Tag best Crime shows

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?

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…

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,…

Justified

US Marshal Raylan Givens, played with perfect laconic cool by Timothy Olyphant, returns to his Kentucky hometown and starts aiming at his own past. Elmore Leonard’s dialogue has never been adapted better, and Walton Goggins’s Boyd Crowder is one of…

Cross

Aldis Hodge becomes James Patterson’s Alex Cross, the detective psychologist hunting a killer with a taste for psychological warfare. Hodge brings real gravity to the character Morgan Freeman and Tyler Perry played before him, and the DC setting is used…

Presumed Innocent

Jake Gyllenhaal as a prosecutor accused of murdering his mistress, adapting Scott Turow’s classic into an eight episode whirlwind. The courtroom turns are genuinely shocking, and Gyllenhaal plays ambiguity like an instrument: guilty or not, you will change your mind…

Euphoria

Sam Levinson’s portrait of teenagers navigating addiction, love, and identity is the most visually daring show HBO has aired: makeup as armor, drug sequences as horror, and Zendaya delivering one of the great young performances as Rue, whose relapses the…