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The detective show is television's most reliable genre, and also its most crowded. Every year brings a new Nordic noir, a new British procedural, or a new prestige limited series where officers stand brooding in the rain as they try to solve complex cases. Most of these crime shows are decently satisfying to watch, and a few of them are so great that they immediately find the audience they deserve.
However, several of these well-paced and well-constructed detective shows do something extraordinary, yet vanish anyway. They're either canceled too early, underseen from the start, or simply buried under the weight of everything else competing for attention in the same window. These five detective shows deserve to be back in the conversation.
The Chicago Code Made The City Its Own Character
Shawn Ryan created The Shield, one of the finest police dramas ever made, and followed it with Chicago Code, a series that holds a 100% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It ran for exactly 13 episodes before Fox canceled it.
Set in Ryan's hometown of Chicago, the show follows veteran detective Jarek Wysocki (Jason Clarke) and Teresa Colvin (Jennifer Beals), the city's first female police superintendent, as they pursue a long-running investigation. The subject of their suspicions is Alderman Ronin Gibbons (Delroy Lindo), a corrupt political figure with connections to organized crime that run deep enough to make the case essentially impossible to make.
The mystery show arrived years before the One Chicago franchise colonized NBC, making the city central to its storytelling in a way procedurals rarely manage.
The Shadow Line Is Unconventional Detective Fare
Hugo Blick wrote, directed, and produced all seven episodes of this BBC Two miniseries, and the result is one of the most ambitious pieces of crime television ever made in Britain. The premise tracks the investigation into the murder of a drug baron from both sides simultaneously.
Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Detective Inspector Jonah Gabriel, shot on an undercover operation and left with a bullet lodged in his brain and memory gaps, while Christopher Eccleston plays Joseph Bede, a criminal associate trying to go straight but finds himself caught in the same web.
Stephen Rea plays a figure called Gatehouse: a tall, quiet, and deeply unsettling presence whose role in everything only becomes clear in the final episode. The Shadow Line looks and sounds like European art cinema rather than genre television, but it lost even the meager audience it had on BBC Two, despite being one of the network's best offerings.
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency Veers From Its Source Material In The Best Way
Max Landis adapted Douglas Adams' novels for BBC America with Samuel Barnett as Dirk Gently, an eccentric self-proclaimed holistic detective who believes in the fundamental interconnectedness of all things.
Elijah Wood plays Todd Brotzman, a hapless hotel employee who becomes Dirk's involuntary assistant when a bizarre murder scene draws them together. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency ran for two seasons, totaling 18 episodes, before being canceled in 2018.
What the show did with Adams' premise was truly inventive—rather than adapting the novels directly, Landis created new mysteries that preserved the books' logic while pushing the comedy into stranger, more surreal territory with each episode.
Deadloch Is An Australian Hidden Gem
When a man's body washes up on the beach in the sleepy Tasmanian town of Deadloch during the lead-up to its annual Winter Festival, fastidious local senior sergeant Dulcie Collins (Kate Box) is thrown together with abrasive Darwin detective Eddie Redcliffe (Madeleine Sami) and their overeager junior constable Abby (Nina Oyama).
The result is an eight-episode black comedy that functions simultaneously as a real mystery, a sharp satire of Australian small-town culture, and a fine odd-couple comedy. Created by Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan, Deadloch is an enjoyable detective story, but most people outside Australia have not seen the crime show.
Deadloch won five AACTA Awards and was nominated at the 52nd International Emmy Awards for Best Comedy, but even so, fans of the genre would not have heard of it.
Top of the Lake Is Highly Acclaimed, But Still Unknown
Top of the Lake is a seven-episode limited series created by Jane Campion for the Sundance Channel and BBC, which she co-created with Gerard Lee. Campion is the first woman to win the Palme d'Or at Cannes, for The Piano in 1993.
Top of the Lake stars the inimitable Elisabeth Moss as Detective Robin Griffin, who returns to the bleak New Zealand town where she grew up to be with her dying mother. Robin is drawn into the investigation of a 12-year-old girl's disappearance after the girl, who is pregnant and refuses to name the father, walks into a freezing lake.
Holly Hunter, Peter Mullan, and David Wenham complete an excellent cast, and Campion creates a show that explores how violence against women gets absorbed by communities that have learned to overlook it. Moss may have won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Miniseries for Top of the Lake, but it's still never as big a part of detective genre conversations as it should be.
