10 Greatest Crime Shows With Fewer Than 40 Episodes
Jessica is a journalist, editor, TCA critic, and multimedia storyteller with a decade of experience covering pop culture, film, TV, women's sports, lifestyle, and more. She earned her degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington with a focus in creative writing before moving to N.Y.C. and getting her start at The Huffington Post. (She still misses those nap pods.) She's covered multiple film festivals, recapped some of your favorite series, worked too many red carpets to count, and even yapped on a podcast or two. When she’s not interviewing your favorite showrunner or ranking Ryan Gosling's best roles for places like UPROXX, Teen Vogue, Marie Claire, The Daily Beast, and Cosmopolitan, she’s busy being a full-time hype woman to her cat, Finn. You can find her on Bluesky and, sadly, Twitter.
The prestige crime show has a habit of forgetting when to leave. What starts as a taut mystery about a missing kid balloons into eight seasons plus a spin-off nobody asked for, and by the fourth season, the writers are inventing new murders just to keep the stars employed. But the shows below never got the chance to overstay.
Some ran short because their creators wanted it that way; others were yanked off the air too soon. Whichever camp a series falls into, the compressed episode count is what makes each of these worth revisiting. Fewer than 40 episodes forces every scene to matter. There's no room for filler, or for a whole season spent staring at cork boards. What you get here is brevity, the secret ingredient to truly great crime television. Below are crime shows worth clearing a weekend for.
'Hannibal' (2013–2015)
Bryan Fuller took the Thomas Harris universe, dunked it in candle wax, and produced the most operatic procedural NBC ever aired. Will Graham (Hugh Dancy), a profiler whose empathy for killers has cost him most of his nervous system, gets paired with Baltimore's most sophisticated psychiatrist, Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen). The problem? Lecter happens to be moonlighting as the very cannibal Will's been chasing. The show never tries to hide this from the audience. Instead, the tension comes in watching Will slowly figure out what his new dinner companion has been feeding him all this time.
Mikkelsen plays Hannibal as a bit of a wounded snob rather than a movie monster, which is what makes the whole thing delicious. The kitchen sequences are mouth-watering (if a Michelin star doctor got the David Lynch treatment, that is). 39 episodes across three seasons feels short because the show got canceled in its prime, though watching it now, that tight run works in its favor. There's no dead weight here, only a slow-burn romance between a man and the person who might want to eat his entrails.
'Broadchurch' (2013–2017)
Chris Chibnall's small-town detective drama landed on ITV in 2013 and immediately kicked off the David Tennant and Olivia Colman era of prestige British telly. Broadchurch is about an 11-year-old boy who's found dead on the beach of a Dorset village where everyone knows everyone. Two detectives (one local, one an outsider lugging way too much personal baggage) have to work out who did it while the town collapses around them.
Colman's performance in the first season is why this show is remembered so fondly. She plays a working cop whose family and closest friends are all on the suspect list. 24 episodes across three seasons let the town grieve on screen rather than shoving it aside for whodunit business. Season 2 is uneven, everyone agrees, but the first arc is one of the great pieces of British crime television.
'Peaky Blinders' (2013–2022)
Steven Knight spent nine years and 36 episodes on the Shelby family, a Birmingham crime dynasty run by Cillian Murphy's Tommy Shelby, whose cheekbones do half the acting and whose interior life is a nightmare. The show starts in 1919 with the Shelbys running bookmaking and racecourse rackets, and it climbs, decade by decade, into international arms deals and fascist politics.
Peaky Blinders is a period gangster show that scores its slow walks to Nick Cave, and once you accept that the show refuses to draw inside the lines, the whole viewing experience becomes a hell of a lot more fun. Six seasons of six episodes each means every run is short enough to blaze through.
'Mare of Easttown' (2021)
Kate Winslet arrived on HBO with an accent so thick you'd need a cleaver to cut through it and had the rest of the country salivating for a Wawa hoagie by the end of her run. Brad Ingelsby's seven-episode miniseries follows Mare Sheehan (Winslet), a small-town detective in Pennsylvania who is running out of patience with her ex, her mother (Jean Smart), her grandson's custody situation, and a missing-persons case that keeps refusing to resolve itself. Then a body turns up.
The show works because it treats the mystery as the least interesting thing about its town. What's interesting is the way everybody knows everybody's business, and the way Winslet plays a woman who has to do her job among the people she went to high school with. Nobody in this town gets to move on cleanly, and the show doesn't rush them.
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.
'The Sinner' (2017–2021)
Season 1 of The Sinner opens with Jessica Biel stabbing a stranger on a beach for no apparent reason. Bill Pullman shows up as Detective Harry Ambrose, a sad man in cardigans who cares less about the crime than about the psychology underneath it. Each subsequent season resets with a new case and a new central mystery, keeping Ambrose as the constant. The show is basically about why people do the awful things they do, filtered through Pullman's rumpled decency.
What keeps it lean is the season-by-season reset. Nobody has to bend a story around a returning cast, which means each season can commit fully to its own weirdness. 32 episodes across four seasons, all built on the premise that we know the who and the what, so the only remaining question is the why. Biel is genuinely great in the first season, and Carrie Coon shows up in Season 2 to do the thing she does best: out-act everyone on screen.
'Mindhunter' (2017–2019)
David Fincher's FBI drama tracks the birth of criminal profiling in the late '70s, when Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff) and Bill Tench (Holt McCallany) start driving around America interviewing incarcerated serial killers to figure out what makes them tick. Anna Torv plays the academic who keeps their methodology from collapsing into cowboy nonsense.
Mindhunter is procedural in the least sexy way possible, and that's the point. Fincher gives us long conversations in fluorescent prison rooms with terrifying men, and the killers are the whole draw. Kemper, Berkowitz, Manson, all the guys crime buffs know from books and podcasts, sitting across a table just answering questions. Nineteen episodes across two seasons is not enough, though what exists is close to a masterclass in how to make talking heads riveting. Cameron Britton's Ed Kemper alone is worth the watch.
'Unbelievable' (2019)
Unbelievable adapted a ProPublica investigation into a serial rapist and the young woman whose report was disbelieved by her own detectives. Kaitlyn Dever plays Marie, and the first episode is one of the more infuriating hours of television produced in the last decade. Of course, we mean that in the best way possible. Merritt Wever and Toni Collette eventually arrive as two detectives in different states quietly building a case that connects the assaults nobody in Marie's jurisdiction bothered to follow.
It's a hard watch that treats Marie with real care, and it doesn't let the cops who failed her off the hook. Eight episodes is exactly the right length; any longer would tip into misery tourism, and any shorter wouldn't earn the payoff when Wever and Collette finally sit across from Dever in the last hour.
'We Own This City' (2022)
David Simon and George Pelecanos followed up The Wire with this six-episode reckoning with the Baltimore Police Department's Gun Trace Task Force, a group of plainclothes cops who spent years robbing the citizens they were supposed to be protecting. Jon Bernthal plays Wayne Jenkins, the unit's ringleader, as someone who's both charming and completely unhinged.
Everything here has a paper trail because everything actually happened, and the miniseries knows the value of laying the receipts out fast. Crime fans get a full corruption saga with federal indictments, informants wearing wires, and a slow-motion collapse where the cops start turning on each other as the walls close in. We Own This Town hurts to watch, which is the entire point.
'True Detective' (2014–Present)
Nic Pizzolatto's HBO anthology arrived in 2014 with Matthew McConaughey monologuing about time being a flat circle and prestige television has never really recovered. Woody Harrelson plays his partner, a family man whose patience for family life is running out, and together the two hunt a killer whose crimes have a ritualistic weirdness that spills into the second half of the season in ways it would be criminal to spoil.
The anthology model is what saves it. Season 2 was criticized for being too dense, though it has its defenders now. Season 3 quietly did some of Mahershala Ali's best television work. Then Issa López took over for Night Country, shooting the Alaskan tundra in complete darkness with Jodie Foster and Kali Reis, and justified the whole enterprise all over again. 30 episodes across four separate cases means no season has to sustain more story than it actually has.
True Detective
- Release Date
- January 12, 2014
- Network
- HBO Max
- Showrunner
- Nic Pizzolatto
- Directors
- Cary Fukunaga
-
Rust Cohle
-
Ray Velcoro
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