10 Modern Crime Thriller Series Better Than ‘The Beast in Me’

Netflix‘s The Beast in Me has spent the last few months proving that a nosy writer and a possibly-murderous real estate mogul make for great neighbors — at least from a ratings perspective. For eight episodes, Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys circle each other like two people who both suspect the other one killed somebody. And, well, one of them might have. The show picked up Emmy nominations, including a nod for Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series, and it has stuck around on Netflix’s most-watched lists since it dropped last November.

That said, a cat-and-mouse thriller staring two Emmy-caliber actors is not exactly a new genre, and some of the shows that did it first did a way better job than The Beast in Me. Crime thrillers have been the most consistently beloved genre on television for the last few decades, and a handful of them turned dread, moral rot, and small-town secrets into impeccable writing on streaming networks like Netflix, Prime Video, and Hulu. Here are 10 that I’d rewatch over The Beast in Me any day of the week.

Why You Should Trust Me: I’ve spent nearly four years covering movies and TV shows at MovieWeb, with crime dramas and thrillers consistently making up a major part of what I watch and write about. I’ve also spent enough time with the genre to know that a good crime thriller needs more than a shocking murder and a suspicious person standing in a dimly lit room, and the ones on this list come with great writing, performances, atmosphere, and mystery.

‘Mindhunter’ (2017–2019)

The Conversations Are the Scariest Part

Watch This If: Mindhunter proves that you don’t need a global conspiracy or a car chase every 15 minutes to make a crime thriller feel unbearably tense. It takes a premise that sounds dry on paper — FBI agents interviewing incarcerated killers to build the field of criminal profiling — and turns it into some of the most anxiety-inducing TV ever made. David Fincher directs several episodes himself, and his fingerprints are all over the static, patient shots of a prison interview room. Jonathan Groff, Holt McCallany, and Anna Torv make an excellent central trio for two seasons, giving the show genuine character arcs instead of just a rotating cast of true-crime cameos.

Skip This If: You need forward momentum and a clear case to solve. Mindhunter cares more about psychology than plot, and entire episodes go by with almost no traditional “crime-of-the-week” structure. Also, Netflix canceled it after two seasons, and despite years of fan campaigns, nothing suggests a third season is coming. Mindhunter is an unfinished masterpiece, but a masterpiece nonetheless.

‘Fargo’ (2014–2023)

Crime Gets Weird in the Midwest

Watch This If: I know Fargo has technically been around since 2014, but if you’re jumping in specifically because you loved The Beast in Me, I would start with Season 2 and work your way forward. Each season tells its own story, which is one of the best things about Noah Hawley’s anthology series. You can get murder, organized crime, corrupt law enforcement, deeply strange people making increasingly terrible decisions, and somehow still catch yourself laughing at least once per episode. Season 2’s Kansas City mob war and Season 4’s Kansas City crime family saga both rank among the show’s best work, and Jon Hamm’s turn as a small-town sheriff with something to hide in Season 5 gives tough competition to his turn as Don Draper in Mad Men.

Skip This If: You like a franchise you can binge from start to finish without gaps. FX hasn’t confirmed a sixth season yet, and Hawley has openly said the timeline is still being worked out around his other projects, so don’t expect new episodes anytime soon. Each season also demands a hard reset, since you’re meeting an entirely new cast every time.

‘The Night Of’ (2016)

One Bad Night Turned Into a Legal Nightmare

Watch This If: In The Night Of, Riz Ahmed stars as Naz, a college student whose life changes overnight after he wakes up beside a murdered woman, and he has no clear memory of what happened. John Turturro plays his attorney, John Stone, and together, they anchor a series that becomes less interested in easy answers and more interested in the terrifying way the criminal justice starts moving once someone has been accused of a crime. The miniseries wastes no time. Across eight episodes, it examines the police, prisons, lawyers, families, and media attention surrounding one case without ever feeling like it’s ticking boxes. Ahmed is phenomenal, and Turturro is both hilarious and heartbreaking.

Skip This If: You want a tidy whodunit with a satisfying ending. The Night Of explores the mechanics of the system rather than the mystery itself, and the final answer to “who actually did it” matters less than what the process does to Naz along the way.

‘Mare of Easttown’ (2021)

Kate Winslet’s Career-Best Turn in a Pennsylvania Murder Mystery

Watch This If: Small towns make for excellent crime thrillers because everyone knows everyone, everyone has an opinion, and somebody always knows something they shouldn’t. Mare of Easttown stars Kate Winslet as Mare Sheehan, a detective in a close-knit Pennsylvania community who investigates the murder of a teenage girl while dealing with a whole pile of personal problems of her own. She won an Emmy for the role, and she earns every second of it playing a detective drowning in grief, addiction in the family, and a case that keeps implicating the people she loves. The HBO miniseries also stars Evan Peters, Julianne Nicholson, Jean Smart, Angourie Rice, and Guy Pearce.

Skip This If: Somebody on the internet has already spoiled the ending for you, which is a possibility because the show’s twist was one of the most discussed reveals of 2021. It is also a single, self-contained season with no continuation planned, so if you’re looking for a long-term binge with multiple seasons, Mare of Easttown is not it.

‘Happy Valley’ (2014–2023)

Sarah Lancashire Is The Whole Reason To Watch

Watch This If: There are several crime shows about detectives who seem to have their lives together. Catherine Cawood is not one of them. Sarah Lancashire stars as the West Yorkshire police sergeant, a fiercely determined officer whose professional life keeps colliding with an enormous amount of personal baggage. Across three seasons, Happy Valley builds its story around crime, drugs, family, grief, and Catherine’s long-running connection to Tommy Lee Royce, the violent criminal who has caused her family immeasurable pain. Lancashire is extraordinary here. Catherine can be funny, furious, exhausted, compassionate, terrifying, and completely fed up within the same episode, and it is truly fascinating to watch.

Skip This If: You’re not into British accents or British detective dramas as a whole. Happy Valley leans hard into authentic Yorkshire dialect and local texture. The show also has long real-world gaps between seasons, so if you started it years ago and completely forgot about it until you stumbled onto this list, you might need a recap before diving into Season 3.

‘Line of Duty’ (2012–2021)

The Anti-Corruption Thriller Where Every Cop Is Suspicious

Watch This If: You know a police department has a serious problem when it needs a dedicated unit just to investigate its own officers. That’s the setup for Line of Duty, Jed Mercurio’s hugely addictive British crime thriller about AC-12, an anti-corruption unit investigating suspected “bent coppers” inside the fictional Central Police Force. Martin Compston, Vicky McClure, and Adrian Dunbar form the show’s core trio, with a rotating collection of major guest stars turning up as officers who may or may not be complicit in all of it. The interrogation scenes are the real hook. They run 20 minutes at a stretch and still feel shorter, and they often drop one tiny piece of information into a conversation and make you rethink everything you just watched.

Skip This If: Police jargon and rapid-fire British procedural terminology without subtitles can be exhausting for you. Line of Duty throws you into the deep end of specialized vocabulary from Episode 1.

‘Ozark’ (2017–2022)

Money Laundering Has Never Looked More Stressful

Watch This If: There are bad family vacations, and then there’s the Byrde family’s decision to relocate to the Ozarks because Marty needs to launder money for a Mexican drug cartel. I’m going to go ahead and say the latter has slightly more complicated travel arrangements. You’re supposed to spend four seasons watching the Byrdes become more dangerous and more ruthless than the people they were running from. Jason Bateman and Laura Linney anchor the whole thing, but Julia Garner’s Ruth Langmore steals every scene she’s in, and she rightfully won two Emmys for it. Ozark ended in 2022, but it remains one of the strongest crime thrillers of the 21st century.

Skip This If: You need your protagonists to be likable and make sensible choices. By its final season, everyone on Ozark has done something irredeemable, and the show has zero interest in redeeming them.

‘Task’ (2025)

Mark Ruffalo Has a Very Bad Week

Watch This If: Brad Ingelsby’s Task arrived in 2025 with an extremely good setup. Mark Ruffalo plays FBI agent Tom Brandis, who leads a task force investigating a series of violent home invasions in Philadelphia. The catch is that the man behind the crimes isn’t some criminal mastermind. He’s a family man driven to desperate choices, played by Tom Pelphrey. Ingelsby’s Mare of Easttown is a modern classic, but Task is a whole different beast. It’s not just catching a criminal, but also spending time with the people on both sides of the investigation and asking how grief, desperation, faith, and circumstance can push people toward decisions they never imagined making. HBO renewed it for Season 2, with Édgar Ramírez, Mahershala Ali, Adam Nagaitis, and Aminah Nieves among the new additions.

Skip This If: You want a tidy little mystery that wraps everything up and sends you to bed feeling emotionally refreshed. Task has other plans. The pacing is also deliberate in a very specific Ingelsby way, so it’s slower than expected.

‘We Own This City’ (2022)

The Baltimore Police Corruption Story From ‘The Wire’s Creators

Watch This If: We Own This City reunites David Simon and George Pelecanos, the team behind The Wire, for a six-episode dive into the real-life corruption scandal that took down Baltimore’s Gun Trace Task Force. Jon Bernthal stars as Sergeant Wayne Jenkins, bringing enough swagger to the role that it’s almost seductive to watch his crime unfold. Which isn’t wrong. The show wants you to understand how a task force built to fight crime turned into one of the most corrupt units in American policing history, and it does a fantastic job. It is based on real events and real court records, and that grounding gives it a lot of emotional weight.

Skip This If: You want escapism. This one looks you directly in the eye and reminds you that the worst crime stories don’t need much embellishment. Structure-wise, it jumps across multiple perspectives, which takes an episode or two to fully click into place.

‘Black Bird’ (2022)

Taron Egerton and Paul Walter Hauser’s Prison Cat-and-Mouse Game

Watch This If: Jimmy Keene has a strange yet appealing proposition in front of him. He’s serving a 10-year prison sentence when authorities offer him a deal: transfer to a maximum-security prison for the criminally insane, get close to suspected serial killer Larry Hall, and try to make him confess. That’s the nightmarish premise of Black Bird. Taron Egerton plays Jimmy, while Paul Walter Hauser plays Hall. Hauser is genuinely unsettling in the role, playing a real convicted killer with an unnervingly soft, almost childlike voice that makes every scene with him feel loaded with tension and dread. He is awkward, strange, difficult to read, and sometimes very ordinary. That contrast keeps Jimmy (and us) guessing about what he’s dealing with. If you enjoyed The Beast in Me because of the two central performances, Black Bird takes that dynamic into darker territory.

Skip This If: True crime hits too close to home for you. This one draws directly from a real case and doesn’t shy away from the details of its killer’s actual crimes.