The 10 Best Miniseries I watched in 2018

As with everyone else on the planet, we continue to shift our viewing preferences away from discs (and theaters) toward streaming, with particular interest in the miniseries format - which continues to provide the most absorbing, entertaining, and informative cinematic material and remains a great venue for new artists, established artists seeking new challenges, and in particular for creative teams from around the world to find larger, international audiences. Of course there's a tremendous amount of junk - pretentious, needlessly gruesome and violent, obvious ripoffs - out there, and perhaps in a future post I'll go through some of the many series that we looked at and immediately of after one episode or so abandoned. But for today, here are the Top Ten Miniseries I Watched in 2018, arranged alphabetically:

Babylon Berlin. A tremendously accomplished police-procedural series from Germany, set in the 1930s and brought to life with exquisite period detail, great acting from the leads and a provocative story throughout its 16 episodes, with many plot lines, betrayals, and reversals of fortune.

The Bodyguard. Jed Mercurio's series from the UK is about as intense and compelling as any short series that's come across from Netflix in the past several years, a tense and tight plot with many strands and many surprising twists and a few of the most tense scenes ever involving suicide bombs and assassination attempts against a cabinet member.

Call My Agent, Seasons 1 and 2. This six-part  (per season) series is a really good comic drama about a small but powerful Paris agency representing major French film stars, with the amusing kick that each episode involves a star (or 2) playing himself/herself, often against type - and this series seems to be hinting at an American setting for the next season.

Elite. An eight-part series from Spain about students from different social strata and their complex inter-relations, a high-school drama that is both sympathetic and highly credible (the only comparable series I can recall is the great Friday Night Lights).

Fauda, Season 2. Right up to the last moments of the last (12th) episode in Season 2, the Israeli Netflix series Fauda maintains its tension, excitement, and complexity, holding us from start to finish; this series has been criticized by all sides in the Israel-Arab conflict, which probably means it's doing something right - and it seems to be headed for more of an international plot in Season 3.

Halt and Catch Fire, Seasons 1-4. We're a little late catching up on this one, which depicts the many ups and downs that a close-knit group of techies in Texas (and later in Silicon Valley) experience as they go through various startups and shut-downs throughout the early years of the PC industry and the founding of the Internet.

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Seasons 1 and (so far) 2. Amy Sherman-Palladino's series on Prime, starring the great Rachel Brosnahan in the title role and perfect sidekick Alex Borstein, is a pleasure to watch start to finish, especially for Brosnahan/Maisel's comic routines that continue to surprise and delight us in every episode.

Ozark, Seasons 1 and 2. Jason Bateman's series has become the best crime-drama miniseries of its type since Breaking Bad, as another good guy gets involved with narcotics to help his family, or so he thinks, and ends up putting everyone at risk.

Trapped.  This beautifully photographed 10-part series from Iceland is a murder mystery with many twists and tendrils, as   fishing trawler pulls up a dismembered body in the harbor just as a huge Danish passenger ferry pulls into port, and the local police force - consisting of a chief and 2 beleaguered officers - begins an investigation that leads them down many paths

A Very English Scandal. A 3-part series based on historical events, this is a terrific drama in the mode that we have come to expect from the best of British TV, with terrific writing, acting (with Hugh Grant in the lead), and production values as well as some surprisingly effective against-the-grain decisions, such as the use of a jaunty, upbeat score that at times is so jarringly at odds with the emotional subtext of this series that it brings the project into sharp relief.

And some other contenders include the hilarious American Vandal Season 1, Collateral from the UK, the creepy Homecoming, the German spy drama The Same Sky, and the documentaries Evil Genius and Wild, Wild Country.