5 Near Perfect Thriller Series on Netflix You Can Binge in a Weekend

Published Oct 19, 2026, 5:05 PM EDT

Ben Brewster is a filmmaker, critic, screenwriter, and actor whose work sits at the intersection of film culture, craft analysis, and storytelling.

He is a movie list contributing writer at Collider and a contributing writer for High on Films, where he covers contemporary cinema, independent film, and festival releases with an eye toward narrative structure, performance, and visual language. 

Ben is an active film festival participant, having worked with Newport Film, the Nantucket Film Festival and as a screener for the Austin, Boston & Woodstock film festivals. 

He brings to that work a programming instinct shaped by years of close engagement with independent and documentary cinema. This comes with a deep investment in the kinds of films that rarely find their way into the mainstream conversation without someone willing to advocate for them.

His background spans documentary and narrative filmmaking, film marketing, and production, including work with award-winning directors. This as well as developing his own indie production company, Lilac Creative Studio, through which he develops and produces original work across fiction and nonfiction forms. 

His debut documentary, Diamond in the Rust, is an examination of economic redevelopment and displacement in the Queens area of New York City. The film was recently accepted to the Unisphere Film Festival, the Defense of Democracy Film Festival, and the Urbanite Arts & Film Festival. This would mark his first festival recognition as a director. 

In addition to his writing and programming work, Ben hosts Beneath the Bloom, a film podcast exploring the work behind the scenes in cinema, and the struggles one can face to make a movie become a reality. The show reflects the same sensibility that runs through all of his work. A conviction that film is not merely entertainment but one of the most powerful tools human beings have for understanding each other.

Across mediums, his work is driven by a deep belief in film as a communal, transformative art form.

Below, the Newfoundland squid-centric gory thriller, hit Netflix earlier this month and I wanted to love it more than I did. Josh Hartnett and Mackenzie Davis star in it and the limited series sets its characters in a remote fishing community. It felt like a premise that had everything going for it, but was limited in its scary and gory moments, leaving its more dialogue-heavy sequences lacking substance. While it might have underwhelmed, it gets the TV nerd's mind thinking about what a truly bankable thriller series on streamers to binge in a single weekend.

The platform has become known for that specific type of media consumption: a series that can be made available in its entirety in one day, a more modern method that some viewers prefer to the slower, more linear approach of an episode a week. While Netflix has been known to miss badly at times, it has cultivated one of the stronger libraries of serialized thriller content out there right now. Some of its most popular projects arrived with little excitement and built their audiences slowly through word of mouth and algorithmic resurfacing, a key strength of Netflix's catalog.

A good bingeable thriller trusts its audience to piece together the story quickly enough to keep up with its often tense and immediate pacing. It does not over-explain but fosters its suspense through character work and atmosphere. The best of these series reward the commitment you've made by the time the finale has arrived, an especially key aspect that many seem to fall flat on.

5 'The Gentlemen' (2024-Present)

Image via Netflix

Guy Ritchie bringing his brand of stylized British crime comedy to television felt like either a great idea or a disaster waiting to happen. It really is dependent on how you feel about his filmography that's been received as quite a mixed bag from the critics. However, The Gentlemen lands decisively in the former category. Theo James anchors the series as Eddie Horniman, an aristocrat who inherits his family estate and the full cannabis empire that lurks in the shadows of its public imagery. Ritchie builds an ensemble cast around James featuring the likes of Kaya Scodelario, Daniel Ings and Giancarlo Esposito, and utilizes his classic overlapping dialogue and verbal wit to support the stakes behind the more action and violence-dominated sequences.

The Gentlemen consists of eight episode seasons that move at a pace that quickly has you forgetting what time it is. Ritchie's ability to keep the audience off balance at all times here, is what makes the element of the unknown so entertaining and engaging. Like some of his most beloved films including The Gentlemen (2019), this show spawns a sense of true comedic timing between its characters, weaved seamlessly into the darker and heavier moments riddling the sprawling English Country Estate.

4 'Dept. Q.' (2025-Present)

Image via Netflix

This Danish crime procedural starring Matthew Goode adapts Jussi Adler-Olsen's novels with a grimness and a formal discipline that few Scandanavian-English language productions have seemed to convincingly replicate. The cold case unit at its center gives the show a structural elegance, a group of people assigned to cases everyone else has given up on. It is a specific kind of premise of institutional exhaustion and decay that surrounds them and gives the more straightforward aspects a sense of realism and edge.

The performances in Dept. Q keep the emotional tension from feeling melodramatic, something that can often kill the background work on a crime show like this that builds it out in such a thorough and deliberate manner. But what separates the show from comparable material is its dedication to each victim at the center of the cases. The team sees each murder or crime beyond the cold case being a puzzle to solve but as a story about people who deserved better than what the system had provided. It is dark and patient and occasionally brutal, but leaves a layer of institutional failure underneath the mystery that will have many viewers left thinking about the ramifications of such ineptness.

3 'Fool Me Once' (2024)

Image via Netflix

Six episodes, a clean ending, and one of the more surprising mystery constructions Netflix has to offer. Harlan Coben's adaptation for the screen follows Maya Stern, a former solider who spots her recently murdered husband alive in footage from a nanny cam. The show builds outward from that singular image and the performance of its lead, Michelle Keegan, who doesn't fall for the kind of tortured protagonist clichés this source material easily could have invited.

The twists in this one arrive from directions that feel inevitable in retrospect but are pretty shocking in the moment, something that Coben's stories have consistently proven to accomplish. Fool Me Once is the perfect show to recommend to someone claiming to not be into thriller TV, because it doesn't feel like some kind of genre exercise. Its structure feeds off a specific person being in this impossible situation and lets the drama work off that exact contradiction.

2 'Bodyguard' (2018)

Image via Netflix

Jed Mercurio's political thriller gave Richard Madden the role that definitively separated him from his Game of Thrones associations and established him as one of the more compelling dramatic actors working in British television. David Budd is a war veteran assigned to protect the Home Secretary, which, by way of order, focuses on the central relationship of the series between Budd and Keeley Hawes' Julia Montague with a tension that operates on multiple registers: political, personal and simply dangerous. Budd has significant PTSD, and finds Montague's political agenda quite morally troubling, yet that contradiction only adds to the suspense of the thrill and action.

Mercurio knows how to construct a sequence that keeps you physically tense in your seat, and Bodyguard has several of them across its six episodes. The show can afford to be generous with its pacing, with that relationship alone holding most viewers' attention for the first few chapters. However, the back half of Bodyguard is some of the most tense television made in the 2010s with sequences designed to make your heart rate go up and then keep going up much longer then you'd expect.

1 'Adolescence' (2025)

Image via Netflix

There is not a more formally ambitious piece of television on Netflix right now. Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne's four-episode limited series about a thirteen-year-old boy arrested for the murder of a classmate is one singular unbroken take. It is a structural choice that removes the safety net of editing but leaves an intimacy and immediacy that can't be replicated in post. It forces every performance to be present at that very moment, since there is nowhere to cut away from.

Stephen Graham is extraordinary in the father role, a portrait of a man trying to understand something that is beyond fathomability and having his conception of his child shattered in real time. Adolescence is anchored by Graham's relationship with his son Jamie, played by Owen Cooper, who never provides easy explanations as to what happened or why. A creative decision worth championing, as it keeps the entire piece from being put into this box of a message tied to social media or masculinity or any of the other frameworks that the press naturally reached for upon its premiere. The single-take format means nothing is thrown away, every frame is deliberate and provides a cumulative effect that gives its fourth episode set in a therapy session impressive baggage.