Netflix’s Underrated 3-Part Psychological Thriller Deserves To Be As Big As True Detective

Published Aug 28, 2026, 1:00 PM EDT

Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies, television, culture, and politics online and in print since 2017. He worked as a Senior Editor in Adbusters Media Foundation from 2018-2019 and wrote for WhatCulture in early 2020. He has been a Senior Features Writer for ScreenRant since 2020.

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While True Detective deservedly received props for redefining the psychological thriller genre in the mid 2010s, Netflix’s similarly superb series never got its flowers for the show’s contributions to the genre. The humble murder mystery has been a TV staple for decades, and it has been through countless reinventions in that time.

From grisly, gory procedurals like the CSI franchise and Prime Video’s Scarpetta to warm and cozy classics of the genre like Murder She Wrote, Diagnosis Murder, and the iconic detective series Columbo, there is a murder mystery show for everyone. In the 2010s, True Detective season 1’s popularity resulted in a string of equally acclaimed dark, gritty psychological thrillers, from Mindhunter to Sharp Objects, in the years that followed.

However, while True Detective season 1 received the attention the show deserved upon release, another equally superb entry into the genre was sorely underrated at the time. Released in 2015, Netflix’s Bloodline predated Stranger Things, Squid Game, Wednesday, and many more of the streaming service’s flagship shows. A dark psychological thriller, Bloodline explored the story of the uber-wealthy Rayburn clan, a dysfunctional family who all hide dark secrets.

Bloodline Was Netflix’s First Great Original Psychological Thriller Show

Image courtesy of Everett Collection

With a stellar cast that included Linda Cardellini, Ben Mendelsohn, Sissy Spacek, and Kyle Chandler, Bloodline gradually unraveled the Rayburn family’s history of lies, deceit, and murder as each character’s secrets came to light across the show’s three seasons. Compared to Netflix’s later Mindhunter, the show was more interested in exploring its amoral villain protagonists than the police trying to catch them. However, this didn’t mean the show was necessarily on their side.

Bloodline’s Family Thriller Story Arrived Too Early

Via MovieStillsDB

On the contrary, Bloodline danced along an interesting tightrope, getting viewers invested in these absurdly rich, amoral characters, while also simultaneously rooting for their eventual downfall. Unfortunately for the show’s creators, the series arrived a little too early to play into a subgenre that would later specialize in this style of satire. Uber-rich families behaving badly became a thriller staple a few years later thanks to Succession, Knives Out, Yellowstone, and even HBO’s satirical mystery series The White Lotus.

Admittedly, shows like Revenge had explored this premise earlier, but the “Eat the Rich” thriller became such a cultural staple after 2020 that there were entire lists and video essays dedicated to the subgenre. Psychological thriller movies like Saltburn, Parasite, and The Menu, horror movies like the Ready or Not franchise and Death of a Unicorn, and TV shows like The Fall of the House of Usher all explored this balance between hoping for these characters to get their comeuppance and wincing when they finally did.

Since Bloodline predated all these shows and movies, the Rayburn family’s story never received the level of mainstream viewership that the psychological thriller might have enjoyed had the show been released only a few years later. In the years since, star Ben Mendelsohn headlined the superb psychological thriller miniseries The Outsider, Chandler starred in DC’s True Detective-inspired Lanterns, and Cardellini led not one, but two darkly comic psychological thrillers, Dead to Me and DTF St. Louis.

Bloodline Started An Unfortunate Netflix Thriller Trend

Image via MovieStillsDB

Clearly, the stars of Bloodline are invested in the psychological thriller genre, and this just goes to show how much the series deserved to receive the outsized acclaim heaped on True Detective around the same time. Sadly, not only was Bloodline not as big a mainstream hit, but the show also fell victim to early cancellation in what would soon become a recurring, troubling pattern for Netflix.

Like Mindhunter and many other psychological thriller shows, Bloodline was canceled too soon and never got a satisfying ending as a result. While Netflix’s recent Agatha Christie series Seven Dials proves the streaming service is still invested in the mystery genre, this cancellation still stung since Bloodline ended before receiving the critical acclaim that True Detective enjoyed.

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  Kyle Chandler

  John Rayburn

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  Danny Rayburn