Top 11 Shows You Can Finish in Less Than 6 Hours

There is a specific kind of relief in starting a show and knowing you will be done with it tonight. No sixty-episode commitment, no drop-off in season three, and no cliffhanger left dangling because someone cancelled it. The eleven shows on this list are complete stories that run under six hours from start to finish.

Some are barely half that. The ranking below is based on how well each one uses its short runtime, and whether the ending earns the hours you gave it.

11 Behind Her Eyes Saves Its Wildest Twist for the Final Minutes

Where to Watch: Netflix

For most of its duration, Behind Her Eyes plays like a fairly ordinary affair drama. Louise is a single mum who sleeps with her new boss, then accidentally becomes best friends with his wife. For four episodes, you are convinced you know what kind of show this is.

You are so wrong. The ending caused genuine uproar when it landed on Netflix, and the slower middle stretch is worth sitting through to reach it. It has six episodes, just under five hours, and we prefer you go in knowing nothing at all.

10 Collateral Gives Carey Mulligan a National Scandal to Solve

Where to Watch: Netflix

Four episodes of Collateral, totaling three hours and 50 minutes, cover four days in London. A pizza delivery driver is shot dead in the street, and DI Kip Glaspie, played by Carey Mulligan, refuses to write it off as a random case of violence.

What she pulls at runs through people smuggling, MI5, a sitting MP, and an army captain. David Hare wrote every episode, so the dialogue is sharper than most crime dramas manage. It is the tightest show on this list, with no filler and no subplot that goes nowhere.

9 The Little Drummer Girl Turns Florence Pugh Into a Reluctant Spy

Where to Watch: AMC+, Prime Video

Park Chan-wook directed his first television series here, shooting 1979 Europe in colours you rarely see on the small screen. In The Little Drummer Girl, Charlie, played by Florence Pugh, is a struggling actress recruited by Israeli intelligence to work her way inside a Palestinian cell. The events play out more morally gray than the premise promises.

It runs for six episodes, about five hours and 45 minutes, and every frame of it looks composed. Charlie’s cover is a role, and the longer she performs it, the less certain she is of who she actually is. It is a bit slower than the rest but covers it up with the best-looking visuals.

8 Death by Lightning Turns Our Attention to a Forgotten Presidency

Where to Watch: Netflix

In its four episodes, spanning three hours and 32 minutes, Death by Lightning tells the story of a president most people could not name. James Garfield barely wanted the job. Charles Guiteau wanted it more than anything. Michael Shannon and Matthew Macfadyen play the two men.

Macfadyen makes the assassin a delusional hanger-on who is funny right up until he is not. The Game of Thrones producers are behind it, but there is nothing epic here. It shows a rotten political system and the doctors who finished what Guiteau started.

7 Black Bird Sends Taron Egerton Into a Cell With a Killer

Where to Watch: Apple TV

Taron Egerton‘s Jimmy Keene is a convicted dealer handed a deal in Black Bird. He has to transfer to a maximum-security psychiatric prison, befriend suspected serial killer Larry Hall, and come back with a confession.

Paul Walter Hauser plays Hall, the serial killer with a soft near-whisper that is far more disturbing than any amount of shouting. He won an Emmy for the role. Dennis Lehane created the series. The long conversations between the two men carry the entire thing for six episodes and five hours.

6 Alias Grace Is the Margaret Atwood Adaptation Everyone Skipped

Where to Watch: Netflix

This show is just six episodes and under five hours, but almost overlooked by mass viewers. Alias Grace, based on Margaret Atwood’s novel of the same name, arrived just months after The Handmaid’s Tale and got buried. Sarah Gadon plays Grace Marks, a real Irish servant convicted of murder in 1843 Canada.

She tells her story to a doctor who cannot work out whether she is innocent, guilty, or simply giving him the performance he wants. The show never decides either, which is the point. The excellent show is written by Sarah Polley and directed by American Psycho director Mary Harron.

5 When They See Us Is the Hardest Watch on This List

Where to Watch: Netflix

While this show is only four episodes, you will want a gap between them. Ava DuVernay tells the story of the Central Park Five, the teenagers pressured into confessing to a 1989 attack they had nothing to do with, and the years that swallowed them afterwards.

The fourth episode, following Korey Wise into adult prison, is the single toughest hour of When They See Us. Jharrel Jerome won an Emmy for it. It is a difficult watch, but not one to skip.

4 We Own This City Hands Jon Bernthal a Badge and No Rules

Where to Watch: HBO Max

The six episodes of this crime drama come from David Simon and George Pelecanos. Two decades on from The Wire, they went back to Baltimore for the true story of the Gun Trace Task Force, a police unit that spent years robbing the people it was supposed to protect.

In We Own This City, Jon Bernthal plays Sergeant Wayne Jenkins as a man fully convinced he is the hero of the story. It is angrier and faster than The Wire, and it never pretends anything got fixed.

3 Baby Reindeer Is Not the Stalker Story You Are Expecting

Where to Watch: Netflix

Under three and a half hours, Baby Reindeer is the shortest watch here. Richard Gadd writes and stars as a version of himself, a struggling comedian who hands a crying woman a free cup of tea and spends the next several years being stalked by her.

The stalking is not really the subject, though. The show is far more interested in why he kept replying, and episode four goes somewhere most series would avoid entirely.

2 Adolescence‘s 13-Year-Old Suspect Scares You More

Where to Watch: Netflix

Each of the four episodes of this show is filmed in a single unbroken take. In Adolescence, Owen Cooper’s 13-year-old boy is arrested for the murder of a classmate. Through the police raid, the interview room, the school, and everything after, the camera simply refuses to look away.

Cooper, in his first-ever acting job, is genuinely frightening opposite Erin Doherty in episode three. Stephen Graham plays the father trying to understand the situation around him. The one-take approach could have been a cheap show, but instead it traps you.

1 Chernobyl Remains the Most Devastating Five Hours on Television

Where to Watch: HBO Max

Five episodes, just over five hours, and nothing else on this list uses that time better. Craig Mazin rebuilds the 1986 reactor explosion and the months that followed. Chernobyl shows firemen handling debris they did not understand, miners digging beneath a melting core, and officials repeating a number they knew was wrong.

Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgård, and Emily Watson lead this stellar show. It is bleak, but it is also about ordinary people doing impossible work, and it never wastes a minute.

Which of these are you starting tonight? Let us know in the comments below!