Great miniseries

Begins and ends with Lonesome Dove.

From the Earth to the Moon.

And for the classics you can't leave out Winds of War or The Thorn Birds.

Wasn't Fanny and Alexander a miniseries? I know Berlin Alexanderplatz was.

ETA: Can't believe I didn't think of The Singing Detective before any of these.

Three of my faves:





...and if you can find it...

Seconded on The Singing Detective. Also, Pennies From Heaven

Alan Bleasdale's TV Work was a big thing for me when I was growing up, particularly GBH which is almost Michael Palin's finest hour and Boys From the Black Stuff, which is an examination of how screwed the UK's working class were in the 80s.

More recently and obviously, you can't go wrong with Generation Kill or The Corner.

Band of Brothers.

Done.

The Brits know how to do these real well, it seems. To the ones mentioned I'd like to add: BLACKPOOL. Funny and occasionally disturbing rise&fall story about an arcade owner in England's seaside gambling resort. Has a lot of music too, which is applied in a similar manner to Singing Detective, but more focused towards soul & modern britpop. Great acting as well.

Yup. It's the best mini-series that's been created. Ever. It's the equivalent in term of quality to a certain The Wire...

'I, Claudius' - this is a British miniseries from the late 70s that follows Derek Jacobi, as Claudius, as he tries to survive Rome. It's gripping and perfectly acted throughout. As Richard mentions, Patrick Stewart has hair:


Also:
'James Clavell's Noble House' - features Pierce Brosnan. If you liked 'Shogun', you'll probably like this one.

'Rich Man, Poor Man'.

Also also:
the 'Sharpe's' movies from England, featuring Sean Bean. There's 15 movies in total, and they go together like a miniseries. Sean Bean is Lt. Sharpe, a soldier who has risen through the ranks to be become an officer during the Napoleonic Wars. Good stuff.

Seconding BAND OF BROTHERS and FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON. Both are about as good as it gets.

On a different tack, I'll toss in V and V: THE FINAL BATTLE. I rewatched them w/ friends who'd never seen them a few years back, and they were still really enjoyable. The hairstyles and clothes give away the era, and some aspects are more on-the-nose than the best shows of today, but these were produced in a much more cinematic manner than most TV of that time, so they still look good, and the story still just plain works. Plus, there's a new version coming this fall!

Before "The Wire" HBO had a great 6 part mini-series about the streets of Baltimore called "The Corner".

And features Patrick Stewart with hair!

Not sure if it was ever a television mini-series but The Yakuza Papers is also very good.

My Favorite Miniseries...
1) G.I. Joe-The M.A.S.S. Device
2) G.I. Joe-The Weather Dominator
3) The Odyssey
4) V-The Final Battle
5) V

P.S. Sure, G.I. Joe is a cartoon...but it began as not one but 2 mini-series.

I updated my post with a box cover for it, proving your point. He's quite good in this, too. In addition to Derek Jacobi, John Hurt, and Patrick Stewart, this also features Brian Blessed and John Rhys-Davies.

'Winds of War' and 'War and Remembrance' were pretty damn good too, as I recall:

I'd love to see Aussie Blue Murder, damn thing is not on dvd around here. But they play it on a loop over at the Sydney Police & Justice museum.

Also, this thread begins and ends with John Adams and State of Play.

There's only 13 hours of The Prisoner, and that's all that there were ever planned.

And AMC's doing a new version over 6 hours that may or not be awesome.

I believe the Jewish ghetto uprising mini referred to in the first post is THE WALL, which I was shown in sixth grade, and for a few moments thought Mrs. Gill was Pink Floyd fan.

I should've known better.

Technically there are 17. Many of the later episodes are throwaways, though: 13, 14, and 15 can easily be skipped.

Band of Brothers and Rome are my favorites in this department. I really love Rome in its depiction of society and daily life during that time, which looks really well researched.

I once again cannot restate just how great State of Play is.

I've never heard of 'State of Play', but it sounds fantastic. Thanks for the recommendation, Ed; I'm going to get this.

Believe me, it's some great stuff. Not to mention it's a fantastic look into how the British Press works plus a lot of recognizable actors are in it also.

I take issue with the classification of Sharpe as a miniseries. A series of TV movies is not a miniseries. Neither was Rome, that was designed as an ongoing series.

State of Play is second only to Band of Brothers as the best miniseries of the decade. How the U.S. approaches miniseries vs. how the Brits seem to do it leads into some murky territory, though. A lot of the better ones, like Jekyll or SoP or some of the others mentioned (House of Cards), were designed as being stories that simply could be told in six episodes. I like the term "limited series" when thinking about these, as there's enough of a difference to require an OCD specification.

I like From the Earth to the Moon better, though, because I like space, I like earnest, and I think that the format allowed them to tell some interesting stories from some interesting perspectives. With BoB, you're really confined to just the troops, which works, but I really like how From the Earth to the Moon looked at the space race from the news perspective, or the wives' perspective, or the lab rat perspective.

I have the supposedly legendary Edge of Darkness at home, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

Band of Brothers, John Adams, Generation Kill. Done. Watch those in any order and be in awe.

Band of Brothers is yearly viewing for me during Memorial Day weekend. And it's still just as powerful and intimate as it was when my dad and I were recording it to VHS every week nine years ago.

I went back and watched Lonesome Dove recently, and it's actually not that great. I remembered it being good, with Duvall and Jones elevating it to great when they're onscreen. In reality, the times they're offscreen the thing really suffers. And Simon Wincer's direction is just awful.

Still, it's worth seeing For Call and McCRae alone. The characters are so great, and the acting so superb, that they can withstand a middling adaptation.

I won't disagree with you on that, however they do all work together LIKE a miniseries. While they stand alone as individual movies just fine, you really need to watch them in order to get the full effect of Sharpe's story. Sean Bean delivers a fine perfomance in each of these movies, and his character in 'Sharpe's Rifles' is very different in 'Sharpe's Waterloo'.

It's an expensive investment to buy all of these movies, though.

I love From the Earth to the Moon precisely because it's not just about the astronauts. You've got the entire episode centered on the design and building of the lunar lander, the Apollo 1 fire told from the point of view of contractors, and they deftly avoid retreading Ron Howard's movie in the Apollo 13 episode by focusing on the press. And the whole thing is filled with such a profound sense of lost potential, that here was this stab at greatness that actually reached its goal, and we just stopped.

And the end of "1968" never fails to bring me to tears.

This is so easy that several others have already said it: There's BAND OF BROTHERS and then there's everything else.

God, if THE PACIFIC is even half as good ...

Ken Burns has some fantastic documentaries that could probably be classified as miniseries. I highly recommend 'The Civil War', 'Mark Twain', 'Baseball', and 'The War'.

Those are different beasts, though. There have been long-form documentaries for a while, and when you say "miniseries", you think narrative stuff.

Though, yes, the ones you mentioned are pretty great. I'll also throw some love for the admittedly flawed and narrow "Jazz," the stomach-churning and frightening "Unforgivable Blackness," and Ric Burns' "New York," which might be better than Ken's best stuff.

Thanks for the Very British Coup and Yakuza Papers recommendations, guys. Top of the Netflix queue!

What's amazing about Band of Brothers is that D-Day is the second episode and none of the following eight episodes feel the least bit anti-climactic.

I liked how Band of Brothers did an entire episode about D-Day and we never once saw the landings on the beach, yet the parachuting under fire sequence is just as intense. That end to the first episode, with the pull out to all the planes, kills me.

Never cared for Holocaust.

'I, Claudius' is the best miniseries ever. Although BAND OF BROTHERS, Earth to the Moon, The Thorn Birds, ROOTS, and Shogun are all great.

the one Bitches Leave friends is Prettty good if it the one I am thinking of, but I don't think so. The one I am thinking of is "Centennial"

also worth watching is The Bourne Identity (1988)

I was going to add Sword of Gideon (1986), but I think it was just a really long movie now I think about it.

It's kind of sad these have disappeared from network television. I think a week-long nightly event like a Roots or a Shogun could still play today.

there are two facters why they don't one the cost, second the there are some good one and even great ones, but a lot were shitty.

In appreciation of Richard Chamberlain:

'The Man in the Iron Mask' - 1977
'Centennial' - 1978-1979
'Shogun' - 1980
'The Thorn Birds' - 1983
'The Bourne Identity' - 1988

He was the king.

Make sure you watch it before Mel Gibson's remake comes out later this year. It's really complicated - I watched it twice and still sort of had no idea what was going on - but its atmosphere and acting supercede all that. Joe Don Baker gives one of the greatest performances known to man. And that zany fat English guy from Ace Ventura 2 isn't bad either.

Yeah, watching it before the movie is definitely a priority. I've seen the first five minutes a couple of times, you're right -- very atmospheric.

Anybody remember Chiefs with Chick Heston? It was about 3 generations of police chiefs in the South and also featured Billy Dee Williams and according to IMDB a young and vibrant Danny Glover. It was like one of the first things my parents recorded and watched after they blessed our home with a VCR.

Doesn't appear to be on DVD, at least in Region 1, which is a bummer.

I think we can put that at the feet of Robert Halmi, who made several miniseries in the late 90s/early 00s (most for NBC) that were both ridiculously expensive and egregiously shitty.

Roots is in the pantheon of great miniseries, nay great television. I marathoned that sucker for 3 days straight. Just engrossing.

One miniseries that I thought was great but has been lost in time is the one about Shaka Zulu. I remember because it had tits and ass in it, that no network would touch it so it went to syndication. It's a worthy mini series to watch.

One of the reasons you don't see miniseries any more (aside from the cost) is that regular TV series like Lost, 24, BSG and others have adapted alot of the storytelling conventions of the miniseries to weekly TV.

One miniseries I'm interested in revisiting (if it's available that is) is Amerika about Russian occupied America. I remember it being pretty good (and slow as fuck).

These two guys nailed it.

Gah, I can't believe someone else had to mention GENERATION KILL. It's brilliant, belonging in the same league as BAND OF BROTHERS and THE WIRE (same people responsible for THE WIRE). The examination of the last Iraq conflict stands in stark contrast to BAND OF BROTHERS as an example of all the ways things have changed. It's darkly funny, grim and unflinching. In every way that THE WIRE reflects back a view of our failings at home, GENERATION KILL shows us how we've lost our way on the warpath in another land.

A must-see.