Good Television Mystery Series


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I'm fond of Midsommer Murders, a BBC series going on like 15 seasons. It's on Roku and probably some other free streamers. Very little blood, but be warned it has a surprising amount of incest and numerous grudges going back several centuries. Also some homophobia from the original sargeant.
 


Only Murders in the Building does good season-long mysteries.

Poker Face does a nice twist on the standard mystery procedurals.
Both of these are excellent recent mystery series.

Only Murders in the Building (Disney Plus) does very well with its charming core cast (Steve Martin, Selena Gomez, Martin Short), impressive guest stars (Meryl Streep, Paul Rudd), and gimmicky call-backs, to the point that you don’t care too much about the mystery (which is good, because they’re usually dire).

Poker Face (Amazon Video) is a wonderful and faithful retool of the Columbo formula, but what if Columbo was an itinerant human lie detector played incredibly charmingly by Natasha Lyonne. It’s brilliant at the mystery of the week format. It’s even coming back for a new season in May.

The Afterparty (Apple TV) has the best season-long murder mysteries, married to a great “each witness statement is a short film in a different genre” gimmick. Pity it only got two seasons.

The Residence (Netflix) is a very recent Shonda Rhimes series set in the White House, and it’s pretty interesting for that alone (it’s based on the non-fiction book of the same name which is about how the WH has been run through the decades). The mystery itself is nicely solvable.

Might as well mention A Man on the Inside (Netflix) which is a very gentle mystery set in an idealised elderly care home. It’s got Ted Danson, which is nice.
 

Felt like they had another season ready to go and then the ax fell.
Yeah, basically Bosch was a victim of it's own success. The show kept getting more popular, but long-running shows get more expensive each season. Even with Bosch: Legacy paring down the number of characters, Amazon apparently felt that they weren't making a profit.*

Corporate thinking, I swear.

*The fact that they felt the whole Freevee thing was a fiasco that led them to competing against themselves was no doubt a factor.
 

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