue to throw bodies at Chernobyl without understanding the full scope.
Explaining nuclear physics in a way that both builds dramatic tension and makes sense to an audience who probably haven't thought about neutrons and atoms since high school science class is no small task. But Chernobyl does this expertly.
Episodes: 5
Genre: Historical drama
Rotten Tomatoes score: 95%
Watch on Max
Watchmen
Max's Watchmen is a follow-up to Alan Moore's award-winning DC comic series of the same name. Set more than three decades after the original story, it follows a new set of all-too-human vigilantes in an alternate timeline where superheroes not only exist but dramatically shaped the course of history.
Angela Abar (Regina King) masks up as Sister Night to stop a white supremacist group that's twisted the published ravings of Watchmen's antihero Rorschach to launch a war on minorities and the police. The show sees the return of vigilante billionaire Adrian Veight (Jeremy Irons), who struggles to find meaning after completing his master plan to avert World War 3 at the end of the original comic. The god-like Doctor Manhattan also features prominently, as several groups compete to use his powers for their own causes.
Sadly, there's not likely to be a Watchmen season 2, but the limited series ends in such a way that it's a satisfying and complete story in its own right.
Episodes: 9
Genre: Drama/action
Rotten Tomatoes score: 96%
Watch on Max
Station Eleven
At its core, Station Eleven is a series about how we process grief. It tells stories of life before, during and after a flu pandemic has ravaged the world, and how the mysterious disease changed already broken lives. And while it landed on Max in 2021 amid the covid-19 pandemic, don't be mistaken: This show wasn't prescient — but, rather, the 2014 book of the same name by Emily St. John Mandel that it's based on, was.
Mackenzie Davis (The Turning, Halt and Catch Fire) leads a seriously talented cast as Kirsten, a now-grown woman who was just a child when the pandemic hit and society collapsed. Throughout its 10 episodes, Station Eleven shows how the people that young Kirsten met during the start of the pandemic, as well as those they held dear, all had their lives changed forever. She falls in with a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything to try to rebuild art and humanity in a hostile world.
Episodes: 10
Genre: Sci-fi
Rotten Tomatoes score: 98%
Watch it on Max
Band of Brothers
No list of the best Max miniseries is complete without the ultimate dad-core Band of Brothers. Since first airing on Max (then HBO) in 2001, this historical drama has set a benchmark for World War II series. Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks take the reins in this adaptation of notable historian Stephen Ambrose's book that tells the story of Easy Company, 506th Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division, U.S. Army during World War II.
Richard "Dick" Winters (Damian Lewis) is part of a group of soldiers undergoing jump training at Camp Toccoa, Georgia. It's a brutal and demanding process, but the soldiers bond over their shared struggles. After completing their training, the regiment is deployed to England to prepare for the D-Day invasion at the beaches of Normandy, France. From there, they're on the frontlines of the Siege of Bastogne, the invasion of Germany and the liberation of a concentration camp.
Episodes: 10
Genre: Historical drama
Rotten Tomatoes score: 97%
Watch on Max
I May Destroy You
I May Destroy You is the brainchild of Chewing Gum creator/star Michaela Coel, inspired by her own experience of sexual assault while writing the award-winning sitcom. She plays Arabella, a London author who hit it big with her debut novel but is struggling with writer's block and the pressures of her career as she works on her second book.
After returning from an Italian sojourn, she goes out for a boozy night in London that takes a dramatic turn when someone spikes her drink. The next morning, she vaguely remembers being assaulted, but the exact details are a hazy fog. As Arabella begins to piece together what happened to her, she leans on friends Terry (Weruche Opia) and Kwame (Paapa Essiedu) in her journey of recovery, healing, and seeking justice. Coel doesn't pull any punches, tapping into her own personal traumas to explore issues of race, gender, creativity and fame.
Episodes: 12
Genre: Drama
Rotten Tomatoes score: 98%
Watch it on Max
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