"Excellent!" I cried. "Elementary," said he.
The Mentalist just makes it in at number ten as a solidly watchable show. Our detective here, Patrick Jane, was once a psychic that took advantage of people, but is now putting his powers of deduction and observation to good use, working as a consultant for the California Bureau of Investigation.
And in every respect this is a Californian show; the weather is glorious, the people are beautiful, and the crimes are scandalous. Of course, the flip side to this is that the show lacks any real grit, and the protagonist seems shallow, but it serves as TV comfort food.
Where The Mentalist gives us a "hot" Sherlock, played by Simon Baker, Tony Shalhoub's Monk goes in the opposite direction, leaning very hard on the idea of a detective that can't understand people. Or rather, can't understand sociability. In fact, Monk's OCD, phobias and conditions are so extreme that the Watson figure here is actually his nurse/carer.
If you like a hero whose genius is counterbalanced by other flaws, Monk is the show for you.
Dexter gets worse and worse as the show progresses, and the finale is almost as underwhelming as Game of Thrones, but the initial hook is fantastic. Dexter Morgan is a blood splatter analyst for Miami Metro Homicide by day, and a serial killer by night.
Due to a horrific incident that happened to Dexter when he was very young, he was left with an insatiable urge to kill, but his adopted father taught him a code to live by that forbids him from killing anyone innocent. Therefore, Dexter uses his talents as a detective and analyst, along with access to police records, to find and hunt the criminals Miami Metro can't catch. So he's a serial killer, but he only targets other killers.
Yes, we're talking about House, a show focused on a doctor in a hospital. But as many of you are probably aware, House is just an interpretation of Sherlock Holmes in a medical setting.
The titular character is supposed to be Holmes, and his sidekick Dr. Wilson is Watson. And we enjoy House, piecing together an answer that nobody else can see, in much the same way we enjoy Holmes. They're also both wonderfully flippant towards authority figures like Lestrade and Cuddy.
Netflix put out a hell of a lot of trash, but Mindhunter is one of their best original shows, and it bears watching for anyone with an interest in forensic psychology.
The show tells the real-life story of the FBI's first psychological profilers, John E. Douglas and Robert K. Ressler, who interviewed serial killers and used their research to create a whole new field in criminology. In that respect, Mindhunter plays out like a detective show in reverse, with the criminals already caught, and the detectives working backward to try and establish motive.
The future is daunting, and a great many of us would like nothing more than to go back to a simpler time. Which is exactly the fantasy Life on Mars offers.
Sam Tyler is a policeman from Manchester, who gets hit by a car in 2006 and wakes up to discover he's in 1973. He is still a detective, and still in Manchester, but his 21st Century outlook is in for a rude awakening. There is also a US version of the show based in New York, which is decent, but not on par with the original.
Of course, we had to include Columbo. Although it's far more dated than anything else on this list, and less likely to appeal to new viewers, there's a reason this show ran for decades.
Columbo follows an unkempt but brilliant detective of the same name, played by Peter Falk. Unlike most detective shows, we are always shown who the perpetrator is at the beginning of the episode, and so you don't get to play along at home, so to speak. But it's no less thrilling to watch the unassuming figure of Columbo corner a suspect, and catch them out with his trademark phrase: "Just one more thing..."
Luther is far darker and more violent than any show on the list so far, and that's fitting for a detective as troubled as Luther, played excellently by Idris Elba. The show also separates itself from the rest of the genre by focusing less on a single, enigmatic figure, and more on the combined efforts of a team of a police officers, dealing with real, traumatic crimes.
But if you are looking for something with a little more grit, look no further.
So many of the shows on this list are inspired by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic, but none adapt the material as well as Sherlock, which is one of the BBC's best shows from the last twenty years. Sherlock even follows the same general plot as many of the original tales, and only makes a few necessary changes to bring the detective (kicking and screaming) into the 21st Century.
Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch are wonderful, and the only real drawback of the series is its insistence on making Sherlock Holmes so awkward and unsociable. Almost all modern adaptions seem keen on doing this, perhaps it's to provide Watson with more of a purpose? But it's not reflective of how the original character was portrayed. Yes, he's eccentric, but he's also charming and witty, especially when he needs to be.
Regardless, Sherlock is excellent, and it bears watching.
I think the first season of True Detective is the best show ever made, over and above the likes of The Wire, Chernobyl, and I, Claudius, and the single six-minute tracking shot from the fourth episode ("Who Goes There") is some of the best cinematography from across any medium. The writing, the acting, the pace, the atmosphere, the music — it's perfect. And I would be doing the show a disservice by trying to summarize it in a dozen words. Watch the first season of True Detective.
If you love seeing brilliant detectives pace around crime scenes and humiliating police chiefs, then you're in the right place. Here are the best TV detectives for you to binge watch next!
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