# Top 32 Neo-Noir Crime Series of All Time

> Rain-soaked detectives, desert drug empires and Nordic winters: this is crime television at its most morally grey, with prestige dramas sharing space with one-season cult gems.

*By YPB Team · Published October 29, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/top-32-neo-noir-crime-series-of-all-time*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **True Detective** — score 1000/1000
   HBO's 2014 anthology whose first season followed two Louisiana detectives on a seventeen-year ritual-murder case.
2. **Twin Peaks** — score 858/1000
   David Lynch and Mark Frost's 1990 murder mystery that turned a small logging town into a dreamlike noir.
3. **Breaking Bad** — score 681/1000
   A chemistry teacher's descent into meth kingpin in the New Mexico desert.
4. **Ozark** — score 681/1000
   A financial planner launders cartel money from a Missouri lake town, drenched in blue-grey gloom.
5. **The Night Of** — score 636/1000
   HBO's 2016 miniseries following a student charged with murder through the New York justice system.
6. **Forbrydelsen** — score 524/1000
   The Danish original of The Killing, a landmark of Nordic noir with Sarah Lund's famous jumper.
7. **Mare of Easttown** — score 524/1000
   Kate Winslet's weary Pennsylvania detective investigates a local girl's murder.
8. **Sugar** — score 524/1000
   Colin Farrell plays a film-obsessed private eye hunting a missing woman in modern Los Angeles.
9. **The Bridge** — score 454/1000
   A body found on the Oresund Bridge pairs a Danish and a Swedish detective in this Nordic noir.
10. **Fargo** — score 454/1000
   Noah Hawley's anthology of Midwestern crimes spun out of the Coen brothers' film.
11. **Miami Vice** — score 454/1000
   Michael Mann's neon-soaked 1980s cop show that set crime TV to pop music and pastel suits.
12. **Dexter** — score 454/1000
   A Miami blood-spatter analyst who moonlights as a serial killer of killers.
13. **The Sinner** — score 454/1000
   An anthology where each season asks why an ordinary person committed a sudden crime.
14. **Tokyo Vice** — score 454/1000
   An American reporter descends into the 1990s Tokyo yakuza underworld in this Michael Mann-launched series.
15. **Sharp Objects** — score 454/1000
   Amy Adams plays a reporter returning to her Missouri hometown to cover two girls' murders.
16. **Bosch** — score 372/1000
   Amazon's long-running adaptation of Michael Connelly's Los Angeles homicide detective novels.
17. **Luther** — score 372/1000
   Idris Elba's brilliant, volatile London detective faces killers and his own darkness.
18. **Perry Mason** — score 372/1000
   HBO's 1930s Los Angeles origin story recasting the famous lawyer as a broke private eye.
19. **Altered Carbon** — score 372/1000
   A cyberpunk murder mystery in which minds can be swapped between bodies.
20. **Better Call Saul** — score 272/1000
   The Breaking Bad prequel charting small-time lawyer Jimmy McGill's slide into Saul Goodman, with black-and-white noir flash-forwards.
21. **Justified** — score 272/1000
   An Elmore Leonard-based neo-western noir about a quick-drawing marshal back in Harlan County, Kentucky.
22. **Top of the Lake** — score 272/1000
   Jane Campion's brooding New Zealand mystery about a detective searching for a missing pregnant girl.
23. **Babylon Berlin** — score 272/1000
   A lavish German series following a vice detective through Weimar-era Berlin's underworld.
24. **Veronica Mars** — score 272/1000
   A teen private eye works cases in a class-divided California town in this cult noir.
25. **Jessica Jones** — score 272/1000
   Marvel's hard-drinking private investigator haunted by a mind-controlling abuser.
26. **Mindhunter** — score 272/1000
   David Fincher's chilly drama about the FBI agents who invented criminal profiling.
27. **Terriers** — score 272/1000
   A cult 2010 one-season show about an ex-cop and an ex-crook working as unlicensed private eyes in San Diego.
28. **The Penguin** — score 272/1000
   Colin Farrell's Oz Cobb claws for power in Gotham's underworld in this HBO crime saga.
29. **The Wire** — score 0/1000
   David Simon's Baltimore saga tracing the drug trade through police, docks, city hall, schools and press.
30. **The Killing** — score 0/1000
   The rain-drenched Seattle murder investigation adapted from the Danish hit.
31. **Ripley** — score 0/1000
   Steven Zaillian's 2024 black-and-white Patricia Highsmith adaptation starring Andrew Scott.
32. **Cowboy Bebop** — score 0/1000
   The 1998 jazz-scored anime about bounty hunters drifting through a noir future solar system.

Tags: tv shows, thriller, crime, mystery, neo-noir