A murder. A sad detective. A small town with secrets. A lingering sense of despair permeating absolutely everything. Put them all together and you’ve got the makings of a great binge watch. (Bonus points if you get to flip on the subtitles and pretend you’re doing something educational.) Thanks to the rise of streaming and the Nordic noir boom, the last decade has blessed us with a bounty of superbly addictive crime dramas.
Maybe you know this and have blazed your way through most of them already. Or maybe you don’t and are looking for something to occupy you when Mare of Easttown ends. Either way, GQ went straight to the sources: below, the creators of our favorite TV crime dramas recommend their favorites.
Dennis Farina as Lieutenant Mike Torello in Crime Story.
Everett Collection“I’ll have to reach back to point the curious and historically-minded viewer to the 1986-1988 series Crime Story. Created by Gustave Reininger and Chuck Adamson, the show bears all the stylistic hallmarks and motifs of series producer-director Michael Mann. From the energizing, stylistic shots of the credit sequence set to Del Shannon’s haunting “Runaway,” through its bombastic action, blurred morality, and gaudy neon, the series feels completely of a piece with Mann’s films and sensibility.
Set in 1963 Chicago (and later Las Vegas and Mexico), Crime Story details the violent exploits of the city’s Major Crime Unit, led by Lieutenant Mike Torello (Denis Farina, never better). This was far from a case-of-the-week procedural with a novel setting, though. The series traced the rise of a ruthless gangster named Ray Luca and his blood feud with Lt. Torello, a saga that escalated to ever more operatic and violent set-pieces. At eleven years old, I’d never seen anything like it on television. Crime Story’s two seasons were ahead of their time, with the serialization of story, its cinematic style, the brutality of its world and the ambiguity of its heroes.
Anyway—Crime Story is a punch in the mouth. If that sounds like your idea of a good time, you should seek it out.”
(Find Crime Story on Prime Video, Peacock, Tubi, Pluto TV, and Vudu.)
Sarah Lancashire as Catherine Cawood in Happy Valley.
Everett Collection / Courtesy of Netflix
Nicole Kidman as Julia Edwards in Top of the Lake.
Everett Collection / Courtesy pf See-Saw Films and Sundance Channel“There are two shows that really stuck with me and became touchstones as I developed The Sinner.
Jane Campion has been one of my favorite filmmakers ever since I saw The Piano, and the first season of Top of the Lake, her limited series starring Elizabeth Moss as a wounded detective who investigates the disappearance of a 12-year-old girl in a New Zealand mountain town, features all the things I love about her: an atmospheric, other-worldly setting that seems to play as a fairy-tale dreamscape, a willful heroine who is by turns vulnerable and opaque, and an unsettling dose of the weird.
Where Campion traffics in the uncanny, writer and creator Sally Wainwright is the opposite. Her series Happy Valley stars Sarah Lancashire as a small-town police sergeant investigating a kidnapping that involves the rapist who caused her daughter’s suicide. The show takes its time, delving deeply into the quotidian struggles of a capable woman navigating personal tragedy and small-town life. Wainright is an emotionally-driven writer, and the amazingly authentic Lancashire grounds everything, guiding us through slice-of-life moments and high-stakes confrontations. As the plot mechanics slowly ratchet up the tension, Wainright always prioritizes character as much as thrills. It’s entertainment that leaves you feeling nourished.”
(Find Top of the Lake on Hulu and Happy Valley on Prime Video.)
Ólafur Darri Ólafsson as Andri Ólafsson in Trapped.
Courtesy of RVK Studios / Dynamic Television / RÚV“The brilliant composer Ólafur Arnalds recommended the first season of Trapped to me. It’s a chilly, beautiful, lean murder mystery set in a remote Icelandic community which gradually gets more and more snowed in. The storytelling keeps you guessing, the acting—including a momentous central performance from Ólafur Darri Olaffson—is great, and the score from Hildur Guonadottir (who subsequently won an Oscar for Joker) is wondrous. It’s a haunting, icy, addictive jewel.”
(Find Trapped on Prime Video.)
Left: Michael Chiklis as Vic Mackey in The Shield.
Everett Collection / Courtesy of Prashant Gupta for 20th Century Fox“My favorite TV crime drama has to be Shawn Ryan’s The Shield. I remember seeing it for the first time and thinking that I had never seen anything like it. Dark, brutal, bold and constantly entertaining. An amazing antihero in Michael Chiklis’s Vic, great plotting throughout and engaging supporting characters. And with—what is really, really difficult to achieve—a perfect ending.”
(Find The Shield on Hulu.)
Faye Dunaway as Lauren Staton and Peter Falk as Columbo in Columbo.
Everett Collection / Courtesy of NBC“Contrary to what you may have been told, peak TV was in fact reached on 15 September 1971, when NBC screened the first proper episode of Columbo. “Murder by the Book” was written by Steven Bochco and directed by Steven Spielberg, with Jack Cassidy as an extravagantly amoral villain and Peter Falk as our shabbily dressed trickster detective.(Just writing that makes me want to watch it.) Columbo’s format was unique: each episode was an inverted detective story, or “howcatchem”: we’d see the crime being committed at the beginning of an episode, meaning we’d know the killer’s identity from the get-go. And we’d know, of course, that Columbo would get his killer in the end. What we didn’t know was how. I’ve loved this show for as long as I can remember … to the extent that I eventually borrowed its format for a show of my own. I even borrowed its naming convention. The show was called Luther.”
(Find Columbo on Prime Video.)
Stanley Tucci as DCI Morton in Fortitude.
Everett Collection / Courtesy of Amanda Searle for Pivot“I love a dark Scandinavian mystery. I was hooked years ago by Maj Siowall, Per Wahloo, Henning Mankel, etc. Good detective TV seems to flow seamlessly from their novels and others in the same genre: troubled investigators, strange criminals, dour landscapes. The stories rarely seem based in reality, but then I get enough of that at work. One of the best for my taste is the Icelandic series Trapped, in which a great bear of a detective struggles to find a killer on the loose as he tries to keep his own family from falling apart. Others: from Finland, Bordertown; from Norway, Wisting; from Sweden, Fortitude. Oh, and Mare of Easttown is as good as they come.”
(Find Trapped, Wisting, and Fortitude on Prime Video, Bordertown on Netflix, and Mare of Easttown on HBO Max.)