10 great TV miniseries of the 1980s

Once upon a tele-time, it was all about single plays, soaps and sitcoms, but in the late 1970s ambitious multi-episode drama series such as Rich Man, Poor Man (1976), Roots (1977) and Jesus of Nazareth (1977) taught audiences to expect more. But when is a TV show a miniseries, a serial, a limited series or a multi-part teleplay? Your guess is as good as ours, as there is seemingly no critical consensus on terminology. Even the Emmys keep changing the name of what is (currently) their Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series category.

The conundrum is encapsulated in the two versions of Maharishi Veda Vyasa’s Sanskrit epic that were broadcast in India and Britain in the 1980s and early 90s. Produced by B.R. Chopra and directed by B.R. and his son, Ravi, Mahabharata (1988 to 1990) ran for 94 episodes lasting 40 to 46 minutes each. By contrast, Peter Brook’s newly restored The Mahabharata (1989) comprises three feature-length episodes – adapted by Brook, Marie-Hélène Estienne and Jean-Claude Carrière from the latter’s nine-hour stage play – totalling 330 minutes.

Size wasn’t everything, however, as some 1980s TV classics, such as the alien invasion drama  V (1983), were only two-parters. Duration and definitions aside, there’s no doubt that the 80s spawned a golden age of predetermined episodic television, with networks racking up viewer numbers that will never be attained again in our era of media convergence. 

Miniseries were made around the world in the 1980s, but in the list below we’re sticking with those that were shown on what, from 1982, were the UK’s four terrestrial channels. The BBC and ITV continued to produce faithful adaptations of literary classics, although serials were no longer confined to Sunday teatimes. Dennis Potter claimed that television was a place where the nation talked to itself, and this was particularly true in a decade of socio-political division that was reflected in sagas in modern and period dress alike. 

We could have included landmarks such as Wagner (1983), Strangers and Brothers (1984), The Beiderbecke Affair (1985), Fortunes of War (1987), A Very British Coup (1988) and Traffik (1989), as well as the 1986 trio of The Monocled Mutineer, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, and Dead Head. But we reckon this selection makes a decent starting point for lively debate.

James Clavell executive produced Paramount Television’s five-part adaptation of his epic 1975 novel, which was inspired by the exploits of 17th-century English navigator William Adams. Clavell’s hero was John Blackthorne (Richard Chamberlain), who comes under the protection of Lord Toranaga (Toshiro Mifune) and his trusted retainer, Lady Mariko (Yoko Shimada), after being blown off course to feudal Japan. The absence of subtitles meant the audience shared Blackthorne’s perspective as he acclimatised to a new culture, and it says much that nearly 33% of US households with televisions tuned in over nine hours with nothing more to guide them than Orson Welles’s occasional narration. 

Filmed exclusively in Japan over six months at a cost of $22 million, the series benefited enormously from the expertise of art director Yoshinobu Nishioka and costume designer Shin Nishida. The 2024 FX version trounced it in terms of awards and avoided its historical inaccuracies, awkward caricatures and white-saviour emphasis. But the original all the same has left a deep cultural imprint.

Much more than a tale of troubled toffs and a teddy bear, this 1981 Granada series transformed screen approaches to Britain’s literary heritage. Produced by Derek Granger, it turned Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel about the impact of God’s grace into an 11-part, all-star drama, which triumphantly overcame the technician strike, schedule conflicts and structural rethinks that cluttered its 42 weeks of shooting.

At its heart is army officer Charles Ryder (Jeremy Irons), who, while billeted at the Baroque Wiltshire home of his 1920s Oxford chum Lord Sebastian Flyte (Anthony Andrews), reflects upon his doomed romance with Flyte’s religious sister, Lady Julia (Diana Quick). The teleplay was credited to John Mortimer, but Granger and director Charles Sturridge rewrote much of it on the hoof after original director Michael Lindsay-Hogg had been forced to withdraw partway through filming. Despised by some for generating a yuppie nostalgia craze during a socio-economic crisis, Brideshead earned seven BAFTAs from 13 nominations and came 10th in the BFI’s 100 Greatest British Television Programmes poll.

Dixie (Tom Georgeson), Chrissie (Michael Angelis), George (Peter Kerrigan), Loggo (Alan Igbon) and Yosser (Bernard Hill) had first appeared in Alan Bleasdale’s Play for Today ‘The Black Stuff’. It had been written and recorded in 1978, when Labour was still presiding over Britain’s economic meltdown. But Margaret Thatcher was in power when it was broadcast in 1980, and her government’s managed decline of Liverpool was subsequently targeted in both Bleasdale’s 1981 Play for Today ‘The Muscle Market’ and 1982 spin-off series Boys from the Blackstuff.

Boys from the Blackstuff offered five harrowingly authentic storylines, outlining how unemployment and poverty had emasculated the tarmac gang members who simply wanted to work. Yosser’s plea “Gizza job!” hit such a raw nerve that the series was repeated on BBC1 just nine weeks after its BBC2 debut. By telling it as it was, Bleasdale had ensured the nation couldn’t look away, and his pugnacious blend of humour, humanity and hope reminded audiences of television’s power to shape the debate.

Colleen McCullough was a laboratory manager at Yale Medical School when she wrote the 1977 bestseller that inspired Daryl Duke’s four-part, decades-spanning miniseries. Plans had been afoot for Herbert Ross to direct Christopher Reeve in a feature adaption of The Thorn Birds, which was then linked with director and actor pairs Peter Weir and Robert Redford and Arthur Hiller and Ryan O’Neal. Ultimately, Richard Chamberlain was cast as Ralph de Bricassart, the Catholic priest whose crisis of faith drives him into the arms of Meggie Cleary (Rachel Ward), whose family had left New Zealand in the 1920s to work the Drogheda sheep station owned by Aunt Mary Carson (Barbara Stanwyck). 

California stood in for the Outback, but it wasn’t the scenery that enticed enormous audiences, in spite of damning reviews. Never had forbidden passion been served up in such a tastefully steamy manner on television, and the show converted six of its 16 Emmy nominations. A sequel, The Thorn Birds: The Missing Years (1996), proved less compelling.

20 years after the publication of his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1951 novel The Caine Mutiny, Herman Wouk topped the bestseller charts with the meticulously researched The Winds of War, which followed fictional US Naval attaché Pug Henry and misguided Jewish academic Aaron Jastrow and their families during the pre-Pearl Harbor phase of World War II. Charging $32 million for the TV rights, Wouk not only wrote the 962-page teleplay, but also took a cameo as the Archbishop of Siena while monitoring a 14-month shoot that required 267 locations for 1,785 scenes. 

Playing the lead, TV debutant Robert Mitchum stood out amongst the 285 speaking parts, with the New York Times declaring him “an imposing battleship”. Director Dan Curtis made astute use of archive footage narrated by William Woodson to place events and characters in context, and 140 million viewers (ignoring the patchy reviews) responded in record-breaking numbers. After the series won three Emmys from 13 nominations, the timeline was completed in followup War and Remembrance (1988).

Having reunited Brief Encounter’s Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson in Staying On (1980), Granada embarked upon this 14-part miniseries based on Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet novels. Filmed on 16mm in subcontinental locations, the action centres on two men who don’t fit into Raj society, Hari Kumar (Art Malik) and Ronald Merrick (Tim Pigott-Smith), and how their travails play out against the backdrop of the end of empire. 

Pigott-Smith won a BAFTA, as did Peggy Ashcroft in a Best Actress category that exclusively contained co-stars Susan Wooldridge, Geraldine James and Judy Parfitt. Salman Rushdie accused the series of following Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi (1982) and David Lean’s A Passage to India (1984) in perpetuating “Raj revisionism”. But there’s no nostalgia here, just an unflinching depiction of clashing cultures. Its success prompted Channel Four to back Peter Duffell’s stellar take on M.M. Kaye’s tale of Victorian derring-do, The Far Pavilions (1984).

Would this political thriller still be feted if writer Troy Kennedy Martin had insisted on his original idea to turn his hero into a tree at the end? Who knows, but Martin Campbell would certainly not have later directed a Hollywood remake starring Mel Gibson. Inspired by Anglo-American military-industrial and nuclear policies and James Lovelock’s Gaia theories, the six episodes follow Yorkshire copper Ronald Craven (Bob Peck) as he uncovers a twisted skein of conspiracies and cover-ups while trying to establish the motive for the murder of his student environmentalist daughter (Joanne Whalley). 

Scored by Eric Clapton and Michael Kamen, and with scene-stealing support from Joe Don Baker as a CIA operative, the storyline melded the mystic and the mythical with a zeitgeisty realism that made it chillingly plausible. Yet, Edge of Darkness is as much about grief as skulduggery, while nothing since has matched its audacious oddness. The fastest repeated series in BBC history, it won six BAFTAs from 11 nominations and to this day retains both its reputation and its relevance.

In striving to present “what goes on inside people’s heads”, Dennis Potter always sought to get under the audience’s skin. Television’s most fearless writer used his own experience of psoriatic arthritis to that end in this six-part landmark, which Stephen King called “the Citizen Kane of the mini-series”. 

Hospitalised with an acute skin condition, pulp novelist Philip Marlow (Michael Gambon) is beset by juvenile memories, plot strands and fever dreams, whose Edenic and Oedipal undertones fuel a debate about whether we control our own destinies or are the product of myriad colliding influences. Director Jon Amiel refused Potter’s non-naturalist gambit to shoot the ward scenes on video, the Chandleresque pastiches on film and the childhood recollections in monochrome. But Amiel integrated the lip-synched songs from the 1930s and 40s so that the lyrics offered clues to Marlow’s psychosis. The performances are impeccable, dwarfing those in the 2003 feature version starring Robert Downey Jr. 

Robert Altman considered this political mockumentary the creative highlight of his career. Combining scripted scenes, group improvisations and chance happenstances, the 11 episodes follow liberal former Michigan congressman Jack Tanner (Michael Murphy) in his bid to beat Jesse Jackson and Michael Dukakis to the Democratic nomination for the 1988 presidential election. 

Anticipating the strategies of reality television, show creator (and Doonesbury cartoonist) Garry Trudeau presented Tanner ’88 from the perspective of the candidate, his family, his campaign team and the pursuing press pack, as an early shift in the show’s approach saw reactive topical satire supplant pre-conceived set-pieces. Several political figures featured, including Bruce Babbitt, Gary Hart and Bob Dole, while the likes of Waylon Jennings and Rebecca De Mornay took knowing cameos. Aaron Sorkin acknowledged this experiment in tele-vérité as an influence on The West Wing (1999 to 2006), while Altman and Trudeau reconvened for followup miniseries Tanner on Tanner (2004) and Murphy guested in character in Martin Scorsese’s Bob Dylan documentary Rolling Thunder Revue (2019).

Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1985 bestseller Lonesome Dove was woven around an idea for an unrealised 1971 western that he and Peter Bogdanovich had been writing for John Wayne, Henry Fonda and James Stewart. Partly inspired by the exploits of his rancher uncle, McMurtry’s text also recalled the epic cattle drives of Nelson Story and Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving. These were the models for Lonesome Dove’s former Texas Rangers Captain Augustus McCrae and Captain Woodrow F. Call, who decide to take 1,000 stolen Texas Longhorns over 2,100 miles to Montana in the late 1870s. 

William D. Wittliff turned the 843-page novel into a 373-page teleplay, which required 16 weeks and $20 million to shoot the 384 minutes of action that depicted the unrelenting realities of frontier life. Immaculately played by a stellar cast including Robert Duvall as McCrae and Tommy Lee Jones as Call, the four-parter won seven Emmys from 19 nominations. By honouring and revising genre conventions, it restored the status of the small-screen western. 

The Mahabharata is out now as a BFI two-disc Blu-ray edition.