6 Crime Shows That Are Better Because You Already Know the Killer
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Most crime shows live by the rule of keeping the killer hidden until the very end. This means that the mystery around that big reveal does most of the heavy lifting. However, there is a certain thrill that comes with letting the audience in on the secret. That singular choice turns the entire viewing experience on its head.
Instead of chasing the story, the audience gets to sit inside it and watch every character on screen operate with half the information they have. Nothing about the plot has changed, but everything about how it lands has. This is a list of acclaimed crime shows that use this storytelling to make for some of the most rewarding watches in the genre, exactly because they reveal their killer to the viewers.
6 'Columbo' (1971–1998)
Columbo built its identity around subverting what viewers expected from murder mysteries back in the day. That’s because most episodes of the show begin by revealing exactly who committed the crime in question, how they executed their plan, and what their alibi is going to be. Then, Lieutenant Columbo (Peter Falk) arrives to kick off his investigation and begins noticing details the murderer assumed nobody would care about. This inverted structure was definitely strange in the beginning, but soon enough, the audience realized how fun it really was.
The viewers already know the answer to every question Columbo raises, and having that intel makes every conversation with the suspect feel ten times more interesting. The fun is not in discovering who did it, but in watching Columbo slowly close the gap while the killer becomes increasingly aware that their plan might not be foolproof after all. More often than not, the big reveal comes from one simple slip-up or a contradiction that no one but the detective could have caught. Columbo never even needs to hide the killer, because watching the detective completely shock everyone who underestimated them is the real thrill.
5 'Des' (2020)
Des is an easy-to-binge three-part series that doesn’t even pretend to keep its killer under wraps. The show opens in 1983, when human remains are discovered blocking the drains outside his North London flat. By the time Detective Chief Inspector Peter Jay (Daniel Mays) arrives, the antagonist, Dennis Nilsen (David Tennant), is not desperately trying to escape suspicion. He calmly tells the police where more remains can be found and soon begins admitting to multiple killings.
From there, the investigation shifts from who did it to figuring out why Nilsen is willingly turning himself in. The audience watches as he speaks to Jay and later biographer Brian Masters (Jason Watkins) with an almost disturbing level of detachment. Don’t be fooled, though, because Tennant never makes the villain feel like some over-the-top monster. In fact, Nilsen is quiet and painfully ordinary, which makes listening to him far more unsettling than any dramatic reveal could have been. Des is a crime drama about what happens after the killer is found, and that is a perspective one just can’t look away from.
4 'Dexter' (2006–2013)
Dexter blurs the line between protagonist and antagonist by making the killer its central character who guides the audience through the story. The show follows Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall), who works as a blood-spatter analyst for Miami Metro Police, which gives him unusual access to crime scenes, evidence, and information about detectives trying to catch people exactly like him. By night, though, he hunts criminals who escaped justice and kills them according to a strict code taught to him by his adoptive father, Harry (James Remar).
That double life becomes the fuel for this adrenaline-fueled narrative, which gets even more complicated when Dexter’s sister Debra (Jennifer Carpenter), who works in the same department, starts getting closer to the truth. The show is far more interesting because the audience understands exactly how Dexter operates and what he is capable of. His internal narration means viewers hear him constantly calculating his next move. The show puts the audience in an uncomfortable position, where they find themselves almost rooting for the killer. The only question is whether he can improvise fast enough to keep the farce up.
Collider Exclusive · Villain Personality Quiz Which Criminal Mastermind Would Be Your Nemesis? Lecter · Joker · Moriarty · Chigurh
Four of the finest criminal minds ever put on screen. One of them would look at you and see something worth their time. Eight questions decide which one comes for you, why they picked you, and what they would want when they arrived.
🍷Lecter
🃏Joker
♟️Moriarty
🪙Chigurh
01
What would a criminal mastermind notice about you first? Great villains choose their opponents carefully. Something about you got their attention.
02
How do they make first contact? The introduction tells you everything about what is coming next.
03
What do you actually believe about right and wrong? Every nemesis is really an argument about the thing you believe most.
04
What finally gets under your skin? Everybody has a pressure point. Finding yours is the whole plan.
05
They have made their move. How do you fight back? This is the part of the film where the audience finds out who you are.
06
What would they use against you? A good villain never brings a weapon you have not already handed them.
07
What do they actually want from you? The money is never the point. Something else always is.
08
How does it end between the two of you? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides who comes for you.
The Case File Is Complete Your Nemesis Is…
Four criminal masterminds. One of them was always going to be yours. Here is who comes for you, why they picked you out of everyone available, and what they want from the encounter.
Hannibal Lecter
Your nemesis does not want to beat you. He wants to know you completely, and he is patient enough to wait for it. The frightening part is how good the conversation is.
- Lecter is the most dangerous kind of opponent: the one who finds you interesting. He never raises his voice, because he has never needed to.
- You keep a great deal to yourself and you are careful about what you show. That reserve is exactly the door he would knock on.
- The films understood something other thrillers missed. The horror is not the violence. It is being perfectly understood by the wrong person.
- He would be unfailingly polite about all of it. That is the worst part.
The Joker
Your nemesis is not after money, territory or revenge. He is after a demonstration, and you are the person he has chosen to prove his point on.
- The Joker only picks opponents who believe in something. Your decency is not a defence against him. It is the entire reason he showed up.
- He has no plan you can predict and nothing you can take away, which removes every tool you would normally reach for.
- His whole argument is that you are one bad day away from being him, and you would spend the rest of your life proving him wrong.
- He would call it a magic trick. You would call it the worst night of your life.
Moriarty
Your nemesis respects you, which sounds flattering until you work out what it means. He chose you because nobody else was worth his time.
- Moriarty is the original criminal mastermind, the template every later one borrows from: a mind the equal of the hero's, pointed the wrong way.
- You enjoy being the cleverest person in the room. He is counting on exactly that, and he has already built the room.
- This is the rare nemesis who would be genuinely disappointed if you lost badly. He needs the game to be worth playing.
- It ends the way these things always end. Two people, one problem, and only one way down.
Anton Chigurh
Your nemesis has no personal interest in you whatsoever, and that is precisely what makes him unsurvivable. You are not a rival. You are a stop on the way.
- Chigurh does not negotiate, gloat or explain. He arrives, he asks one question, and the answer was decided long before you opened your mouth.
- You trust yourself to handle things. He is the one problem in the world that has no interest in how capable you are.
- No Country for Old Men rewrote the screen villain by removing the thing audiences quietly rely on: the sense that talking might work.
- Call it. He will wait.
3 'The Serpent' (2021)
The Serpent is a criminally underrated show with a plot that just keeps getting better. The series opens in 1970s Bangkok, where Charles Sobhraj (Tahar Rahim) is living under the name Alain Gautier and presenting himself as a wealthy gem dealer while also preying on young travelers passing through Southeast Asia. Alongside Marie-Andrée Leclerc (Jenna Coleman) and Ajay Chowdhury (Amesh Edireweera), he draws vulnerable tourists into his apartment, takes control of their passports and belongings, and keeps reinventing his identity whenever suspicion gets too close. Meanwhile, Dutch diplomat Herman Knippenberg (Billy Howle) begins investigating the disappearance of two backpackers and slowly realizes that several apparently unrelated cases may lead back to the same man.
Knowing the killer makes those two sides of the story all the more compelling. The audience watches Sobhraj move through different identities with almost insulting ease while Herman is stuck chasing paperwork and trying to piece together a pattern that viewers can already see. Even the show’s fractured timeline works in its favor because it keeps the focus on the victims since the audience already understands where they are heading. In doing all this, The Serpent becomes less about the shock of discovering a killer and more about watching how long someone can remain visible without the system around him figuring out the whole picture.
2 'The Fall' (2013–2016)
The Fall is another show that puts its killer in plain sight and dares the audience to watch as the investigation tries to catch up with him. The show follows Paul Spector (Jamie Dornan), a grief counselor and seemingly perfect family man, who lives a double life, murdering women across Belfast. It’s actually chilling how he manages to live these two realities in parallel without ever giving anything away. However, things get complicated when Detective Superintendent Stella Gibson (Gillian Anderson) is flown in from London to hunt him down.
From there, the show splits its time evenly between her relentless pursuit of whom she knows to be a nameless, faceless killer and Spector's home life, so the audience is always a step ahead of everyone on screen. That gap is where the tension comes from. Every time Gibson's team gets closer to a lead, someone in Spector's own life gets closer too, without having any idea what they're actually looking at. Dornan plays the twisted antagonist without any obvious tells, which makes him all the scarier. There is no big twist waiting at the end of The Fall because the show doesn’t need it to be compelling until the very end.
1 'Hannibal' (2013–2015)
No show on this list commits to the bit harder than Hannibal. The show presents its killer, Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen), as its most trusted character, a brilliant psychiatrist, who is invited to the FBI’s inner circle as they try to catch… well, him! Right off the bat, the audience knows that he is the one the officials need to be profiling, and that tension is what makes Hannibal impossible to stop watching. Lecter is joined by FBI investigator Will Graham (Hugh Dancy), who has the unsettling gift of thinking exactly like the killers he hunts, which makes him either the one person capable of catching Hannibal, or his perfect next victim.
The way Lecter operates is one of the most fascinating parts of the acclaimed crime show, and also the most unsettling. The infamous killer is a cannibal whose victims end up on his table. He hosts elaborate dinners for his unsuspecting FBI colleagues, who enjoy the meals he puts in front of them without knowing the truth behind them. The central question of Hannibal isn’t whether the killer will get caught, but how long it will take for Will to finally connect the dots. By the time the FBI profiler finally understands what he's been sitting across from, the show has already spent two seasons making the audience complicit in the horror.
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