The Best Miniseries, TV Movies, and Specials of 2018

by Jason Dietz, Metacritic Features Editor – December 29, 2018

Above are the 20 highest-scoring special TV programs—including "limited" series, made-for-TV-movies, and one-off specials—debuting in the United States between January 1, 2018 and December 31, 2018. Titles are ranked by Metascore (an average of grades from top professional critics on a 0-100 scale) prior to rounding, and any programs with fewer than 7 reviews are excluded. (Looking for the best regular TV series of 2018? Those are ranked in a separate list.)

Note that Netflix original films (such as Roma and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs) generally open in at least a few theaters prior to (or in conjunction with) their streaming debuts, and are excluded here. (They will be eligible for our Best Movies of 2018 list instead.)

12 of 21 photo by Netflix

Netflix's captivating, stranger-than-fiction documentary miniseries is produced by the Duplass brothers and traces guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh's failed attempts (despite spending over $100 million) to build a 64,000-acre utopian city in the Oregon desert in the early 1980s. Local residents weren't happy about the sudden influx of outsiders, and the resulting conflicts began with the largest-ever biochemical terrorist attack on U.S. soil—and only got wilder and more intense from there. Directors Maclain and Chapman Way unearthed a trove of home movies—which they supplement with often surprising present-day interviews—to trace the rise and fall of the Rajneeshpuram movement.

“It’s a challenging piece that requires the viewer to acknowledge their own reactions and then question them. In that, Wild Wild Country may be even more vital to a divided nation. It demands you see the other side.” —Ben Travers, IndieWire

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