Zodiac Meets True Detective In Netflix's 19-Episode Masterpiece Thriller

Published Oct 29, 2026, 9:30 PM EDT

Angel Shaw is a Lead Writer and Critic on ScreenRant's TV team, covering new-release and classic TV shows across all major streaming platforms. She has been a writer with ScreenRant since 2022 and specializes in Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, and fantasy. 

Angel holds a bachelor's degree in language interpreting and is passionate about all things culture and communication—especially in how it relates to popular media throughout history (from Shakespeare to Friends to Game of Thrones).

If projects like Zodiac and True Detective are your vibe, Netflix has a crime thriller masterpiece that should be right up your alley. These are two crime-thriller projects that revolve around dark, gritty cold cases, though the way they explore these ideas is, of course, rather different. Zodiac is a 2007 movie directed by David Fincher and written by James Vanderbilt, while True Detective is an HBO anthology TV show created by Nic Pizzolatto and initially premiered in 2014. They were released years apart on different media, but both are likely to draw a similar audience.

The name of the game here is disturbing grit and chilling realism. There's a sort of hopelessness in both stories, as they emphasize that true crime often doesn't come with a neat and tidy resolution. Both Zodiac and True Detective also lean into the psyche of both murderers and investigators. To solve crimes, it's imperative to understand criminals' minds. However, diving into these minds takes a toll, and definitive answers still aren't guaranteed. It's within this exact realm that Netflix's Mindhunter also finds its foundation.

Mindhunter is an easily defined spiritual hybrid between Zodiac and True Detective. The Netflix series premiered in 2017 and ran for two seasons and 14 episodes, and is set around the birth of the FBI's Serial Crime Unit. The series' central team, Agent Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff) and Agent Bill Tench (Holt McCallany), travels to prisons around the country to interview serial killers like Ed Kemper and Charles Manson to understand better how they tick. The idea here is that these criminals' complex psyches can help investigators solve future murder cases.

Mindhunter is another of Fincher's creations, so there is naturally plenty of overlap here with Zodiac. This director has a passion for criminal profiling, and both projects convey this through a similarly cold visual style and the unfortunate truth that not all stories have a happy ending. The character dynamics in Mindhunter are more like True Detective season 1. That partnership between the investigators allows Mindhunter to take the desperate search for answers a bit deeper, as we see the relationship suffer the cost of knowing disturbing truths.

Is There Any Chance Mindhunter Will Return?

Image via MovieStillsDB

Crime thrillers can be approached in a wide variety of ways, but the most chilling of these stories tend to be the ones that are either based on true events or that center on the killer's mindset and process (in contrast to the investigators'). That's precisely what Zodiac, True Detective, and Mindhunter all achieve. Unfortunately, while Zodiac became a cult classic and True Detective remains an ongoing hit, Mindhunter ended prematurely after season 2.

Choose the movie with the higher Rotten Tomatoes score.

This didn't happen because Mindhunter is, by any means, a bad show. The series holds an impressive 97% score on Rotten Tomatoes, so it's no stretch to call this crime thriller a masterpiece. The trouble is that Fincher doesn't hold back with his projects. Mindhunter came with high production costs because of the nature of the show itself, yet cerebral crime thrillers of this type appeal to a comparatively niche audience. Between this and Fincher's busy schedule, Netflix couldn't justify greenlighting another season.

Technically, Mindhunter was never canceled. The show just got put on an indefinite hold. This fact has meant that the discussion regarding a potential return has never been too far from the surface. It's very unlikely that a third season will ever come about, but there were once rumors of some feature-length films to wrap things up. In this day and age, we also can't rule out potential remakes or reboots, regardless of the format. Overall, the future is unclear, but the good news is that Mindhunter's existing 14 episodes are still available to binge on Netflix.