# The 18 Best Murder Mystery TV Series of All Time

> Rumpled lieutenants, Nordic gloom, an Oxford Jaguar and a podcast made in an apartment block. Prestige and comfort viewing on the same list.

*By YPB Team · Published August 14, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/the-18-best-murder-mystery-tv-series-of-all-time*

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## Current results (0 votes)

1. **Agatha Christie's Poirot**
   ITV's 1989-2013 series in which David Suchet played every major Poirot story across 70 episodes.
2. **Columbo**
   The inverted mystery where you see the killer first and watch the lieutenant close in.
3. **Broadchurch**
   The 2013 ITV drama about a boy's death in a Dorset town, written by Chris Chibnall.
4. **True Detective**
   HBO's anthology, whose first season followed two Louisiana detectives across seventeen years.
5. **Inspector Morse**
   The Oxford-set ITV series that ran from 1987 and spawned two spin-offs.
6. **Line of Duty**
   The BBC series about an anti-corruption unit investigating its own police force.
7. **Sherlock**
   The BBC's modern-dress Holmes with Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman.
8. **Miss Marple**
   The BBC's 1984-1992 adaptations with Joan Hickson, the Marple many readers still picture.
9. **Murder, She Wrote**
   The long-running CBS series with Angela Lansbury as mystery novelist Jessica Fletcher.
10. **The Killing**
   The Danish series Forbrydelsen, whose first season fixed on one girl's murder for twenty episodes.
11. **Twin Peaks**
   David Lynch's 1990 series that asked who killed Laura Palmer and answered stranger things.
12. **Only Murders in the Building**
   The Hulu comedy about three true-crime podcasters investigating their own apartment block.
13. **Mare of Easttown**
   HBO's 2021 miniseries with Kate Winslet as a small-town Pennsylvania detective.
14. **Luther**
   The BBC series with Idris Elba as a detective who keeps crossing his own lines.
15. **Endeavour**
   The prequel following a young Morse through 1960s Oxford.
16. **Father Brown**
   The BBC daytime series with Mark Williams as Chesterton's priest-detective.
17. **Bones**
   The forensic procedural pairing a forensic anthropologist with an FBI agent.
18. **Death in Paradise**
   The BBC series putting a British detective on a fictional Caribbean island.

Tags: tv shows, crime, mystery, detective