Five modern TV shows that would have worked better as movies
In the modern streaming TV era, how often have you sat down to watch the latest miniseries or first season of a new show, only to find yourself mildly bored after a couple of episodes? If you’re anything like me, the answer to that question is, “All the damn time”.
These days, the relentless amount of streaming services are constantly pumping out shows with big stars and hooky premises. Most of them are between six and eight episodes long, and they promise to tell one compelling story throughout that timeframe.
The problem I’ve noticed more times than I’d care to count in the last few years, though, is that many of these miniseries and first seasons don’t have enough material to sustain interest across their episodes. Half the time, even if I wind up finishing the season, I think something along the lines of “They could’ve cut two episodes out of that” or, even more frequently, “That would’ve worked better as a two-hour movie.”
It’s no secret that, back in the 1990s or the 2000s, when the cinematic landscape was different, many of these miniseries likely would have been made as movies. However, the market for crime dramas, comedies, and romances has almost exclusively shifted to TV now, and I don’t feel it’s the natural habitat for some of the stories that are being told.
Before continuing, I should probably clarify that I’m specifically thinking of miniseries and shorter season shows for this list. Old school shows like The X-Files, Sex and the City, and 24, or even more modern ones such as Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, and Dexter, were calibrated for the television medium, with premises designed to be told in episodic instalments that could theoretically run for as long as the creators/networks needed them to. These shows, whether they were good or not, were always intended to be TV experiences, not movie pitches that wound up on TV because there were no other options…so don’t hunt me down on social media to complain!
So, without further ado, here are my picks for five modern TV shows I’m convinced would have worked better as movies.
Five TV shows that should have been movies:
‘Adolescence’ (2025)
Netflix’s Adolescence was released to incredible acclaim in March 2025, and for good reason.
The series, which explored the story of a 13-year-old boy arrested on suspicion of murdering a female classmate, was one of the most starkly emotional series released in years. It featured great performances from Stephen Graham and Erin Doherty, in addition to a revelatory turn from Owen Cooper as the angry young boy whose views on women have been warped by social media and online misogyny.
When I watched Adolescence, though, I couldn’t help feeling like it was a scintillating two-hour film trapped in an unnecessary four-hour TV format. It started brilliantly, too, as the first episode is arguably a modern television classic, and undoubtedly the best use of the show’s ‘one take’ gimmick. It grabs the viewer by the throat and doesn’t let go for an hour, as we follow Jamie being arrested and taken into the police station for questioning. It’s tense, harrowing, thrilling stuff.
However, the series only hits anywhere close to those heights once more. This comes in the third episode, which is all about Jamie being interviewed by a forensic psychologist. Episodes two and four, by contrast, have good material within them, but are hamstrung by everything needing to take place in one continuous shot. It eventually becomes distracting instead of engrossing, which detracts from the excellence of episodes one and three. Condensing it all into a two-hour film would, in my opinion, accentuate the series’ strengths and minimise its weaknesses, leading to a much better whole.
‘The Bear’ (2022-present)
Honesty, I really liked The Bear during its first season. It felt fresh, new, and invigorating, and took viewers into a world they knew little about. Over the course of those eight half-hour episodes, we got to know Carmy, Richie, Sydney and the rest of the employees at The Beef, and were treated to the uniquely stressful pressure cooker that is working in a professional kitchen. Along the way, there were laughs, tears, emotional outbursts, and many, many panicked screams of the words “Cousin!” and “Yes, chef!”
In season two, though, something strange happened. All of a sudden, The Bear seemed to get high on its own supply. Episodes became longer, celebrity guest stars began turning up with alarming regularity, and it all took a marked turn toward melodrama. This hit me most heavily during the sixth episode, “Fishes”, one of the most histrionic, scarcely believable 66 minutes of TV I’ve ever had the displeasure to sit through. Naturally, because it featured a ton of yelling, crying, and characters feeling things very loudly, it won a whole bunch of Emmys. I, on the other hand, sat there with my arms folded, a sulky look on my face, knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that The Bear had jumped the shark.
Ultimately, I stuck with the show until two or three episodes into the third season, when it struck me that I didn’t care anymore. The characters seemed to be stuck in TV stasis, making the same mistakes over and over again, with only some fancy filmmaking to distract the audience. At this point, I realised if The Bear had been a movie that told its story in 120 minutes and then never bothered me again, I’d have liked it a whole lot more. Sorry, chef.
‘The Outsider’ (2020)
In 2020, Jason Bateman directed the first two episodes of HBO’s The Outsider, a grim horror-tinged crime drama based on a novel by Stephen King. These episodes were prestige TV to a tee, with great performances, an intriguing mystery, and, best of all, an atmosphere that practically pulsed with dread at all times. By the end of the second episode, the hints of the supernatural that had been slowly introduced were compelling as hell, and I was completely on board for the rest of the season.
Unfortunately, The Outsider never quite lived up to those first two stellar episodes, although it was still a pretty darn good watch until about episode six. The problem was that HBO had ordered 10 episodes, which meant that showrunner Richard Price had to elaborate on King’s book rather than condense it to fit within a shorter run of episodes—or, indeed, the two-hour timeframe of a movie.
The longer The Outsider went on, and the more that was unearthed about the core mystery, the more the reveal that the culprit was a shape-shifting monster began to feel silly. If anything, it wound up being overexplained, whereas if the show had been a movie, there would have been less time to hold the audience’s hand. Thusly, they wouldn’t have questioned things as intently because they would have been too swept up in the scary narrative to care about little things like logic and credibility.
‘Loki’ (2021-23)
When it was announced that the Marvel Cinematic Universe would be stretching its tendrils into TV via the Disney+ streaming service, nerds everywhere rejoiced. Finally, they said, characters from the movies that didn’t truly get their chance to shine could now show their worth in shows that gave actors and writers more storytelling real estate to work with. What could possibly go wrong? Well, everything. Absolutely everything.
As of 2025, even the most die-hard Marvel fan would have to admit the TV experiment has been a failure, even if its produced the odd good episode here and there. After debuting fairly strongly with WandaVision, which actually felt like a TV show, the MCU shows quickly revealed what they really were: six-episode shows that played out like four-hour movies, with episode breaks arbitrarily crowbarred in at inopportune moments. Marvel arrogantly thought it could apply its movie formula to TV, but the studio’s hubris left it with a succession of boring, uninspired, and cheap-looking shows (The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Hawkeye, Moon Knight, Secret Invasion, Echo) instead.
However, there was one show that I’d argue would have made a great movie. The first season of Loki, starring Tom Hiddleston as the titular God of Mischief and Owen Wilson as his erstwhile sidekick Mobius, was pretty fun, and it had some genuinely intriguing concepts underpinning it. Sadly, there was a lot of dead air mixed in with the compelling elements, but had the Marvel executives come to their senses and released it as a streamlined feature film, it would have solved most of those issues.
‘Hijack’ (2023)
Ah, Hijack. Never have I watched a television show that more obviously felt like a feature film endlessly, torturously elongated into seven episodes of repetitive nonsense than this 2023 AppleTV+ Idris Elba vehicle. The show cast Elba as a business negotiator trapped on a flight hijacked by terrorists who must use his excellent mediation skills to navigate a safe outcome for everyone involved. Does this sound like a premise that can sustain a seven-hour runtime? No. But does this sound like a recipe for a tense, thrilling film? Maybe.
Instead, Hijack plays out like the dullest, most predictable version of a ’90s action thriller you could ever imagine. It never crafts any legitimate tension, and each episode crawls by at a snail’s pace as the audience waits for something – anything – to happen that will entice them to watch the next episode.
The performances are serviceable at best, half-assed at worst, with the usually reliable Neil Maskell being left up shit creek without a paddle by some truly dismal writing. Elba also spends the whole thing looking like he’d rather be doing the dishes, and the cinematography makes everything, even the open streets and office buildings of London, look like it was shot in an all-white Apple store with sickly fluorescent lighting tubes overhead. It’s all pretty awful and unlikely to ever be good, but it would certainly have been mildly preferable in two-hour form.
