Boardwalk Empire
Atlantic City, 1920, and the rum running machine is humming. Nucky Thompson (Steve Buscemi, quiet and terrifying in a felt hat) runs the city the way a pit boss runs a floor: everyone is cheating, and he lets them, because…
Genre Crime
A Man on the Inside
Ted Danson plays a retired professor turned amateur undercover sleuth in Mike Schur's gentlest comedy yet: 93% on RT, IMDb 7.6, 16 episodes across two seasons on Netflix.
Furious
Elizabeth Meriwether, the creator of New Girl and the devastating Dying for Sex, takes an odd swerve into serial killer territory with this eight episode series loosely inspired by the 1987 thriller Black Widow. Emmy Rossum plays Alice Black, an FBI agent hunting a calculating female serial killer, played with icy charisma by Lola Petticrew, and the show's central gambit is structural: it tells the story from both sides, giving the killer's backstory and reasoning nearly equal weight, until the pursuit starts to look like a twisted courtship.
American Hostage
Jon Hamm finally gets the role his Mad Men gravitas has been circling: Fred Heckman, a beloved Indianapolis radio reporter who ends up on the wrong end of his own microphone when an armed man, Tony Kiritsis, takes him hostage live on air in 1977. Based on the scripted podcast and the real case, the eight episode MGM+ series turns a three day standoff into a period piece about media saturation, police incompetence, and a kidnapper who understood television better than the people covering him.
A Killer Story
HBO's three part true crime documentary digs into the 2002 Topeka murders of Mike Sisco and Karen Harkness and the two decade legal saga that followed, and it wisely spends as much time on the amateur investigators as the crime. Eileen and Keen Umbehr, a Kansas couple who became obsessed with the case after reading about it, spent years pushing a theory that prosecutors eventually used to convict Dana Chandler, and director Matthew Galkin builds the series around an uncomfortable question: what happens when true crime fans become part of the story?
The Gentlemen
Guy Ritchie does television, and somehow it works. Theo James plays the aristocrat who inherits a title along with the family business: a cannabis empire tucked into the grounds of a country estate. Kaya Scodelario is the brilliant, terrifying business…
Lucifer
The Devil quits Hell, opens a piano bar in Los Angeles, and starts solving crimes with the LAPD. It sounds like a joke pitch, and for the first half of season 1 it sort of is. Then the show figures…
Wild Cards
The most easygoing procedural on TV right now. A demoted detective and a con man doing community service get forced into a partnership, and their casework quickly becomes a con artist’s playbook applied to solving crimes. It is a CBC…
Brooklyn Nine-Nine
The precinct sitcom with the best ensemble on broadcast TV. Andy Samberg’s Jake Peralta is a manchild detective who is actually great at his job, and around him the show builds one of the deepest comedy benches ever: Holt’s deadpan…
Bad Monkey
A severed arm washed up in the Keys pulls a suspended detective into a Florida noir, and Vince Vaughn finally gets the role his motormouth was built for. Carl Hiaasen’s brand of environmental crime comedy survives the adaptation fully intact,…