Many of the greatest TV series of all time—from Oz to The Sopranos to Game of Thrones and beyond— were born on HBO Max (well, HBO). The renowned premium cable network-turned streaming service is still pumping them out, making it harder than ever to decide what to watch.
If you’re looking for a show that you can get through in a single weekend, I’ve got three picks that you’re bound to love.
3
The Penguin
With only a couple of weeks to go before they hand out the hardware at the 77th Emmy Awards, there’s still time for you to binge season one of The Penguin, the second-most nominated show of the year, with a whopping 24 nominations. Two of those nods are well-earned by The Batman spinoff’s two lead actors: Colin Farrell, who is chillingly unrecognizable as Oswald “Oz” Cobb, aka The Pengiun, and the brilliant Cristin Milioti as the deadly and underestimated crime boss, Sofia Falcone. The series is worth watching for their performances alone.
The story picks up where 2022’s film The Batman left off, and follows Oz as his obsessive ambition to climb to the top has him dangerously playing both sides of the city’s warring crime families, the Falcones and Maronis. But it’s Sofia’s ambition that Oz really has to worry about. Fresh out of Arkham Asylum, the traumatized daughter of Carmine is cunning, dangerous, a bit unhinged, and poses a serious threat to Oz’s plans.
Milioti chews up every scene she’s in, which is no easy feat when sharing the screen with Farrell, who endured a three-hour makeup routine with prosthetics and a full bodysuit to play the iconic DC villain. Shot with a cohesive, darker aesthetic, in line with Matt Reeves’ Batman film, The Penguin isn’t your daddy’s top-hat-and-monacle-wearing comic book Penguin, but a whole new breed.
2
The Pitt
Noah Wyle’s John Carter was by far my favorite ER character (suck it, Clooney). So when I heard that the actor was returning to the world of hospital dramas in The Pitt, and the team behind ER was responsible for its creation to boot, I was in like an intubation tube (I’ve clearly watched a lot of this stuff).
I love this show on HBO Max because it gets to provide a much more realistic look inside the breakneck, brutal, and often dire world of a busy hospital emergency room than network shows like ER or Grey’s Anatomy ever could.
Wylie plays Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, the chief attending doctor in the trauma ward of the fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center, aka The Pitt. Much of the show’s realism can be attributed to its 15 one-hour episodes, which take place in real-time over the course of a single, exhausting 15-hour shift in the ER.
Season one not only introduces us to Robby’s veteran team, who perform miracles, but also a group of young residents, some on their first shifts in the ER, who get thrown into chaos when a shooting at a music festival floods the department with victims. It’s bloody, intense, emotional, and produced with such attention to detail that you’ll be left exhausted and in awe of them and the real-life medical professionals who do this every day.
It’s been 26 years since Noah Wyle was last nominated for an Emmy for his most famous role as ER‘s John Carter, for which he was nominated five times. This year, he’s up against Gary Oldman, Pedro Pascal, and Adam Scott. Fingers crossed for Dr. Robby.
1
Chernobyl
It may not be the most cheerful show to binge over the course of a weekend, but I guarantee that you won’t be able to tear yourself away from HBO’s acclaimed five-part miniseries Chernobyl. Created by The Last of Us writer/creator Craig Mazin, the haunting series is a dramatic depiction of the worst nuclear disaster in human history, the meltdown of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Soviet Ukraine in 1986. The show opens by taking viewers inside the plant on the night of the event.
The disaster unleashed tons of nuclear radiation into the atmosphere, a fact that Soviet chemist Valery Legasov (Jared Harris) puts into perspective to Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev by telling him that “It’s giving out the equivalent radiation of two Hiroshima bombs every hour!”
Harris’ performance is chilling to the bone as Legasov, the man charged with handling the travesty, navigates Soviet propaganda, politics, and the gruesome effects the radiation is having on the citizens of the nearby town of Pripyat. Stellan Skarsgård also stars as Soviet Deputy Prime Minister Boris Shcherbina, who butts heads with Legasov as the man in charge of the government’s response to the disaster.
When the show aired in 2019, it was acclaimed for its stark realism and performances, but it was also controversial, prompting conversations and even arguments about its portrayal of Soviet Russia, socialism, and even the realities of nuclear physics. Chernobyl is a must-watch series if you’re at all interested in dramatizations of major historical events. It’s a good thing that it’s just five episodes, because it’s an intense, but worthwhile, ride.
HBO Max is the home of some of the best TV series of all time. And even if you don’t go for any of the streamer’s most recent shows, like The Last of Us, Peacemaker, or The White Lotus, this well runs so deep that you’re not likely to run out of older things to watch.
- Subscription with ads
-
Yes, $10/month
- Simultaneous streams
-
2 or 4