14 crime TV shows you shouldn’t miss in 2024

It has been an eventful, heavy-going year, to say the least. To take our minds off everything from the news cycle to everyday worries, many of us have turned – as we so often do – to our television screens for comfort, distraction and entertainment.

This year didn’t let us down in terms of providing high quality TV crime drama. From spy thrillers to detective dramas, the following have been the best crime shows of 2024:

High Country
Where to watch it: BBC iPlayer.

Leah Purcell starring in High Country. Credit: BBC/Curio/Sony Pictures Television/Narelle Portanier

Aboriginal-Australian actress, writer and director Leah Purcell stars in this complex mystery thriller that sees the Wentworth star take on the role of big city police sergeant Andrea ‘Andie’ Whitford. Andie gets transferred to the mountainous Victorian High Country to investigate a complicated missing persons case of five people who have disappeared in the wilderness.

On the face of it, this is high quality drama: a rural noir that entertains and grips. But under the surface there are big themes at play, like any good piece of art. The historic and current treatment of Australian Aborigines looms large here and asks some important questions of its audience.

Red Eye
Where to watch it: ITVX.

The British screenwriter Peter A. Dowling is more used to penning scripts for Hollywood, his most successful being the 2005 Jodie-Foster-on-a-plane thriller Flightplan. For this six-part ITV thriller, series creator and writer Dowling returns to what he knows best: coming up with exciting stories that take place 35,000ft in the air.

The Hobbit and Hannibal star Richard Armitage plays Dr. Matthew Nolan, a Brit who’s extradited to China on suspicion of murder after being in a car accident. The majority of the series takes place on a rather action-packed overnight flight to Beijing.

Crazy Rich Asians’ and Gangs of London’s Jing Lusi plays DI Hana Li, Dr. Nolan’s police escort. Her mission is to accompany the suspect back to the Chinese capital without any hiccups – which goes rather wrong, rather quickly. Throw in political intrigue and some dastardly MI5 and CIA plotting and you’ve got all the ingredients for a tasty dramatic dish that’s much more filling than your average in-flight meal.

The Jetty
Where to watch it: BBC One, BBC iPlayer.

Jenna Coleman in BBC’s The Jetty. Image Credit: Firebird Pictures/Ben Blackall.

Part crime drama, part exploration of some weighty themes such as sexual consent and abuse, this four-part series from writer Cat Jones sees another powerhouse lead performance by Jenna Coleman.

The Serpent star plays a police detective called Ember Manning who’s investigating the arson attack of a lakeside house in Lancashire. The case soon spirals into a missing persons case and unearths dark secrets tying Ember to a predatory sex offender in the area. The case gets seriously personal when she starts to suspect that her recently deceased ex-husband may not have been all he seemed and could well have been involved in the case.

Alien: Romulus‘ Archie Renaux, Bridgerton‘s Ruby Stokes and The First Omen’s Ralph Ineson co-star in this taut and thought-provoking thriller. The Guardian’s Lucy Mangan called The Jetty ‘not only a very good thriller, but an unexpectedly attentive meditation on what it means to move as a woman through a world that is suffused with male violence in all its myriad forms.’

Griselda
Where to watch it: Netflix.

Griselda Blanco was a fearsome Colombian drug lord (or should that be lady?) who ruled the Miami drug trade in the 1980’s with an iron fist. The incredibly true story of ‘The Godmother of Cocaine’ sees Modern Family’s Sofía Vergara play Blanco in a series that isn’t exactly subtle or low-key, but it’s a heck of a lot of fun.

It’s particularly well worth watching, given that it comes from the same team that worked on Netflix’s Pablo Escobar smash hit series Narcos.

Ludwig
Where to watch it: BBC iPlayer.

For fans of slightly lighter TV crime, Ludwig was a welcome addition to BBC One’s autumn schedule in 2024. There’s something of Jonathan Creek to this eminently watchable crime comedy-drama.

David Mitchell is very likeable in the lead, although he can’t exactly be accused of pushing his acting range too much as the nerdy puzzle-creating hermit who finds himself trying to track down his missing twin brother by impersonating him and sniffing about his workplace (where he works as a police detective).

Admittedly, it’s something of a convoluted plot device, set up to allow David Mitchell to be David Mitchell as a fish-out-of-water Sherlock Holmes-type. But it works.

Anna Maxwell Martin, Dipo Ola and Ralph Ineson co-star in this series that’s proved popular with viewers and already been commissioned for a second series.

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Joan
Where to watch it: ITV1 and ITVX.

Game of Thrones and X-Men actress Sophie Turner left fantasy and sci-fi this year as she took on the role of Joan Hannington in this 80s-set six-part ITV series. Hannington was an infamous diamond thief, a glamorous woman whose heists earned her a nickname very similar to Griselda Blanco’s – ‘The Godmother’.

This ITV thriller is an adaptation of Hannington’s 2004 memoir, I Am What I Am: The True Story of Britain’s Most Notorious Jewel Thief. Frank Dillane (Fear the Walking Dead) co-stars. It was, perhaps, the glitziest crime drama of the year – and one of ITV’s best.

Presumed Innocent
Where to watch it: Apple TV+.

When David E. Kelley is behind a project, big names take note. The writer and producer behind the likes of Ally McBeal and Big Little Lies has a knack for attracting A-listers to his small screen outings. The latest star to sign up to a Kelley show was Source Code and Donnie Darko big-hitter Jake Gyllenhaal.

Presumed Innocent is an adaptation of Scott Turow’s debut novel from 1987 and sees Gyllenhaal take on the role of Rusty Sabich (played by Harrison Ford in Alan J. Pakula’s 1990 film adaptation), a prosecutor accused of murdering a colleague with whom he was having an affair.

A solid supporting cast for this eight-part Apple+ series includes Ruth Negga, Bill Camp, Lily Rabe and Peter Sarsgaard, amongst others. A classy affair, it was one of the standout TV thrillers of the year. If you’ve already watched this one, but are still confused by the ending, we explain what happened here.

Lady in the Lake
Where to watch it: Apple TV+.

While we’re talking about high-end crime thrillers showing on Apple+ and starring A-list Hollywood stars, let’s talk about Lady in the Lake. An adaptation of Laura Lippman’s popular 2019 novel of the same name, Natalie Portman (Black Swan, Leon, Annihilation) headed up the cast of this intriguing seven-parter.

Set in 1960’s Baltimore, a bored but determined housewife decides to take up a new career as an investigative journalist. In the noir-tinged miniseries, we follow her as she dives deep into the murky waters of a case involving a missing Black woman that far too many people in the city seem keen to forget about.

Mr & Mrs Smith
Where to watch it: Prime Video.

Doug Liman’s 2005 film Mr & Mrs Smith is a fun action romp, though it’s better remembered as the film where Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie met and had a famous on-set affair. This year we enjoyed a similar on-screen story without the off-screen distractions.The 2024 Mr & Mrs Smith is a TV show – and a truly excellent one at that, It’s smart, exciting, brilliantly written, hilarious and unmissable: we’d call it the televisual highlight of the year.

Showing on Amazon Prime Video, the small screen version stars Atlanta’s Donald Glover (who co-created the series) and PEN15 star Maya Erskine as John and Jane Smith. That’s a fun pairing, but it’s the supporting cast that really stands out: John Turturro, Wagner Moura, Parker Posey, Paul Dano and Michaela Coel.

Criminal Record
Where to watch it: Apple TV+.

Doctor Who‘s Peter Capaldi and The Good Wife‘s Cush Jumbo are both big enough names to make this eight-part series beep loudly on our crime drama radar. Throw Charlie Creed-Miles, Cathy Tyson, Shaun Dooley and Zoë Wanamaker into the mix, and it’s a solid cast.

As for the plot? Well, it’s a classic set-up: an experienced detective and a rookie clash when forced to work together on a murder. The creator of Channel 4’s Indian Summers, Paul Rutman, writes and produces.

Mr Bates vs. The Post Office
Where to watch it: ITV1 or ITVX.

Based on a shocking true story, this ITV1 series starred Toby Jones, Julie Hesmondhalgh, Lia Williams, Alex Jennings, Monica Dolan, Ian Hart, Katherine Kelly, Shaun Dooley and Will Mellor. It told the story of one this country’s worst ever miscarriages of justice, one that saw hundreds of people who ran Post Offices wrongly convicted, fined and imprisoned for theft and fraud after a computer glitch suggested they’d all been syphoning money from their takings.

It wasn’t one of the dark dramas full of dead bodies and moody shots of the woods we all know and love, but it was a criminal tale well worth being told. In fact, its existence actually helped propel the real case forward by instigating an inquiry into the scandal. Who said crime telly couldn’t be a force for good?

Fool Me Once
Where to watch it: Netflix.

Netflix loves a Harlan Coben adaptation. Their latest (which was their eighth…) was written for the screen by BAFTA-winning Brassic creator Danny Brocklehurst. Michelle Keegan, Richard Armitage, Joanna Lumley and Adeel Akhtar having starring roles.

The story follows former soldier Maya (Keegan), who is shocked to see her murdered husband on a secret nanny cam in her home. Soon enough, a deadly conspiracy unravels. It’s based on Coben’s popular 2016 novel of the same name and is every bit as twisting and turning as Netflix’s other Coben offerings.

The Penguin
Where to watch it: Sky Atlantic/HBO.

It may seem odd to see a show based on a DC Comics character on a list of best TV crime dramas. But this spin-off from Matt Reeves’ moody 2022 Batman movie is 100% mob drama, without a single cape in sight. In fact, it’s more like The Sopranos than Batman.

Colin Farrell is as unrecognisable as he is excellent here, heavily made up and walking with an exaggerated limp as Oz Cobb, a mid-level gangster who spots an opportunity to make his move and pull off a Machiavellian plot to seize criminal power in Gotham City.

Colin Farrell gives a strong performance but it is Cristin Miliot, who plays Sofia Falcone-Gigante, who steals the show. We highly recommend The Penguin, even if you’re not into all things Caped Crusader.

Sherwood
Where to watch it: BBC iPlayer.

The second series of the BBC’s classy drama Sherwood dives back into the divided communities of Nottinghamshire, again exploring the lingering impact of the miners’ strike, decades on. This taut and complex drama skilfully weaves social history with modern-day tension, blending complex characters with gritty, small-town drama.

Familiar faces return for the second series, with David Morrissey back as Detective Chief Superintendent Ian St. Clair, alongside Lesley Manville and Claire Rushbrook. Meanwhile, David Harewood, Stephan Dillane, Monica Dolan and Robert Emms join the cast.

Don’t miss our round-up of the best shows on Netflix to watch now.

Have we missed anything? If you’re looking forward to a TV crime drama in 2024 that we’ve missed off our list, tell us all about it in the comments below…

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