From "The Sopranos" to "Sex and the City", from "Six Feet Under" to "Succession," HBO is home to some of the greatest series of all time, many of which have changed and shaped modern-day TV as we know it. Given the popularity and influence of those HBO shows, they get rewatched on the regular. (Heck, it seems like there's always a binge-ready marathon of Carrie Bradshaw's romantic antics playing on a nearby screen.)
But that means that you might have forgotten about some of the network's other, equally great dramas, which are more than overdue for a rewatch. We're talking a Riz Ahmed-led thriller drama, a Prohibition-era crime saga starring Steve Buscemi and a Southern-gothic vampire epic with seven delightfully smutty seasons.
If you're looking for a show to dig your fangs into (pun intended), here are three classic HBO dramas that you should revisit ASAP.
'The Night Of'
Long before Riz Ahmed was leading the acclaimed Prime Video series "Bait," he was getting great critical notice in the 2016 HBO miniseries "The Night Of," which won the Brit the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series.
Written by Richard Price and Steven Zaillian, the eight-part crime drama sees Ahmed play Nasir "Naz" Khan, a Pakistani-American college student accused of murdering a woman on the Upper West Side of New York City after waking up from a night of partying to find her stabbed to death and with no memory of what took place. With John Turturro as his lawyer, John Stone, Naz's story tensely unravels over eight episodes, equal parts whodunnit mystery, character study and social commentary on the institutional failures of the American justice system.
Watch "The Night Of" on HBO Max now
'True Blood'
From "Bridgerton" to "Heated Rivalry" to "The Hunting Wives," we're in a bit of a golden age of smutty TV, but before all of those steamy shows, there was "True Blood," HBO's campy vampire drama that served up as much horniness as it did horror.
Based on Charlaine Harris's "The Southern Vampire Mysteries novels," the seven-season series takes place in small-town Bon Temps, Louisiana in the near future — when the existence of synthetic blood allows vampires to "come out of the coffin" and live among normal alive folk — and centers on telepathic waitress Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin), whose feelings for 174-year-old vampire Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer) leaves her navigating not only romance and intimacy (and yes, of the very graphic sort), but also supernatural politics, dark mysteries and more.
Watch "True Blood" on HBO Max now
'Boardwalk Empire'
No, "The Sopranos" isn't HBO's only stellar New Jersey mob drama. There's also, of course, "Boardwalk Empire," which brings all of that organized criminal activity to Atlantic City in the 1920s and '30s. We pick up at the dawn of Prohibition with Enoch "Nucky" Thompson (Steve Buscemi), the corrupt treasurer of Atlantic County and a part-time bootlegger, who, over the course of five seasons, builds a lucrative empire that finds him navigating dangerous alliances with violent mobsters while dodging federal agents relentlessly poking around his illegal activities.
With episodes directed by Martin Scorsese and a stacked cast that includes Michael Shannon, Kelly Macdonald, Michael K. Williams, Michael Stuhlbarg, Stephen Graham, Jeffrey Wright, Gretchen Mol and Bobby Cannavale, among others, this is a truly prestige-packed period piece.
Watch "Boardwalk Empire" on HBO Max now
