6 Detective Shows Better Than True Detective

Published Nov 1, 2026, 11:00 AM EST Ben Sherlock is a Tomatometer-approved film and TV critic who runs the massively underrated YouTube channel I Got Touched at the Cinema. Before working at Screen Rant, Ben wrote for Game Rant, Taste of Cinema, Comic Book Resources, and BabbleTop. He's also an indie filmmaker, a standup comedian, and an alumnus of the School of Rock. If True Detective had stopped after one season, and remained a limited series, it would’ve gone down as one of the greatest masterpieces in TV history. It would be ranked alongside Breaking Bad and The Sopranos and Chernobyl and Avatar: The Last Airbender as one of the few perfect TV shows that everyone should watch at least once. But HBO had to get greedy; True Detective was a hit, so they had to turn it into a brand. They never brought back the original characters, but they used that iconic name to market a series of bland, hit-and-miss mystery dramas. Ever since its first season, True Detective has struggled to settle into an anthology format. The subsequent seasons have been horrendously bad at their worst and pretty good, not great, at their absolute best. Season 2 was rushed out to capitalize on season 1’s success, so it felt half-baked and shallow; season 3 was a return to form, but felt safe and familiar; and season 4 was exciting and different, but felt like a brand-new show entirely, with Lynchian supernatural overtones. Those later seasons have soured True Detective’s reputation. Season 1 would easily top any list of the best detective shows ever made, but when it’s bundled with seasons 2, 3, and 4, it falls down a couple of notches. Taken as a hit-and-miss whole, True Detective isn’t quite as fine a TV drama as The Wire or Twin Peaks or its own unofficial fourth season, Mare of Easttown. Line Of Duty Line of Duty is the UK’s answer to The Wire. It’s the closest thing we have to a police procedural with the nuance and depth and intense realism of David Simon’s magnum opus. Line of Duty has a revolving door of characters, mixing in A-list guest stars like Thandiwe Newton and Stephen Graham and Kelly Macdonald. The series revolves around an anti-corruption task force within the police service, essentially tasked with policing the police. It’s a great setup for a cop show, turning the investigative lens inward and looking for crime and corruption inside the walls of the station. Like True Detective and The Wire and The Shield and all the other trailblazing cop shows of the 21st century, it subverts the black-and-white morality and case-of-the-week formulas of classic crime procedurals in favor of a darker, more complicated look at police procedures. The good guys don’t always catch the bad guys, and the good guys aren’t always all that good. The Night Of One of HBO’s most compulsive miniseries, The Night Of stars Riz Ahmed as a Pakistani-American college student who meets a young woman, enjoys a night of sex, drugs, and partying, and wakes to find that she’s been murdered and he’s the prime suspect. He has no idea what happened, how she died, or who really killed her, but he’ll have a tough time convincing a jury of any of that when they see the evidence mounting against him. John Turturro, giving one of the best performances of his career, plays the lawyer fighting the uphill battle to clear his name. The Night Of’s first episode sets up a fascinating mystery, and the next seven carefully unraveled that mystery, and kept us on the hook the whole time. Ahmed and Turturro’s performances are so human and lifelike, and Richard Price and Steven Zaillian’s writing is so naturalistic and engaging, that it feels like you’re watching these chilling events play out for real. Mindhunter After chronicling the crimes of serial killers both fictional (Se7en’s John Doe) and real (Zodiac’s Zodiac) on the big screen, David Fincher turned to the small screen to go back to the source. Mindhunter takes place in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, and follows a trio of FBI agents who notice a pattern in the behavior of mass murderers, set up a rinky-dink new underground department at the bureau, and start building up psychological profiles of all of America’s most heinous killers. Mindhunter is a who’s-who of old-school serial killers, with appearances by everyone from Charlie Manson to the Son of Sam, but at the same time, it’s not just a cameo-fest; it really digs deep into the mental toll of studying this kind of horrific bloodshed as a nine-to-five vocation. The real crime is that Netflix cancelled Mindhunter so soon. Twin Peaks In its first episode, Twin Peaks plants itself in a couple of familiar TV genres. It sets itself up as a soap opera about a small town in the heart of Americana, full of colorful characters with messy interpersonal drama, but it also sets itself up as a detective show about an FBI agent coming to that town as a fish out of water and investigating the mysterious murder of the homecoming queen. And then, by the third episode, when Special Agent Dale Cooper finds himself in the Black Lodge, immersed in a strange, otherworldly dimension on the edge of town, it’s clear that there’s nothing familiar about this show at all. Twin Peaks takes all the tropes and conventions that David Lynch had enjoyed from decades of watching American television — soapy melodrama, legal procedures, attractive people having affairs, detectives investigating gruesome murders — and filtered them through this bizarre Lynchian lens. It’s All My Children by way of Blue Velvet; it’s Days of Our Lives by way of Mulholland Drive. Mare Of Easttown Mare of Easttown almost feels like an unofficial season of True Detective; it’s True Detective in all but name (and certainly feels more like True Detective than Night Country ever did). Kate Winslet plays the titular Mare Sheehan, a disillusioned detective and former hometown hero who’s losing the town’s support as she fails to solve a couple of high-profile local crimes. Just like in True Detective, Mare’s latest murder case starts to spill into her chaotic personal life; the killer may be closer to her own doorstep than she’d like to think. Mare is holding onto a lot of grief and trauma that she hasn’t processed, and Winslet gives one of her greatest performances showing all of that behind her eyes while barely moving her face — it’s a masterclass in subtle expressiveness. The Wire Not only is David Simon’s The Wire better than True Detective; it might be the single greatest TV series ever made. It’s a searing, sobering, almost documentary-like look at crime and corruption in the American city, using Baltimore — a town that Simon knew like the back of his hand, having been a police reporter there for years — as a microcosm of the entire country. Each season is a Ken Burns-like deconstruction of a different broken institution in the United States: the illegal drug trade, the public school system, the media, the government. But at the same time, it’s not just a dry social critique lecturing its audience on the issues; it’s a genuinely entertaining TV drama, with lovable characters and witty dialogue and even a few action scenes, that just so happens to reflect the harsh realities of the world with shocking accuracy. The Wire is the most realistic cop show ever made; the only way to make a more realistic cop show would be to put cameras on the walls of a real police precinct and watch them do it for real, but that wouldn’t be nearly as funny or stylish or tightly paced as The Wire.