Crime · 2010s
The 2010s account for 128 of the 337 crime shows here, and 134 opening sequences.
No decade here has more crime openings than this one.
BBC One carries the most, with 19.
128 shows134 sequences
1 sequence
Peaky Blinders
Nick Cave's 'Red Right Hand' over Birmingham furnaces and a man walking away from a fire — a period drama scored entirely out of period.
- Season 1
1 sequence
The Rookie
A five-second card: THE ROOKIE in tall white capitals over a row of Los Angeles palms against a hazy blue sky, and the episode is under way.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Better Call Saul
A title card that gets worse every year on purpose: tracking errors, colour bleed and tape damage accumulating season by season, so the picture degrades at roughly the rate its subject does.
- Seasons 1–6
1 sequence
Fargo
Snow, and the claim that this is a true story, which it is not — an anthology that opens every season by lying to you in a title card.
- Season 1
4 sequences
True Detective
Double-exposure portraits where the landscape is projected onto the people. Every season is reshot from scratch, so the titles change as completely as the cast does.
- Season 1
- Season 2
- Season 3
- and 1 more
1 sequence
The Blacklist
Nine seconds and a card. A ten-season network procedural that never once made you wait to get into an episode.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Animal Kingdom
The Australian film remade in Southern California, following the same criminal family.
- Season 1
2 sequences
Ozark
Five glyphs inside the letter O — a boat, a gun, a cross, a bird, a body of water — chosen for the episode they introduce. The title card is a table of contents.
- Season 1
- Season 2
1 sequence
Mindhunter
Reel-to-reel tape, evidence photographs and audio equipment intercut so tightly that the interview and the crime become one process. Clinical, and much nastier for it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceMr Inbetween
An Australian hitman's domestic life, opened in twelve seconds because the series has no interest in ceremony.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Death in Paradise
Caribbean colour and a calypso theme, for a murder series that has never once let its setting look threatening.
- Season 1
1 sequenceShetland
North Atlantic weather over islands where everyone already knows everyone, which is the constraint the series runs on.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Banshee
Amish country and violence intercut at the same speed, from the network's short-lived attempt at prestige action.
- Season 1
1 sequenceMoney Heist
Red jumpsuits, Dalí masks and the Royal Mint rendered as a heist diagram, with 'Bella Ciao' turned from a partisan song into a brand.
- Seasons 3–5
1 sequence
Sherlock
London shot as data — maps, magnification and chemical traces, cut to a violin figure that never quite settles.
- Season 1
1 sequenceBroadchurch
Dorset cliffs and a beach, filmed as beautifully as a tourist board would want and used for the opposite purpose.
- Season 1
1 sequenceBosch
Los Angeles at night from a helicopter, over Caught A Ghost's 'Can't Let Go' — a city filmed the way the detective sees it, from above and at a distance.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDaredevil
Blood-red liquid pouring upward into the shapes of New York — the courthouse, the church, the skyline — then the scales of justice and a man who cannot see any of it.
- Seasons 1–3
1 sequence
The Punisher
A skull assembling out of gun smoke and muzzle flash, with the ordnance doing the drawing. Blunter than its siblings, deliberately.
- Seasons 1–2
1 sequenceChicago P.D.
The second of Dick Wolf's Chicago series, and the one the crossovers usually run through.
- Season 1
1 sequenceBlue Bloods
Three generations of one New York police family, fourteen seasons long.
- Seasons 10–12
1 sequenceKilling Eve
Hand-drawn ink over a chase across Europe, in the register of a fashion illustration rather than a thriller.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDelhi Crime
Delhi at night from a moving vehicle, with none of the stylisation the subject would normally attract.
- Season 1
1 sequenceS.W.A.T. (2017)
The reboot, which ran eight seasons to the original's two and rebuilt the theme rather than dropping it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceJustified
Kentucky hills and hip-hop — Gangstagrass over holler country, which should not work and entirely does.
- Season 6
1 sequenceThe Sinner
An anthology that begins with the crime and spends the season on why.
- Season 2
1 sequencePower
A New York club owner running a drug network behind it, and the franchise Starz built out of him.
- Season 1
1 sequenceNarcos
Archive photographs, surveillance stills and evidence shots of the real Medellín cartel, cut to Rodrigo Amarante's 'Tuyo' — a bolero written to sound like something Escobar's father would have played.
- Seasons 1–3
1 sequenceHawaii Five-0 (2010)
The reboot, which keeps the 1968 theme almost note for note and rebuilds the wave and the zoom around it in high definition.
- Season 1
1 sequenceLine of Duty
Redaction as a design language — evidence bags, case files and blocks of black covering the parts you are not cleared for.
- Season 1
1 sequenceRizzoli & Isles
A Boston detective and a medical examiner, from the Tess Gerritsen novels.
- Season 1
1 sequenceBlindspot
A woman found in Times Square covered in tattoos that are each a case.
- Season 1
1 sequenceElementary
Holmes and a female Watson in New York, opened by a Rube Goldberg machine assembling itself.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Gotham
A few seconds of title card: GOTHAM in weathered stone capitals, surfacing out of storm cloud.
- Season 1
1 sequenceHow to Get Away with Murder
Law-school iconography cut against evidence photographs, so the lecture and the crime scene share a visual language.
- Season 1
1 sequenceNarcos: Mexico
The parent show's archive-and-evidence method moved north — Guadalajara and Sinaloa in period photography, with the same documentary flatness.
- Seasons 1–3
1 sequenceMirzapur
A carpet-trading family running the guns and opium of an eastern Uttar Pradesh town.
- Season 1
1 sequenceHappy Valley
Sally Wainwright's Calder Valley series, which opens with almost nothing and is all the bleaker for it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Night Of
New York at night from inside a cab, the city sliding past in sodium light, cut so that nothing quite resolves — which is the state of the evidence for the entire series.
- Season 1
1 sequenceJessica Jones
Purple watercolour bleeding across Hell's Kitchen while a noir trumpet plays — the colour of the villain seeping into every frame before he is named.
- Seasons 1–3
1 sequenceThe Fall
Belfast, and a series that shows you the killer in the first episode and spends three series on the pursuit anyway.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Killing (US)
The American remake of Forbrydelsen, moving the rain from Copenhagen to Seattle and keeping everything else.
- Season 1
1 sequenceEndeavour
The Morse prequel, which quotes Pheloung's Morse-code motif in its own theme without repeating it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceRay Donovan
Los Angeles at street level — a fixer's city, shot from the driver's seat rather than the hills.
- Season 4
1 sequenceSneaky Pete
A con man hiding inside his cellmate's identity, from Bryan Cranston and David Shore.
- Season 1
1 sequenceLuther
Massive Attack's 'Paradise Circus' over a city at night, with a detective who is already losing before the episode starts.
- Season 1
1 sequenceTop Boy
A Hackney estate shot from within rather than above, over Brian Eno's score — which is not the collaboration anyone predicted.
- Season 1
1 sequenceVera
Northumberland coast and moorland in twenty seconds, with no detective visible in any of it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceBabylon Berlin
Weimar Berlin as a cabaret poster — Bauhaus type, jazz and a city that already knows how this ends.
- Season 1
1 sequenceI Am the Night
Patty Jenkins directing a story that runs alongside the Black Dahlia case without being it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Missing
A child vanishing in France and the two timelines that follow it, eight years apart.
- Season 1
1 sequenceMayans M.C.
The Sons of Anarchy spin-off, on the other side of the California border.
- Season 1
1 sequenceMajor Crimes
The Closer continued around Mary McDonnell's captain rather than Kyra Sedgwick's chief.
- Season 1
1 sequenceNCIS: New Orleans
The franchise moved to a city with a soundtrack, which the titles spend all twenty-one seconds on.
- Season 1
1 sequenceMystery Road
The Australian outback shot as landscape rather than backdrop, for a detective series about who the land belongs to.
- Season 2
1 sequenceGomorrah
Naples and the Camorra, shot in concrete and sodium light with no romance permitted anywhere in it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCriminal Justice
The BBC series remade in India, running longer than the original did.
- Season 1
1 sequenceLuke Cage
Harlem projected onto a man's skin — brownstones, crowds and streets mapped across a body that cannot be marked. The one Marvel Netflix opening that is about a place rather than a mood.
- Seasons 1–2
1 sequenceMayday
A May Queen vanishing on the morning of the procession, and a village that suspects itself.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSignal
A walkie-talkie connecting a present-day profiler to a detective in 1989.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Alienist
An 1896 New York murder investigation using methods the police do not yet have a word for.
- Season 1
1 sequenceLilyhammer
Netflix's first original commission, and an opening that plays a New Jersey mobster in rural Norway entirely straight.
- Season 1
1 sequenceTop of the Lake
Jane Campion's missing-girl series, opened across the South Island lake it is named for.
- Season 1
1 sequenceMcMafia
A banker pulled back into his family's Russian organised-crime money.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Bridge
The Øresund Bridge at night, and Choir of Young Believers — a border filmed as a character, which is what the show is about.
- Season 3
2 sequences
Stranger
A prosecutor without emotional affect and the detective who trusts him anyway. Known at home as 비밀의 숲, Secret Forest.
- Season 1
- Season 2
1 sequenceNancy Drew
The teenage detective relocated to a haunted Maine town.
- Season 1
1 sequenceAnd Then There Were None
Christie's island novel adapted straight, with a title sequence that counts the cast down as the story does.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCity on a Hill
Boston in the early nineties, a corrupt FBI agent and the prosecutor trying to use him.
- Season 1
1 sequenceLa Reina del Sur
Arturo Pérez-Reverte's Sinaloan trafficker, remade in English by USA Network as Queen of the South.
- Season 1
1 sequenceChicago Justice
The fourth Chicago series, cancelled after thirteen episodes — the only one Dick Wolf could not make stick.
- Season 1
1 sequenceTruth Be Told
Recording equipment and case material, for a series about a true-crime podcast reopening its own mistake.
- Season 1
1 sequenceGood Behavior
A thief on parole and the hitman she decides not to turn in.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFortitude
An Arctic settlement where nothing decays and a killing therefore cannot be buried.
- Season 1
1 sequenceEl Señor de los Cielos
A narco drama loosely built on Amado Carrillo Fuentes, and Telemundo's longest-running original.
- Season 2
1 sequenceCSI: Cyber
The last CSI, moving the forensics from bodies to hard drives, and the one the franchise ended on.
- Season 2
1 sequenceNo Offence
Paul Abbott's Manchester police series, opened in eighteen seconds by Peter Anderson Studio.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCriminal Minds: Beyond Borders
The spin-off that moved the profiling unit to crimes against Americans abroad.
- Season 1
1 sequenceTrapped
Icelandic weather as an antagonist — ice, sea and a town nobody can leave, which is both the plot and the title.
- Season 1
1 sequenceClaws
A Florida nail salon laundering money for a pill mill, staged in saturated colour throughout.
- Season 1
1 sequenceGraceland
Undercover agents from three agencies sharing a confiscated beach house.
- Season 2
1 sequenceTin Star
A British policeman running a small Alberta force, and the refinery that follows him there.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDeadwind
A Helsinki homicide detective returning to work after her husband's death. Known at home as Karppi.
- Season 2
1 sequenceRepublic of Doyle
A father-and-son detective agency in St. John's, Newfoundland.
- Season 1
1 sequenceMob City
Frank Darabont's post-Walking Dead series, on 1940s Los Angeles, cancelled after six episodes.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFrankie Drake Mysteries
Toronto's only female private detective in the 1920s, from the Murdoch Mysteries producers.
- Season 1
1 sequenceHigh Seas
Two sisters on a 1940s liner to Rio, and a passenger who was never on the manifest.
- Season 1
1 sequenceBreathe
A father working his way up a transplant list by removing the people above his son.
- Season 1
1 sequenceTunnel
A 1986 detective stepping through a tunnel into 2017, still chasing the same killer.
- Season 1
1 sequenceTerriers
An unlicensed private investigator in Ocean Beach, cancelled after thirteen episodes and mourned ever since.
- Season 1
1 sequenceBriarpatch
A Texas border town where the zoo animals have got out, which the series treats as background.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Oath
A gang made up of serving police officers, opened by Imaginary Forces.
- Season 1
1 sequenceLow Winter Sun
The British two-parter remade in Detroit and stretched to ten episodes, cancelled after one season.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSilver Spoon
A Russian oligarch's son forced to work as a policeman, and the most exported Russian drama of its decade. Original title Мажор.
- Season 3
1 sequenceGood Cop
A Liverpool response officer who stops waiting for the system to work.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Last Panthers
A jewel heist across Europe, opening on the title track of Blackstar — the last title music David Bowie wrote.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDe Twaalf
A Belgian trial told from the jury box rather than the bench. Remade in Australia as The Twelve.
- Season 1
1 sequenceRellik
A murder investigation told backwards — the title is killer reversed, and so is the series.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDicte
A crime reporter back in Aarhus after a divorce, from the Elsebeth Egholm novels.
- Season 1
1 sequenceUmbre
A Bucharest debt collector holding two lives apart, in HBO Europe's Romanian production. The title means Shadows.
- Season 1
1 sequenceBeau Séjour
A murdered girl who can be seen by five people, investigating her own death in a Flemish hotel.
- Season 1
1 sequencePustina
A girl disappears from a north Bohemian village that a mining company is trying to buy. The title means Wasteland.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWataha
Border guards in the Bieszczady mountains, and the first Polish drama HBO made for itself.
- Season 1
1 sequenceBelfer
A teacher arriving in a small Polish town where a pupil has been murdered, and finding the town would rather he did not ask.
- Season 1
1 sequenceAranyélet
A Budapest family whose comfortable life runs on crime, and the first Hungarian series HBO Europe made itself. Known abroad as Golden Life.
- Season 1
1 sequenceBattle Creek
Vince Gilligan's script from a decade earlier, finally made, and cancelled after thirteen episodes.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Bletchley Circle
Four women who broke codes during the war, using the same habits on a murder afterwards.
- Season 1
1 sequenceBoardwalk Empire
One man on a beach while the tide brings him bottles. No montage, no cast — just Nucky Thompson standing still as Prohibition washes up around his shoes, to The Brian Jonestown Massacre.
- Seasons 1–5
1 sequenceDublin Murders
Tana French's first two novels braided into one eight-part case.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFather Brown
Chesterton's priest detective moved to the 1950s Cotswolds, and the most durable daytime drama the BBC has.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Glades
A Chicago detective exiled to Florida, working murders he keeps being told are not his.
- Season 1
1 sequenceGodfather of Harlem
Bumpy Johnson out of prison in 1963 and finding Harlem taken, with Malcolm X across the street.
- Season 4
1 sequenceHinterland
Aberystwyth and the country behind it, shot twice over - once in Welsh as Y Gwyll, once in English.
- Season 1
1 sequenceHudson & Rex
A St John's detective and his German shepherd, remade from an Austrian series that ran for twenty years.
- Season 1
1 sequenceKruk
A Białystok detective returning to the town he grew up in, with a subtitle that translates as whispers are heard after dark.
- Season 1
2 sequences
Mr. Mercedes
King's retired detective and the man who drove a car into a queue of people looking for work.
- Season 1
- Season 3
1 sequenceNielegalni
A Polish intelligence unit whose members do not officially exist.
- Season 1
1 sequenceRipper Street
Whitechapel in the years after the murders, policed by men the murders made famous.
- Season 1
1 sequenceRookie Blue
Five recruits out of the academy in Toronto, made as a summer series for two countries at once.
- Season 1
1 sequenceRosewood
A private pathologist in Miami working the cases the police have already closed.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSacred Games
Mumbai rendered as a mandala of crime and religion, with the city's iconography arranged into something closer to a devotional image.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Sharp Objects
Wind Gap seen at speed from a car window, with words hidden in the frame — the same trick the show plays for eight episodes, put in the titles from the first minute.
- Season 1
1 sequenceStrike
Galbraith's one-legged private detective and the assistant who turns out to be better at it than he expected.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Team
A Europol task force built out of three countries' police, and shot in all three languages.
- Season 2
1 sequenceUnforgettable
A detective who remembers every day of her life except the one that matters.
- Season 1
1 sequenceUnforgotten
Two detectives working cold cases old enough that the suspects have built whole lives since.
- Season 1
1 sequenceVlad
A Romanian crime series about a man returning to Bucharest to find who killed his brother.
- Season 1
1 sequenceYou
A bookshop manager narrating his own stalking in the second person, moved to Netflix after one season.
- Season 1