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If The Night Manager left you with a very specific cravingsleek suspense, bruised people in expensive coats, secrets layered on secrets, and Olivia Colman quietly acting harder than should be legally allowedyou are not alone. Some shows end and leave a hole. Others end and leave a dramatic crater shaped like a morally complicated intelligence operation. The good news is that Olivia Colman has spent years building an outrageously strong catalog of dramas that scratch a similar itch, even when they don’t look identical on the surface.
And yes, the word “underrated” is doing a little dramatic work here. A few of these titles were critically adored. But compared with the way people endlessly recommend The Night Manager, these Olivia Colman performances still deserve more binge-watch love, more late-night group-chat praise, and more “why did nobody force me to watch this sooner?” energy.
What makes Colman so addictive in drama is not just that she can cry on cue or stare into the middle distance like a world-class professional feeler of feelings. It’s that she makes contradictions look natural. She can be warm and terrifying, funny and shattered, practical and barely holding it together. One minute she is the emotional center of a story; the next, she is the grenade with perfect manners. That range is exactly why these nine dramas are worth your time.
1. Broadchurch
Why it belongs on this list
If you loved the tension and emotional aftershocks of The Night Manager, start here. Broadchurch is the Olivia Colman binge for people who want crime drama with an actual pulse. She plays Ellie Miller, a detective whose personal ties to a small seaside town make every twist hit twice as hard. David Tennant brings the flinty edge, but Colman supplies the heart, the humor, and the devastating human cost.
What makes Broadchurch so effective is that it understands a murder mystery is never only about the mystery. It is about what grief does to marriages, friendships, workplaces, and entire communities. Colman’s performance keeps the show from becoming just another gloomy whodunit with sad lighting. Ellie is funny, loyal, impulsive, wounded, and gloriously real. When the story asks her to endure betrayal, rage, and moral exhaustion, Colman never overplays it. She lets the hurt sit there and breathe. That makes it worse for viewersin the best possible way.
This is the show to watch when you want suspense with emotional wreckage included at no extra charge.
2. Landscapers
Why it feels like a hidden gem
Landscapers is for viewers who like their crime stories strange, stylish, and slightly haunted. Based on a real case, the series follows Susan and Christopher Edwards, a married couple wrapped up in murder, fantasy, denial, and a truly astonishing amount of emotional evasive driving. Olivia Colman and David Thewlis are phenomenal together, playing people who seem fragile, absurd, loving, manipulative, and lost all at once.
What sets Landscapers apart is its tone. This is not a standard true-crime drama that points at horror and says, “See? Horror.” Instead, it moves through performance, memory, movie references, and self-mythology. Susan often feels like someone trying to survive reality by rewriting it. Colman plays her with such delicacy that even when Susan is frustrating, she remains fascinating. You keep leaning closer, trying to decide whether she is childlike, cunning, broken, or all three.
If The Night Manager gave you a taste for polished suspense with morally slippery people, Landscapers is the artier, more psychologically eccentric cousin you absolutely invite over.
3. The Crown
Yes, it is famous. No, that does not mean everyone fully appreciated Olivia Colman in it.
Some performances are so elegantly controlled that people mistake them for easy. That is exactly what happened with Olivia Colman’s turn as Queen Elizabeth II in The Crown. She stepped into one of television’s most high-pressure recasts and somehow made restraint look riveting. Not flashy. Not showboaty. Riveting.
Her seasons are especially rewarding if you enjoy drama built on emotional repression, institutional pressure, and rooms full of people politely detonating each other. Colman’s Elizabeth is not written as a woman who says everything out loud, so the performance depends on tiny shiftshesitation, dryness, clipped disappointment, the faint suggestion that she would like to scream into a ceremonial cushion. The brilliance is in how much she reveals while appearing to reveal almost nothing.
Fans of The Night Manager will appreciate the same fascination with power, duty, deception, and the performance of public identity. Also, if you enjoy watching world-class actors weaponize silence, this series is practically a banquet.
4. Les Misérables
The non-musical version that lets the drama do the singing
If you hear Les Misérables and immediately brace for someone to launch into song while holding a candle in emotional distress, surprise: this adaptation skips the musical format and leans into grit, class conflict, suffering, and character. That makes it a particularly good fit for viewers who want period drama with real dramatic teeth.
Olivia Colman plays Madame Thénardier, and she does not sand down the cruelty. She is selfish, sharp, predatory, and deeply unpleasant in the way only a great actor can make compelling. Colman gives the role a brutal specificity. This is not a cartoon villainess twirling metaphorical mustache crumbs. She feels lived-in, resentful, and frighteningly practical about exploiting whoever is weaker.
The series works because it treats Victor Hugo’s world as political and intimate at the same time. Poverty is not decorative here. Neither is misery. Colman fits perfectly into that vision, bringing force and texture to every scene she enters. It is not always an easy watch, but it is a rewarding one.
5. Great Expectations
Come for Miss Havisham, stay for the glorious menace
There are many versions of Great Expectations. This one arrives in a mood. A dark, grimy, slightly unhinged mood. Olivia Colman’s Miss Havisham is the main reason to show up, because she plays the role like a woman whose heartbreak long ago curdled into a lifestyle brand. She is mesmerizing, grotesque, elegant, bitter, and impossible to ignore.
What Colman understands about Havisham is that she should not be reduced to a spooky old-house meme in bridal fabric. She is a force of rot, manipulation, and emotional theater. Every scene with Estella and Pip becomes charged because Colman turns Havisham into an architect of pain rather than merely a victim embalmed in the past.
This series is not cozy Dickens. It is feverish Dickens. If The Night Manager appealed to you because it knew glamour can hide ugliness and obsession can masquerade as strategy, Great Expectations belongs on your queue.
6. Flowers
The weirdest entry here, and one of the most rewarding
Flowers is technically a dark comedy-drama, but emotionally it hits like a drama that wandered into a carnival mirror maze and came out wiser, sadder, and much more interesting. Olivia Colman plays Deborah Flowers, matriarch of a deeply dysfunctional family whose house is packed with secrets, sadness, awkwardness, and the kind of tension that can make a dinner table feel like a battlefield.
The show’s biggest strength is its refusal to separate absurdity from pain. Depression, loneliness, marital distance, and family confusion are all present, but never presented in a tidy, prestige-drama package with solemn piano cues begging for awards. Instead, Flowers is eccentric, prickly, funny, and heartbreaking. Colman is magnificent at navigating those shifts. She can deliver a line that seems ridiculous and then reveal the ache beneath it half a second later.
This is the recommendation for viewers who liked the emotional sophistication of The Night Manager but want something more offbeat. It is less about espionage and more about the secret operations of the human psychewhich, frankly, are often messier.
7. Fleabag
Not a traditional drama, but too good to leave out
Purists may point out that Fleabag is a comedy-drama. Purists may also need to relax for a minute, because Olivia Colman’s godmother-turned-stepmother is one of the great emotionally chaotic supporting performances of modern television. She is passive-aggressive, needy, manipulative, absurd, and somehow infuriatingly believable. You know a character is well written when viewers collectively want to throw a decorative cushion at the screen.
The reason Fleabag belongs in this lineup is simple: beneath the jokes, it is one of the sharpest studies of grief, loneliness, family dysfunction, and self-sabotage around. Colman understands exactly how to play someone who appears fluttery and harmless but knows how to control a room through guilt, charm, and strategic fragility. Her scenes are funny, yes, but they are also exquisitely tense.
If what you loved in The Night Manager was the feeling that every conversation had something dangerous humming underneath it, Fleabag absolutely delivers that. Just with more wine, more emotional damage, and a terrifying amount of sculptural home décor.
8. Heartstopper
A softer pick that proves Colman can break your heart by being kind
At first glance, Heartstopper may look like the outlier on this list. It is gentler, warmer, and far sunnier than most of these entries. But that is exactly why it works. Olivia Colman appears as Sarah Nelson, and in a smaller role she reminds viewers of one of her greatest strengths: she can make decency feel profound.
Her scenes do not rely on grand speeches or melodrama. Instead, they land through warmth, listening, and emotional intelligence. In a TV landscape that often treats good parenting like mythical folklore, Sarah feels almost radical. Colman gives the character softness without making her bland, and that balance matters. She becomes the kind of screen presence that calms an entire episode.
Why include it in a list built around The Night Manager? Because after several darker entries, Heartstopper shows the flip side of Colman’s power. She is not only brilliant at suspicion, sorrow, and menace. She is brilliant at safety. That range is part of what makes her such a compelling actor to binge.
9. The Suspicions of Mr Whicher: The Murder in Angel Lane
For the viewer who wants one evening of Victorian intrigue
This title does not get talked about nearly enough, which is a shame because it is exactly the kind of moody, well-acted mystery that can rescue a weekend night from scrolling paralysis. Olivia Colman plays Susan Spencer in a story full of secrets, social hypocrisy, buried motives, and period-detail unease.
What makes this one satisfying is its concentration. It has the richness of a larger drama but the efficiency of a feature-length mystery, so you get atmosphere, character, and revelation without a long commitment. Colman brings emotional urgency to the story and avoids the trap of playing “period suffering” as a costume. She makes Susan feel active, anxious, and painfully invested in what is being uncovered.
If The Night Manager sold you on stylish suspense with intelligent performances, this is a worthy detourless glossy, more Victorian, but still deeply watchable.
Why Olivia Colman Dramas Are So Easy to Binge
The truth is that Olivia Colman dramas tend to be bingeable for a reason that has nothing to do with algorithms and everything to do with emotional credibility. She makes scenes feel unfinished in the best way, as if every line contains a second line underneath it. That creates momentum. You do not just want to know what happens next in the plot; you want to understand what is happening inside the people.
That is the secret connection between all the titles on this list. Broadchurch gives you grief wrapped in a mystery. Landscapers gives you delusion wrapped in a crime story. The Crown gives you loneliness wrapped in protocol. Les Misérables and Great Expectations give you cruelty wrapped in period grandeur. Flowers and Fleabag give you pain disguised as wit. Heartstopper gives you hope without sentimentality. Mr Whicher gives you old-school suspense with emotional stakes. The genre shifts, the settings change, and the costumes become either fancier or much worse for everyone involved, but Colman remains the hook.
The Experience of Bingeing Olivia Colman Dramas
Bingeing Olivia Colman dramas is a strangely specific viewing experience, and anyone who has accidentally watched three episodes in a row while claiming they were “just testing it out” knows exactly what that feels like. It usually begins with admiration. You put something on because Colman is in it, and you assume you’ll get a strong performance, a clever script, maybe a little tension. That part is true. What you do not always expect is how quickly she changes the temperature of a series.
In darker shows, she often makes dread more intimate. A mystery stops being a puzzle and starts feeling like a wound. A period piece stops being about corsets, class, and aesthetically pleasing candlelight and becomes about humiliation, loneliness, revenge, or buried hunger. Even when she is playing a supporting role, she has a habit of making you reorganize the show in your head around her. You start watching for plot and wind up watching for reaction shots, pauses, half-smiles, and the exact second a polite sentence turns lethal.
There is also the emotional whiplash factor, which is a major reason these dramas are so satisfying to binge. Colman is one of the rare actors who can be hilarious and devastating almost simultaneously. That means the viewing experience never feels flat. In one stretch, you are laughing because a character is being monstrously passive-aggressive over lunch. Ten minutes later, you are staring at the screen like someone has personally wronged you. It is terrific. It is exhausting. It is television doing its job.
Another part of the experience is trust. Once viewers have seen Colman in a few strong roles, they tend to follow her into projects they might otherwise skip. A Dickens adaptation that sounds too dusty? Suddenly appealing. A small-scale crime drama with unusual tonal choices? Absolutely. A family story so weird it seems like it may have been assembled in a dream? Fine, press play. Her presence creates confidence that even if the material gets odd, bleak, or emotionally hazardous, there will be something grounded at the center.
Then there is the post-binge aftereffect: the desire to immediately recommend the show to someone else, usually with wildly unhelpful but sincere phrasing like, “You have to watch it, she’s unbelievable in it,” or, “It’s depressing, but in a chic way,” or, “I’m not okay, which means it was excellent.” That is the Olivia Colman drama cycle. You watch. You spiral. You evangelize.
And maybe that is why these titles pair so well with The Night Manager. That series gave viewers suspense with style, intelligence, and emotional undertow. The best Olivia Colman dramas do the same, even when they swap spies for detectives, monarchs, grieving families, Dickensian revenge machines, or awkward dinner parties from hell. They trust audiences to enjoy complexity. They refuse to flatten people into types. Most importantly, they remind us that binge-worthy TV does not need constant noise. Sometimes all it needs is one actor looking at another actor like she can already see the lie forming.
Conclusion
If your watchlist has been wandering around aimlessly since The Night Manager ended, Olivia Colman is an excellent person to let lead you out of the wilderness. Start with Broadchurch if you want emotional crime drama, Landscapers if you want something stranger, or The Crown if you like power dressed as restraint. Then branch into Les Misérables, Great Expectations, Flowers, Fleabag, Heartstopper, and The Suspicions of Mr Whicher depending on your tolerance for heartbreak, discomfort, and perfectly delivered side-eye.
One thing is guaranteed: with Olivia Colman, “underrated” often just means “not enough people are currently texting their friends about this.” That can be fixed.