Angels in America (Season 1)

Angels in America (2003) is an HBO miniseries you can watch online on iFILM. Director Mike Nichols brought Tony Kushner's landmark stage play to the screen with a cast that remains astonishing to look at: Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson, Mary-Louise Parker, Patrick Wilson, and Jeffrey Wright. New York City, 1985 — Reagan's America, and the AIDS epidemic is accelerating.

Several lives collide across six episodes. Prior Walter (Justin Kirk) has just been diagnosed; his partner Louis cannot stay. Mormon Republican Joe Pitt wrestles with faith, shame, and a marriage that has gone hollow. His wife Harper (Mary-Louise Parker) disappears into Valium-soaked visions. And Roy Cohn (Pacino) — the most feared political fixer of his generation — is dying, and will do anything to keep the word AIDS off his chart. Meryl Streep and Emma Thompson each play multiple roles, including an actual angel descending on the living.

The production took home five Emmy Awards and two Golden Globes. What Nichols preserved from Kushner's text is both the surreal imagery and the political fury — this is a work about illness and guilt and what a country owes the people it ignores. Few miniseries before or since have carried that weight so steadily. Stream Angels in America (2003) on iFILM.