Crime & Thriller

Eric is a gripping and emotionally devastating six-part limited series from Netflix, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Vincent Anderson, a volatile and brilliant puppeteer whose nine-year-old son Edgar goes missing in 1980s New York City. As the police investigation unfolds — led by the detective played by McKinley Belcher III — Vincent's already-fragile grip on reality begins to disintegrate, and he becomes convinced that his salvation lies in bringing to life a giant, shaggy monster puppet he calls Eric, a character Edgar had sketched as a friend he desperately wanted to see on television.

Created by Abi Morgan, the series weaves together several distinct narrative strands: the immediate thriller of the missing child; the portrait of a marriage under extreme strain; an exploration of the policing of New York's underground communities of homeless people and gay men during the AIDS crisis; and a surrealist interior drama as Vincent's psyche begins to fragment and Eric himself becomes an on-screen presence visible only to Vincent. Cumberbatch's performance is extraordinary — physically committed, emotionally raw, and willing to be profoundly unsympathetic without ever losing the audience's complicated investment.

Eric is a series that trusts its audience to hold complexity — to see how one person's unraveling connects to larger social failures, how grief and guilt can warp a mind beyond recognition, and how a city's most vulnerable people are too often erased by the systems meant to protect them. It is haunting, beautifully shot, and driven by performances of the highest order. For viewers willing to embrace its demanding emotional register, it stands as one of the finest limited series of 2024.

Tulsa King offers a deceptively simple premise — aging New York mafia boss exiled to Tulsa, Oklahoma — and spins it into something far richer than its elevator pitch suggests. Taylor Sheridan, the architect of Yellowstone's neo-Western empire, created the series as a vehicle for Sylvester Stallone, whose performance as Dwight "The General" Manfredi is the most charming, lived-in work of the actor's late career. After serving 25 years in prison without informing on his bosses, Dwight is rewarded with banishment to Tulsa to establish a new criminal enterprise in territory about as foreign to him as the moon.

What Tulsa King understands that many fish-out-of-water stories miss is that displacement is only interesting when the fish is genuinely interesting himself. Stallone's Dwight is a man who operated by codes that the world has moved on from, confronting a Midwest that runs on entirely different rules, speeds, and assumptions. His bewilderment is played with genuine vulnerability and extraordinary comic timing — Stallone has rarely been funnier, and his scenes with the local ensemble generate the kind of chemistry that makes network television feel quaint.

The show isn't shy about its genre pleasures — the slow accumulation of Dwight's Tulsa operation, the comedy of mafia protocols applied to a baffled heartland, the violence when it arrives — but it earns its most memorable moments from character. By the end of the first season, Tulsa has genuinely become Dwight's home, and the audience feels that transition as keenly as he does. Subsequent seasons deepen the mythology while keeping Stallone's magnetic presence firmly at the center of everything.

Poker Face is a 2023 Peacock original mystery series created by Rian Johnson, the filmmaker behind Knives Out and its sequels. The show stars Natasha Lyonne as Charlie Cale, a woman with an extraordinary gift: she can always tell when someone is lying. After a confrontation with a dangerous casino boss forces her to go on the run, Charlie drifts across America in a battered Plymouth Barracuda, stumbling into a different murder case every week and using her supernatural instincts to uncover the truth.

The series is a loving, expertly crafted homage to the classic American detective shows of the 1970s and 1980s, particularly Columbo. Each episode opens with the murder itself, showing the audience precisely what happened and who did it, before Charlie arrives and slowly, charmingly pieces it together. This inverted mystery format puts all the dramatic tension on how rather than who, and Lyonne's performance is so magnetic and lived-in that the show works even when it isn't trying to surprise anyone. The guest cast across the season is exceptional, featuring names like Adrien Brody, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Chloë Sevigny, and Stephanie Hsu.

Poker Face became one of the most acclaimed television series of 2023, earning Natasha Lyonne a Golden Globe nomination and near-universal praise from critics who called it the most purely entertaining show of the year. Johnson's sharp direction across multiple episodes and Benjamin Millepied's retro-inflected score give the show a consistent identity that holds it together across its standalone episode structure. A second season is in production.

The Gentlemen is Guy Ritchie's return to the stylish, fast-talking criminal underworld he popularized in films like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. The Netflix series follows Eddie Horniman, a young British aristocrat who discovers that his recently deceased father has been secretly leasing the family estate's underground tunnels to one of England's most powerful cannabis empires. Suddenly thrust into a world of gangsters, aristocrats, and violent power struggles, Eddie must navigate a criminal landscape where charm and cunning matter more than brute force.

The ensemble cast is uniformly excellent, with Theo James delivering a breakout performance as the out-of-depth Eddie, and Kaya Scodelario shining as his fiercely intelligent wife Susie. Giancarlo Esposito brings his signature menacing magnetism to the role of the American crime boss overseeing the whole operation, while Ray Winstone, Joely Richardson, and Daniel Ings round out a gallery of vivid supporting characters. Ritchie's trademark snappy dialogue and baroque plotting are on full display, resulting in a show that never slows down or loses its sardonic wit.

Over eight episodes, The Gentlemen builds an intricately layered world where loyalty is currency and no alliance can be fully trusted. The series succeeds not just as a crime thriller but as a sharp comedy of manners, contrasting old English money with new criminal wealth in ways that feel both timely and deliciously absurd. For fans of Ritchie's film work or anyone who enjoys prestige crime television that crackles with energy, The Gentlemen is essential streaming.

Better Call Saul is an AMC drama series created by Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould, running for six seasons from 2015 to 2022. Serving as both a prequel to and a partial sequel of Breaking Bad, the show chronicles the transformation of Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) — a good-natured, ethically elastic small-time lawyer from Cicero, Illinois — into the morally compromised criminal attorney Saul Goodman. Set primarily in Albuquerque, New Mexico beginning in 2002, the series follows Jimmy's decade-long slide from sincere ambition: trying to build a legitimate legal career and earn the respect of his elder brother Chuck (Michael McKean), a brilliant but deeply troubled attorney — into the flamboyant, cartel-adjacent persona that Breaking Bad audiences already knew from the start.

The show features exceptional supporting performances from Rhea Seehorn as Kim Wexler, a principled attorney whose relationship with Jimmy becomes the series' emotional spine and its most agonizing dramatic question; Jonathan Banks reprising his Breaking Bad role as the taciturn fixer Mike Ehrmantraut, whose vastly expanded backstory adds tremendous weight to the character; and Giancarlo Esposito returning as the calculating Gus Fring, whose construction of the meth operation beneath his restaurant is traced in careful, thrilling detail. Kim Wexler — created specifically for the spinoff with no Breaking Bad counterpart — emerges as arguably the show's most compelling figure, her fate serving as the series' central unanswered question across six seasons.

Better Call Saul received exceptional critical acclaim throughout its run, frequently described as matching or surpassing Breaking Bad in character depth and moral complexity. The show received 46 Emmy nominations across its six seasons — a record for the most nominations by a series that never won the award. Bob Odenkirk, previously known primarily as a comedy writer and performer, delivered a dramatic performance of extraordinary range that earned him six consecutive Emmy nominations for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series. The series finale aired in August 2022 to widespread critical acclaim and is considered one of the finest finales in drama television history.

Created by Peter Craig (The Batman, Top Gun: Maverick) and directed entirely by Ridley Scott, Dope Thief is Apple TV+'s most ambitious crime drama — a sprawling, morally textured thriller set in the grinding streets of Philadelphia. Brian Tyree Henry stars as Ray, a small-time criminal with a gift for improvisation, and Mekhi Phifer plays Manny, his lifelong partner whose reckless bravado is matched only by his genuine loyalty. When the two men hatch a scheme to impersonate DEA agents and rob drug dealers of their cash and product, they stumble into a conspiracy of terrifying depth and reach — one that pulls them far beyond anything their neighborhood prepared them for.

The series is based on Dennis Tafoya's novel and adapted by Craig with a screenwriter's eye for character economy and plot precision. Ridley Scott's direction across all eight episodes gives the show a cinematic scale rarely seen in prestige television: long, observational sequences of Philadelphia street life alternate with bursts of brutal, consequence-laden violence. Henry delivers one of the finest performances of his career, bringing to Ray a weary intelligence and improvised dignity that makes the character's increasingly desperate situation genuinely heartbreaking.

Dope Thief arrived as one of the most acclaimed debuts of 2025, praised for its performances, its unflinching portrait of working-class criminal life, and its refusal to sentimentalize or glamorize. For a show built on a heist premise, it is surprisingly interior — less interested in the mechanics of crime than in what it means to live a life in which crime is the only available infrastructure. It stands as essential television: the kind of show that reminds audiences what the medium is capable of when given the resources and the freedom to be genuinely serious.

Ozark is an American crime drama streaming television series created by Bill Dubuque and Mark Williams that premiered on Netflix on July 21, 2017. The series follows Marty Byrde (Jason Bateman), a financial advisor from Chicago who, after a money-laundering scheme with a Mexican drug cartel goes catastrophically wrong, is forced to relocate his family to the Lake of the Ozarks region of Missouri. There, along with his wife Wendy (Laura Linney), he must launder millions of dollars to pay off a dangerous cartel boss and keep his family alive.

What begins as a survival story quickly evolves into something far more complex: a layered examination of how ordinary people transform under extreme pressure, how power corrupts, and how far a person will go to protect the people they love — even when those people are complicit in their own destruction. Jason Bateman's performance is a revelation, marking a dramatic pivot from his long career in comedy; his Marty Byrde is a man who processes catastrophic stress with terrifying rationality, burying his panic beneath spreadsheets and contingency plans. Laura Linney matches him scene for scene as Wendy, a woman who discovers she may be more ruthless than her husband, and Julia Garner is simply extraordinary as Ruth Langmore, a sharp-tongued local criminal who becomes the show's moral lightning rod.

Ozark ran for four seasons, with the final season split into two parts, concluding in April 2022. The series received widespread critical acclaim, earned dozens of Emmy nominations, and established itself as one of Netflix's flagship prestige dramas. The show's distinctive blue-grey visual palette, the moral ambiguity of its central family, and its refusal to offer easy redemption made it one of the defining crime dramas of its era.