25 HBO Max Originals: There is something very specific about an HBO original: not the biggest or the loudest show necessarily. Sometimes it is not even the show everyone remembers until someone says its name some years later and suddenly you go “oh my goodness, that show was something!” without even realising.
HBO Max Originals
The reaction itself might be the charm of HBO Max shows because it has always had a slightly strange relationship with television. It could make something glossy and expensive, and immediately make something deeply unhinged. It could give us prestige drama, college comedy, animated existentialism, true crime, superheroes, pirates and a woman trying to escape the creepiest home.
All of it can even come in a single gasp, and somewhere amidst all of the chaos, the platform itself has developed a personality.
These are 25 HBO Max shows that capture the energy; not necessarily the best 25. This is not a ranking chart of sorts, or a list designed to turn television into holiday homework. These are just 25 shows that in their own little ways explain what made HBO Max feel like HBO Max.
Is Messy a Genre?
There are a few HBO Max shows that have made messy feel like a genre itself. Here is a curated list: from Hacks to Search Party, we have covered them all.
Hacks
Hacks is about comedy on the outer shell, but really it is about what happens when two women from completely different generations realise they might actually need each other.
Jean Smart’s Deborah Vance is slightly difficult, funny, terrifying and occasionally heartbreaking, while Ava is a younger, messier woman carrying her own ideas about what comedy should be. Their relationship works because neither of the two is treated as completely right.
It is a show about ego, ageing, ambition and the terrifying possibility of someone being just “irrelevant”… Boom!
The Sex Lives of College Girls
While the title can seem ridiculous, the show is not. The Sex Lives of College Girls understands that college is not actually one long party like the show bizz presents. It is friendship, insecurity, sex, money, identity, loneliness, bad decisions and pretending you know what you are doing when you yourself do not know.
The best part is that the girls are allowed to be messy without becoming “moral lessons”. It depicts a larger idea of “sometimes people are just messy, especially at college.
And Just Like That…
And Just Like That… is not simply nostalgia television but is about what happens when people who once thought they understood adulthood keep changing the rules.
Carrie is now older, the city seems different, and so do the friendships. The clothes do a lot of talking, and sometimes the show makes choices that make you stare at the screen and whisper, “Why?”
The Other Two
The premise is wonderfully stupid: two struggling siblings watch their much younger brother become famous almost overnight.
The Other Two uses the setup to talk about something very painful but real. What happens when everyone around you seems to be succeeding and when you love someone but are also jealous of them?
It is a comedy about envy that never forgets how embarrassing envy is.
Search Party
Search Party begins with a missing-person mystery that keeps going on and on and on and somehow becomes a story about narcissism, friendship, privilege, social performance and the consequences of treating your own life like a TV show.
Dory is one of the characters who makes you want to scream into the TV and stop her, but she obviously does not.
Some Shows Were Unhinged: Post Merger Scenes
HBO Max shows have not shied away from being unhinged. There are emotions: sometimes loud, and that is what makes these shows a little too special.
Peacemaker
There is something beautifully stupid about Peacemaker that keeps you hooked.
James Gunn took a deeply questionable superhero character and somehow made him emotionally compelling without sanding away the ridiculousness. There is something immature about Christopher Smith, who can be violent and does not seem to be able to process his feelings.
This is precisely why the moments when he feels something hit harder.
Doom Patrol
Doom Patrol is what happens when superhero television stops caring about looking “cool”. They are damaged people with amazingly bizarre powers and more bizarre emotional baggage.
The show could be gross, hilarious, surreal and unexpectedly sincere within a single episode. The show understood that superpowers independently can usually be the least interesting thing about people; the trauma is where the story lives.
Harley Quinn
This show has always been funny, but it also understood that Harley Quinn could be deeply and wonderfully unhinged.
The animated series takes Gotham’s familiar characters and throws them into a blender: Harley gets to exist outside any shadow; Poison Ivy gets her own emotional life.
It is violent, profane and ridiculous while being surprisingly good at talking about relationships, which is perhaps the most Gotham thing imaginable.
Raised by Wolves
There are shows where you eventually give up explaining the plot to anyone, and Raised by Wolves belongs to that category.
It was strange in a way streaming television does not always allow itself to be anymore.
Velma
Not necessarily a very well-rated one, Velma is a show about a character most people already knew, reimagined into something crude and chaotic that the Scooby-Doo universe generally allows.
It was divisive, and perhaps that is also worth remembering when talking about the HBO Max shows. Not every show needs to be globally loved to become a part of the platform’s identity; sometimes it is memorable because everyone had an opinion about it.
Some Shows Turned Darkness Into Television
It is often said that people watch shows to escape from “reality” and feel at peace, but there are certain shows that put out darkness on television.
The kind of darkness that is deliciously addictive.
The Flight Attendant
The Flight Attendant has a murder mystery, a hotel room, a hangover, a dead man, and a woman whose coping mechanisms are weird.
The show has the very “HBO Max ability” to take a thriller premise and make it feel a little glossy, whimsical, slightly chaotic and completely bingeable.
The Staircase
The Staircase is a true-crime show less interested in giving you a neat answer than in sitting inside the uncertainty.
It explores a family, a death, and a trial and the uncomfortable distance in sitting inside the uncertainty. It is claustrophobic television with an intention.
Love & Death
Another true-crime, another murder and a nightmare hiding behind the normal-looking houses. Love & Death takes the familiar American suburban aesthetic and makes it feel sinister.
The horror is that the people do not necessarily live in some “obviously dangerous world”.
The Way Down
The Way Down explores the complicated relationship between religion, wealth, influence and control.
What makes the documentary particularly unsettling is how familiar some of the machinery feels: charisma becomes authority, authority becomes money, money transforms into power, and suddenly a community built around belief can become something much more complicated.
Tokyo Vice
Tokyo Vice had Tokyo at night, organised crime, and long conversations where you know something terrible is probably about to happen. The series feels like it is constantly walking two steps ahead of you.
It is less interested in rushing toward the next twist and more in building a world you can get lost in.
Genre Was Also a Playground
Some shows somehow made genre feel less like a strict “genre” and more like a playground.
Our Flag Means Death
It is a pirate comedy that becomes a story about love, identity and finding a version of yourself you actually like.
Our Flag Means Death looked a little ridiculous but incredibly tender. Somewhere between the wigs, swords and absurdity, the show created a romance people genuinely cared about.
Pretty Little Liars
The original Pretty Little Liars was built around secrets, while Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin understood that the secret formula could be taken to a darker place.
The latter version leaned into horror, violence and the teenage experience as something genuinely frightening rather than merely dramatic.
It is glossy and occasionally horrifying.
Gossip Girl
The 2021 Gossip Girl had an impossible job because how do you remake a show whose entire cultural identity was built around a very specific version of 2000s wealth, teenage scandal and anonymous blogging? The relevance itself was being in the late 2000s.
But the world was made messier in the reboot with an understanding of surveillance in the social-media-era, reputation and popularity.
Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake
Fionna and Cake takes familiar characters and turns them into a multiverse story about identity and self-discovery. It is technically a spin-off; emotionally, an initiation to revisit a world you thought you had outgrown.
But you eventually realise that you are still very well there.
Made for Love
Okay, now… imagine yourself being trapped in a marriage where your husband has literally implanted a device to monitor every single move of yours! Dark?
That is Made for Love. The show takes the language of technology and turns it into a story about control, autonomy and what happens when intimacy is surveillance.
It seems funny until you really think about it; it then gets terrifying.
HBO Max Can Be Weirdly Comforting
There is something about HBO Max shows. They are a part of every TV lover and each such person would also have a “favourite”. There is also something particularly comforting about some HBO Max shows that is undefinable.
Julia
Julia is a TV show about cooking that is however, a television show about television secretly.
The protagonist’s story becomes a story about women entering spaces that were not necessarily built for them (women in a male-dominant field just got real here), about personas and about what happens when someone refuses to be embarrassed because of their enthusiasm.
Selena + Chef
Sometimes television does not need a complicated premise; it just needs Selena Gomez to cook. The beauty of the show was in watching someone who was not pretending to be a professional chef learn.
There were mistakes nd chaos while famous chefs tried to explain things through a screen.
Bookie
Bookie takes the very LA idea of professional gambling and turns it into a comedy about people constantly trying to clean up problems they caused themselves.
It is messy, fast and unserious.
Conan O’Brien Must Go
Conan O’Brien travelling around the world and essentially being allowed to bother the strangers is a very specific kind of television energy that brings a delicious joy.
Conan O’Brien Must Go works perhaps because Conan does not pretend to be the coolest in the whole wide world; he seems happy being weird, and something is refreshing about watching a celebrity whose entire appeal comes from being willing to make himself weird. The official trailer for the third season is on YouTube.
Station Eleven
The show has a very HBO Max energy. It is neither loud nor chaotic. It is about memory, art, grief, performance. The show is about strange things humans preserve when everything else disappears and, perhaps most importantly, the question of “what really makes life worth continuing?” and the answer that we get is “people”.
What Do These Shows Tell Us About HBO Max
Perhaps the real HBO Max genre was never comedy or drama or science fiction; it was perhaps specificity.
The connective tissue is not the subject; the personality is. These shows were allowed to be strange little things, and perhaps that is what made HBO Max shows so fun to follow. Streaming has spent a lot of time trying to convince us that the next big thing must be an event, but sometimes the shows that stay with you are smaller than that.
They are weird, oddly specific, sometimes chaotic and comforting.
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