True Detective season 4 may be over, but there is good news for fans of the show. HBO has officially ordered another season of the anthology series. However, given the four-year gap between True Detective season 3 and True Detective: Night Country, it might be quite a while before a new mystery unfolds in this series. So the real question now is simple: What will you watch next?
There are plenty of police procedurals on network television, but they lack the same dark and ambiguous tone of True Detective. That’s why when looking for similar series, the best options are almost always on streaming platforms or premium cable outlets. We’ve narrowed down our choices for the seven shows like True Detective that you should watch now that season 4 has come to a close. All you have to do is make time to watch them.
A Murder at the End of the World
Fans of True Detective: Night Country should be right at home with the frigid setting of FX and Hulu’s A Murder at the End of the World. Emma Corrin’s Darby Hart may not be a professional detective like the ones on HBO, but her deductive skills have earned her an invitation from billionaire Andy Ronson (Clive Owen) to attend a gathering at his arctic compound in Iceland.
Much to Darby’s surprise, her ex-partner, William “Bill” Farrah (Harris Dickinson), is also among Andy’s guests. And before Darby can even broach a potential reconciliation with Bill, she finds him fatally wounded. Who killed Bill and why? If Darby can’t narrow down the suspects quickly, then Bill will only be the first to die.
The Fall
Gillian Anderson had plenty of practice starring in dark mysteries with occasional occult or alien overtones as Agent Dana Scully in The X-Files. Two decades later, Anderson got to headline her own mystery drama for BBC Two, which is called The Fall. And unlike her previous series, the case is a down-to-earth search for a murderer.
Stella Gibson (Gillian Anderson) is a veteran detective who has been sent to Belfast to oversee the progress of a murder investigation. But it isn’t long before Stella has to take over the investigation herself when she and the other detectives realize that a serial killer is in play. And he’ll do anything to keep killing unimpeded by the police.
Mare of Easttown
Kate Winslet beat True Detective‘s Jodie Foster to the punch with her own HBO crime drama miniseries, Mare of Easttown. Winslet plays Detective Sergeant Marianne “Mare” Sheehan, a famous local investigator whose latest case has dragged on for a year without any end in sight.
Mare also has enough personal tragedy to deal with on top of the murder case, including her divorce, the suicide of her adult son, and an attempt to get custody of her grandson from her late son’s girlfriend. Winslet handles it all with skill and crafts one of her most memorable characters through her performance.
Mindhunter
It takes a very special project for David Fincher to shepherd it to TV. But the director was very hands-on with Mindhunter, a series that is set in the late ’70s and is a prequel to almost every serial killer drama that you’ve ever seen.
Jonathan Groff plays FBI Special Agent Holden Ford, one of the leading figures in the Behavioral Science Unit. It’s Ford who hits upon the idea of interviewing serial killers in custody to get a better idea of how their pathology works and what to look for when hunting them. Ford, Bill Tench (Holt McCallany), and
Wendy Carr (Anna Torv) all participate in Ford’s research. But it takes its toll on everyone, and there are still active serial killers to catch as well.
The Outsider
Stephen King’s The Outsider has plenty of the things that True Detective has, including well-known stars and a foreboding atmosphere with potential supernatural overtones. Ben Mendelsohn stars as Detective Ralph Anderson, a man who is outraged that the suspect in the murder of a young boy is Terry Maitland (Jason Bateman), the man who used to coach the Little League team of Ralph’s late son.
Ralph is so certain that Terry is the killer that he doesn’t know how to take it when evidence gives Terry an airtight alibi. To get to the bottom of this case, Ralph turns to Holly Gibney (Cynthia Erivo), a private investigator with near-perfect recall and an eye for details that he may have missed.
Top of the Lake
During the production of Mad Men, Elizabeth Moss somehow found the time to star in a dark detective drama of her own: Top of the Lake. Unlike The Fall, this series takes place in Australia and New Zealand as Detective Robin Griffin (Moss) attempts to find a missing and pregnant 12-year-old girl.
Moss reprised her role for a second season of Top of the Lake, which opened up a new case and new suspects to play off of while searching for answers. Compared to many of the other shows on this list, Top of the Lake is a little obscure. But Moss’ performance makes it a must-see television for any fan of the mystery genre.
Dark Winds
AMC’s Dark Winds is almost certainly going to give you True Detective vibes, even though the source material, Tony Hillerman’s Leaphorn and Chee novels, were published decades earlier. Joe Leaphorn (Zahn McClarnon) is a tribal police lieutenant in Navajo County who has seen it all. That may be why Leaphorn almost instantly (and correctly) guesses that his new deputy, Jim Chee (Kiowa Gordon), is actually an FBI agent who has gone undercover to find a group of brazen bank robbers.
Leaphorn and Chee make an unofficial alliance to shift FBI resources to a double homicide they’ve been investigating while also looking into the robbers that the FBI wants so badly. Naturally, the two cases are connected. And despite their combined skills and experience, even Leaphorn and Chee are in over their heads.
