10 Thrilling Crime Shows That Don't Slow Down for a Single Episode
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Crime television has to be fast-paced, but the momentum that defines the genre doesn’t necessarily need to come from car chases or police shootouts every five minutes. A conversation can create just as much tension as an action sequence if every little piece of information drives the story in an unexpected direction. That works especially well in crime stories because the crime itself is rarely the end. If anything, it is usually where the real complications begin.
Someone has to cover it up or figure out who was responsible, and each of those decisions can create an entirely new problem. The more difficult it is to contain the chaos, the more entertaining the progression. These crime shows might just be the best examples of that because they use character work and unpredictable storytelling to keep their stories moving with every single episode.
10 'ZeroZeroZero' (2019–2020)
ZeroZeroZero is set in the high-stakes world of cocaine shipment, and the adrenaline rush is real with this show. The series follows aging ’Ndrangheta boss Don Minu La Piana (Adriano Chiaramida), who orders five tons of cocaine from Mexico to try and restore his position within the organization. The Lynwood family, American shipping brokers led by Emma (Andrea Riseborough) and her brother Chris (Dane DeHaan), are responsible for getting that shipment across the Atlantic. Meanwhile, Mexican soldier Manuel Contreras (Harold Torres) becomes increasingly entangled with the cartel producing it.
The audience then gets three separate views into one risky transaction. That structure is why ZeroZeroZero barely slows down. These storylines don’t just alternate, either, but constantly change one another. Instead of wrapping up one problem, the series moves the shipment into the hands of someone facing a different one. The great part about the show is that unlike other crime dramas, it doesn’t need to keep inventing random threats to hold the audience’s attention. It sets things in motion in the first episode, and refuses to slow them down until the very end.
9 'The Day of the Jackal' (2024–Present)
The Day of the Jackal follows a deadly contract killer known only as the Jackal (Eddie Redmayne), who hides behind different identities to carry out impossible jobs across Europe. That changes after one of his hits catches the attention of MI6 firearms specialist Bianca Pullman (Lashana Lynch), who realizes that whoever pulled it off possesses an extremely unusual set of skills. From there, the series essentially becomes two people working toward each other from opposite ends. Things get complicated when the Jackal is hired for an even more difficult assignment where he has to assassinate billionaire Ulle Dag Charles (Khalid Abdalla) before the launch of River, a software designed to expose the movement of hidden wealth.
This premise essentially puts the Jackal in a pressure cooker where every obstacle adds to the suspense. The immediate problem of an episode keeps shifting, but the central storyline of Bianca working backwards to trace the killer’s aliases and contracts always remains the same. This keeps things from ever getting boring or slowing down. The Day of the Jackal approaches a classic manhunt in a much more complex way than most other shows, and this approach is the binge-worthy crime series' biggest strength.
8 'Money Heist' (2017–2021)
Money Heist begins with the plan of a perfect robbery, but spends its entire runtime showing all the ways in which it comes crashing down. The internationally acclaimed Spanish crime series follows the mastermind Professor (Álvaro Morte), who recruits eight criminals, including Tokyo (Úrsula Corberó), Berlin (Pedro Alonso), Nairobi (Alba Flores), Rio (Miguel Herrán), and Denver (Jaime Lorente), to take over the Royal Mint of Spain. Their plan isn’t straightforward, though. The group intends to take 67 hostages and remain in the building long enough to print billions of euros themselves while the Professor manipulates the police from outside.
Initially, the audience believes that the Professor has an answer for everything, and while that might be true, even he has blind spots for moments when hostages fight back, and his crew members ignore orders and disagree among themselves. Money Heist uses flashbacks as its greatest storytelling tool because these sequences reveal part of the Professor’s plan only when they become relevant, which leaves the audience in a state of constant uncertainty about whether the latest disaster is genuinely unexpected or part of the design. That means the show never gets boring, because the crew keeps moving from one disaster to the other.
7 'I Will Find You' (2026)
I Will Find You begins with an impossible mystery. David Burroughs (Sam Worthington) is five years into a life sentence for murdering his three-year-old son Matthew, even though he maintains that he didn’t do it. Now, David has stopped fighting his conviction until his former sister-in-law Rachel Mills (Britt Lower) shows him a photograph taken at an amusement park of a boy who looks exactly like Matthew. The possibility of his son being alive completely changes David’s objective. All of a sudden, clearing his name is no longer important, because finding Matthew comes first. As a result, he escapes prison with help from his best friend, Sgt. Adam Mackenzie (Jonathan Tucker), and joins Rachel in tracing where the photograph came from.
The problem is that breaking out immediately puts the FBI Fugitive Task Force on his trail, led by Max Williams (Chi McBride) and Sarah Greer (Logan Browning). This means David is trying to investigate the crime that put him away while simultaneously becoming the most wanted person in the same investigation. Almost every lead raises yet another question, and the central mystery just keeps getting bigger. The thrilling miniseries tells a compelling story in eight fast-paced episodes that keep tightening the noose, which makes the final reveal feel truly earned.
6 'The Gentlemen' (2024–Present)
The Gentlemen follows British Army officer Eddie Horniman (Theo James), who unexpectedly inherits his father’s title and enormous country estate instead of his irresponsible older brother Freddy (Daniel Ings). The inheritance comes with one major surprise, though. Turns out a huge cannabis operation run by the Glass crime family has been operating underneath the property for years. Susie Glass (Kaya Scodelario) manages the business, and Eddie initially wants nothing more than to get her operation off his land. Unfortunately, Freddy owes millions to dangerous criminals, and his attempts to solve that problem end with a dead gangster inside the family estate.
From there, Eddie keeps getting dragged into increasingly bizarre situations that keep spiraling in horrible ways. The Gentleman has mastered the art of escalation because the series is essentially a chain reaction where one criminal act creates the need for another. Eddie might begin an episode trying to fix a distribution problem or find somewhere else to grow Susie’s product, only to end up dealing with an entirely new corner of the British underworld. By the end of Season 1, getting out is no longer really the objective because Eddie starts believing that the power this life offers him is not so bad at all.
Collider Exclusive · Action Franchise Quiz What Action Series Would You Thrive In? Wick · Fast · Mission · Die Hard
Four franchises. Four completely different ideas of what a hero is: the assassin with a code, the family that never leaves anyone behind, the man who does his own stunts, and the guy who simply refuses to die. Only one of them runs on your particular brand of trouble. Eight questions will tell you which one you would survive.
🐕Wick
🏁Fast
🧨Mission
🎄Die Hard
01
How does a room know you've walked into it? Every action hero arrives differently. Some of them arrive before they arrive.
02
It turns physical. What does your fighting actually look like? Choreography is character. Yours says something about you.
03
Who is standing beside you when it starts? Some franchises are built on a team. Others are built on one person walking in alone.
04
It has gone badly wrong. What keeps you upright? Act two exists to find out what you're actually made of.
05
There's a vehicle. What are you driving, and how? No action franchise has ever survived without a car chase. This one is yours.
06
How do you feel about the people giving the orders? There is always an institution. There is rarely a good one.
07
Underneath all of it, what are you actually doing this for? The stunts are the reason people come. This is the reason they stay.
08
When the credits roll, what do people say about you? Every franchise is really an argument about what makes someone worth watching.
Casting Has Been Completed Your Franchise Is…
Four action series. One of them is built around exactly the way you handle pressure, people, and a room that has just gone very quiet. Here is where you would survive the trilogy, and probably headline it.
John Wick
You are precision with a grudge. You don't posture, you don't escalate, and you don't warn anybody twice. That is exactly why the people who know you are so careful never to be the reason you start.
- The Wick films run on discipline: an underworld with actual etiquette, a hero who honours every rule of it, and a world that unravels the instant someone breaks one against him.
- You share that quality. You are extraordinarily reasonable right up to the line, and then completely immovable past it.
- Focus, commitment and sheer will. You'd be the one carrying grief through three sequels and turning it into technique rather than noise.
- People wouldn't call you dangerous. They'd say your name quietly and let that do the work.
Fast & Furious
You understand the thing the whole franchise is secretly about: the cars are spectacular, but the crew is the point. You collect people, you keep them, and you'd drive through a building for any one of them.
- This series went from street racing to orbit without ever changing its actual subject, because loyalty scales and plot doesn't have to.
- You have the same instinct. You build a family out of whoever turns up, and then you defend it past the point of reason.
- You'd thrive here because the franchise rewards exactly your strengths: warmth, nerve, an absolute refusal to leave anyone behind, and a relaxed relationship with physics.
- The mission can wait. The barbecue cannot.
Mission: Impossible
You over-prepare and then take the dangerous part yourself anyway. It looks like control, but it's really responsibility. You have never worked out how to ask somebody else to carry the risk.
- This is the franchise of the plan that collapses on schedule: the team, the mask, the rooftop, and the one person sprinting flat out because sprinting is all that's left.
- You share that refusal to accept an outcome. Told the odds, you treat them as an administrative error.
- You'd thrive here because these films reward competence and loyalty in equal measure. The mission matters, but nobody on the team gets left on the wrong side of a door.
- Some people delegate the cliff. You have never once been that person.
Die Hard
You are not the most trained person in the building, the best equipped, or the one anybody would have picked. You are simply the one still standing at the end, which turns out to be the only qualification that matters.
- Die Hard invented the modern action hero by making him mortal: outgunned, out-planned, bleeding, and extremely funny about it.
- You share that stubbornness. Adversity doesn't make you noble, it makes you sarcastic, and then it makes you unstoppable.
- You'd thrive here because these films reward improvisation and nerve over preparation, and you've never had the luxury of preparing anyway.
- You didn't want any of this. You just declined to be the person who let it happen.
5 'MobLand' (2025–Present)
MobLand wastes no time turning a family problem into a brutal gang war. The crime series follows Harry Da Souza (Tom Hardy), a trusted fixer for the Harrigans, one of London’s most powerful criminal families. The audience meets Conrad Harrigan (Pierce Brosnan) and his wife Maeve (Helen Mirren), but much of Harry’s work involves cleaning up the damage caused by the generations beneath them. That becomes considerably harder when Conrad’s reckless grandson Eddie (Anson Boon) goes out with Tommy Stevenson (Felix Edwards), the son of rival crime boss Richie Stevenson (Geoff Bell), and Tommy subsequently disappears. Years of uneasy peace between the two families begin collapsing almost immediately, with Richie being convinced that the Harrigans know more than they are admitting.
That tension is MobLand’s biggest source of momentum as one missing person case turns into a fight over territory, loyalty, and control of London’s criminal underworld. Harry’s calm personality is the only thing providing any sense of normalcy in all this chaos, and he almost expects every situation to eventually turn into a disaster. That makes the constant escalation surprisingly entertaining. While everyone around him acts on anger, pride, or revenge, Harry is usually already calculating how to do damage control. The only problem is that the Harrigans create messes faster than even he can clean them up. MobLand gives its most capable character an increasingly difficult job, and watching him try to stay one step ahead of people who just don’t want to make sense keeps the show moving relentlessly.
4 'Fool Me Once' (2024–Present)
Fool Me Once begins with a dead man walking back into his own house, and that hook remains undefeated. Former military pilot Maya Stern (Michelle Keegan) is still grieving the murder of her husband Joe (Richard Armitage), who was supposedly shot during a robbery, when she checks a hidden nanny cam and sees him playing with their young daughter. The footage leaves her wondering whether Joe really is dead, and if he is, how did he show up in that recording? Her search quickly leads beyond Joe’s murder. Turns out that Maya’s sister Claire (Natalie Anderson) was also killed months earlier during what appeared to be a burglary, while Claire’s children Abby (Danya Griver) and Daniel (Daniel Burt) begin uncovering secrets of their own about their mother’s life. Detective Sami Kierce (Adeel Akhtar) is meanwhile investigating Joe’s death, and Maya’s increasingly suspicious relationship with Joe’s wealthy mother Judith Burkett (Joanna Lumley) keeps pointing her toward secrets the Burkett family would rather leave buried. Before long, these two seemingly separate murders begin overlapping in ways Maya cannot ignore.
This constant connection between them is what keeps Fool Me Once moving. No clue ever works in isolation because everything Maya discovers raises another question. The greatest part of the series, though, is when the audience eventually realizes that Maya has never been investigating the mystery from the same starting point they have. In fact, she is withholding crucial information, which means earlier scenes keep changing meaning as more of her own actions are revealed. Fool Me Once is endlessly entertaining because it keeps changing its central mystery, so the audience never truly knows what’s coming.
3 'The Helicopter Heist' (2024)
The Helicopter Heist takes one of Sweden’s most unbelievable real-life robberies and spends most of its time showing exactly how difficult it was to pull off. The eight-part Netflix series follows childhood friends Rami (Mahmut Suvakci) and Michel (Ardalan Esmaili), who once committed robberies together before Rami left that life behind to raise a family. He eventually turns to Michel in the face of extreme financial troubles, and his friend comes up with an idea for one enormous final adventure. The duo decides to rob millions from a heavily protected cash depot in Stockholm by landing a helicopter directly on its roof. The plan sounds ridiculous, but it sure does give The Helicopter Heist a lot to work with. Michel and Rami have to assemble the right crew, secure financing, find an explosives expert, and, most importantly, somehow get their hands on a helicopter and someone capable of flying it. At the same time, police officer Leonie Hamsik (Iskra Kostić) begins investigating the possibility of a major robbery before it has even happened, which puts the two sides on a collision course.
Now, instead of treating all this preparation as something to rush through, the show makes it the most exciting part of it all. All the madness that ensues makes the final payoff feel genuinely satisfying. The robbery itself is depicted almost in real time, with the crew getting just 15 minutes to break in, grab the money, and get back into the air. However, the story doesn’t end there, because once the helicopter leaves the roof, Rami and Michel have to resort to increasingly desperate ways to avoid the consequences of what they have just done. The Helicopter Heist is over-the-top in the best possible way, and its brilliant storytelling deserves way more recognition than it has gotten.
2 'Griselda' (2024)
Griselda takes its viewers through the rise and fall of an entire criminal empire in just six episodes. The series, inspired by the life of Griselda Blanco, begins with Griselda (Sofía Vergara) fleeing Medellín with her three sons and arriving in Miami with nothing but a hidden stash of cocaine she hopes to sell. Her desperate attempt to start over quickly turns into something much bigger when Griselda identifies a wealthy clientele that Miami’s existing dealers have largely overlooked, brings women she knows from Medellín into the operation, and gradually builds a distribution network powerful enough to challenge the men controlling the city’s drug trade. The show’s biggest conflict, though, is that she is never satisfied.
Winning over dealers leads to competition with larger suppliers, which eventually puts her against the Ochoas, while detective June Hawkins (Juliana Aidén Martinez) begins recognizing that the violence spreading across Miami has someone unusually organized behind it. By the time Griselda has the money and influence she was fighting for, she is also surrounded by rivals and informants, with no one she can trust. The show doesn’t waste a lot of time with its pacing. It doesn’t even offer Griselda a comfortable moment where she gets to enjoy her success. Every victory raises the stakes for her, and every loss could mean her empire’s downfall. The six-episode format works perfectly for a story as intense as this because Griselda’s success and failure eventually begin to feel like parts of the same complex, messy process.
1 'The Penguin' (2024)
The Penguin begins with Gotham’s criminal hierarchy falling apart, and Oz Cobb (Colin Farrell) immediately sees an opportunity to climb up the ladder. The eight-episode series is set after the events of The Batman and follows Carmine Falcone’s death, which leaves a massive power vacuum in Gotham’s underworld. Oz is still a relatively low-level gangster when an impulsive confrontation with Carmine’s son Alberto (Michael Zegen) ends with Alberto dead. Instead of allowing that mistake to destroy him, Oz recruits teenager Victor Aguilar (Rhenzy Feliz) to help cover it up and begins using the murder as part of a much larger play for power. Soon enough, he begins playing the Falcone and Maroni families against each other while convincing both sides that he can be useful. Things become considerably more dangerous when Alberto’s sister Sofia Falcone (Cristin Milioti) returns from Arkham and begins questioning what really happened to her brother. Oz briefly works alongside her to take control of Gotham’s drug trade through Bliss, but alliances in The Penguin rarely survive for long. Sofia eventually builds an empire of her own, while Oz is forced underground and begins recruiting Gotham’s smaller gangs for his attempt to take the city.
The central character’s relentless ability to improvise is what fuels the show. He is somehow always minutes away from getting exposed, but almost always finds a way to turn the situation into another opportunity. This turns Oz into one of the most compelling anti-heroes TV has seen in decades, where the audience is practically begging for more once an episode ends.
The Penguin
7 10
- Release Date
- 2024 - 2024-00-00
- Showrunner
- Lauren LeFranc
- Directors
- Craig Zobel
- Writers
- Lauren LeFranc
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