10 TV Shows To Watch If You Love ‘True Detective’
10. Broadchurch (2013–2017)
Broadchurch begins with the murder of a young boy in a small seaside town, but the show’s real subject is what happens after the headlines. David Tennant and Olivia Colman play detectives whose clashing temperaments make the investigation feel unstable from the start, while the case gradually exposes the fault lines running through the entire community. Like True Detective, it understands that solving a murder doesn’t restore what was lost. It just forces everyone to confront how much damage was already there.
9. Black Bird (2022)
This prison thriller trades wide-open landscapes for confinement, but it hits a similar nerve. Taron Egerton plays a convicted drug dealer who is offered a reduced sentence if he can befriend a suspected serial killer behind bars and extract a confession before the man’s appeal goes through. Much of the tension comes from conversation rather than action, with the show building a disturbing psychological duel between two men trapped in close quarters. If you like True Detective at its most unnerving, when the threat comes from being stuck in a room with someone who may be monstrous, Black Bird delivers.
8. Under the Banner of Heaven (2022)
Andrew Garfield anchors this bleak true-crime drama as a devout Mormon detective investigating the murder of a mother and her infant daughter. What begins as a homicide case gradually opens into something much larger: a study of religious extremism, historical violence, and the damage caused when belief becomes a tool for control. Like True Detective, it uses the structure of an investigation to interrogate faith itself, and to show how a detective’s worldview can start to fracture under the weight of what he uncovers.
7. Happy Valley (2014–2023)
Sally Wainwright’s Happy Valley doesn’t have the mythic sprawl of True Detective, but it shares its understanding of how violence seeps into ordinary life. Sarah Lancashire is extraordinary as Catherine Cawood, a police sergeant carrying enormous personal grief while dealing with crime, addiction, and abuse in her Yorkshire community. The show is less stylized than True Detective, but no less dark, and it’s driven by the same kind of emotional exhaustion: the sense of a good person trying to keep functioning in a world that keeps grinding people down.
6. The Night Of (2016)
This one leans more toward legal drama than detective fiction, but it’s soaked in the same dread. After a college student wakes up next to a murdered woman with no memory of the night before, the series follows his descent through police custody, Rikers Island, and the machinery of the justice system. What makes The Night Of so effective is how suffocating it feels. Every step of the process seems designed to strip away identity, certainty, and hope. If True Detective works for you because of its sense of moral rot, this is one of the strongest follow-ups.
5. Mare of Easttown (2021)
Kate Winslet’s Mare Sheehan feels like exactly the kind of detective who would fit inside the True Detective universe: exhausted, stubborn, deeply wounded, and unable to separate her job from the town she lives in. The murder mystery at the center of Mare of Easttown is compelling on its own, but the show’s real strength lies in how it maps grief across an entire community. Like True Detective, it understands that the detective story is only one layer of the drama. Beneath it is a portrait of family damage, guilt, and the way small towns trap people in each other’s pain.
4. The Killing (2011–2014)
If you’re after rain-soaked misery and detectives destroying themselves over a case, The Killing is an easy recommendation. Its first season stretches a single murder investigation across multiple episodes, using that slow pace to build atmosphere and obsession rather than urgency. Mireille Enos and Joel Kinnaman make for a compellingly broken investigative pair, and the series is at its best when it leans into emotional attrition, the sense that every lead, every suspect, and every new detail is pulling everyone involved further into the dark.
3. Sharp Objects (2018)
There’s a reason Sharp Objects comes up in so many True Detective conversations. It’s a murder mystery, yes, but it’s also a study of trauma, memory, addiction, and the way a hometown can trap a person in the worst version of themselves. Amy Adams plays a reporter returning home to cover the murders of two girls, only to find herself pulled back into the orbit of her manipulative mother and the emotional wreckage she thought she’d escaped. The show’s fractured editing and oppressive atmosphere make it feel less like a standard thriller than a psychological bruise.
2. Mindhunter (2017–2019)
David Fincher’s Mindhunter is less mystical than True Detective, but it shares its fascination with what prolonged exposure to violence does to the people studying it. Set in the early days of FBI criminal profiling, the series follows two agents and a psychologist as they interview imprisoned serial killers in the hope of understanding how they think. The cases are chilling, but the real hook is watching the investigators absorb more and more of the darkness they’re trying to classify. It’s one of the few crime shows that feels genuinely interested in the psychological cost of looking too closely.
1. Twin Peaks (1990–1991 / 2017)
If True Detective is the descendant, Twin Peaks is the ancestor. On paper, it starts with a familiar setup: a young woman is murdered in a small town, and an outsider arrives to investigate. But David Lynch and Mark Frost turn that premise into something stranger, sadder, and far more unsettling than a conventional mystery. The deeper the show goes, the more it reveals a world where evil feels both intimate and cosmic, rooted in human cruelty but impossible to fully explain. That combination of murder, atmosphere, and existential dread is exactly what True Detective would later build on , and Twin Peaks still does it better than almost anyone.
