10 Great TV Crime Thrillers No One Talks About Anymore

0:00you know that exact moment on a Friday night, you've finally logged off, you've ordered your take out, and you just collapse under the couch with a remote in your hand. Oh yeah, the modern ritual of relaxation, right? But the reality of that ritual has actually become incredibly fraught. Fraud is honestly an understatement. When you open the app, and instantly, that whole relaxing experience just shatters. You aren't relaxing. No, you're navigating a digital labyrinth. Exactly. You scroll through row after endless row of brightly colored thumbnails, auto playing trailers, top 10 lists, and those algorithm recommendations. And instead of feeling entertained, you just feel this heavy, overwhelming wave of information overload. Well, the clinical term is choice paralysis. I mean, you have the entirety of modern broadcast history hovering at your fingertips, and the sheer volume of options completely short circuits your decision making process. Yeah, and so what happened? You end up watching a sitcom you've already seen five times. Yes. Purely because it requires zero cognitive load

1:00to select it. And that paralysis, that deeply relatable feeling of being completely swamped by the sheer volume of content available to you, is really where we are planting our flag today. We are actively attempting to cut through that algorithmic noise. So welcome. I am so glad you're here with us, because we have a very specific and frankly, fascinating mission for this deep dive. Yeah, we are dissecting a brand new piece of media analysis today. Fresh off the presses. Right. It was published today September 5th, 2026 by Matt Watkins over at MovieWeb. And the title of the piece is 10 great TV crime thrillers. No one talks about anymore. And Watkins, I mean, he has been writing about media for years. He has a masters in marketing, which I think gives him this really sharp lens on not just what makes a show good, but how a show is packaged. You know, how it's sold. Exactly, sold and ultimately remembered. Or in the case of today's deep dive completely forgotten. He has essentially gone down into the archives of television history to rescue these absolute gems that have been completely

2:03lost to the sands of time. But our goal here is not just to like read off a list of 10 shows and give you a quick summary of the plot. We want to take a much broader view. Right. We are going to use these forgotten buried shows as stepping stones to trace the entire evolution of the crime thrillers genre. We want to map the journey for you. We are going to start all the way back with those classic early police procedurals. Shows like Colombo and Dragnet where there was a crime of the week and neat resolution and you could sleep soundly exactly. And we are going to trace how that DNA mutated decade by decade into the massive cinematic, highly serialized shows that dominate the cultural conversation today. Right. It shows like true detective and the penguin. Yeah. Because to understand those modern giants, you have to look at the missing links. You have to look at the shows that laid the bricks, tested the boundaries and honestly often got punished for it. Oh, heavily punished. OK, let's unpack this. Where exactly does the blueprint for the modern crime thriller

3:05begin? Well, to really grasp where we are now with all the intense psychological trauma and bleak serialization of modern TV, we have to travel back to an era when television operated under a completely different set of rules. The Wild West. Right. The 1970s and the defining characteristic of a television thriller in the 1970s is a word that would probably get a modern showrunner fired immediately. Oh, what's that? Breezy. Breezy. Yeah. I could even imagine pitching a thriller to a network today and using the word breezy. Right. I mean, you think thriller, you think tension, sweat, impending doom, you don't think of light breeze on the Sunday afternoon. No, but that was the baseline for mainstream entertainment back then, which leads to the first show Watkins highlights, though he actually consigns it to an honorable mention category. OK, what is it? We are talking about the Rockford files, which ran from 1974 to 1980. Now, for anyone who grew up in that era or, you know, who studies television history, the Rockford files is basically untouchable.

4:06Absolutely. It was a massive commercial success and a massive critical hit. It is a defining piece of 1970s culture. So why on earth does Watkins relegate a giant like that to a mere honorable mention on a list of crime thrillers? Because of that exact tonal shift we just mentioned by modern standards, the show is just well too lighthearted, too fun. Exactly. Watkins makes the argument that it's fundamental breezyness disqualifies it from technically being categorized as a thriller in the way a modern audience understands the term. I see. I mean, the stakes while they're present, they never feel suffocating. The tension never really crosses over into genuine anxiety. That makes a lot sense actually. The definition of the genre itself has drifted over the decades. Yeah, significant back in the 70s. A detective drama didn't have to leave the viewer with a lingering sense of existential dread to be considered gripping. You watched it. The bad guy was caught. James Garner look cool and you went to bed feeling satisfied. But there were shows attempting to push against that breezy

5:08framework aiming for something a bit darker and more visceral. And that contrast brings us to a major ABC classic that Watkins highlights. Oh, right. The streets of San Francisco, which ran from 1972 to 1977. This was a colossal show. I mean, it's primarily remembered today as the launch pad for Michael Douglas's mainstream career, right? It is. Yeah. Before the mega stardom, he was cutting his teeth on this gritty procedural. And at the time of its release, it was heavily praised. Critics loved it for its realism and its incredibly high production values. I mean, it felt cinematic for a television show in 1972. It really did. But if you look for it today, red luck, right? It's sitting silently in the depths of Netflix. No banners, no promotional push, just totally lost the time. And this is where Watkins offers a very pragmatic warning to the modern viewer who might, you know, be tempted to queue it up tonight. What's the warning? Well, if you're baseline for a crime thriller is the high paced, heavily

6:08stylized, hyper edited productions of today, the streets of San Francisco is going to feel like a very tough, jarring watch. In what way, though, is it just the clothes and the cars looking old? No, it goes much deeper than the aesthetics. It's a fundamental construction of the narrative. Oh, the pacing is incredibly deliberate. The action scenes are noticeably choreographed. The practical effects really reveal their age. Sure. Even though it was widely considered ahead of its time in 1972, the sheer mechanics of how the story is visually told just feel dated. I really want to challenge that concept, though. Go for it. Is dated pacing actually a flaw of the television show or is it a flaw in our own modern attention spans? I was thinking about this while going through the article. Okay. Like where this is going, watching a 1970s procedural like the streets of San Francisco feels to me like brewing a slow drip coffee. Ooh, a slow drip coffee. Walk me through that analogy. Well, think about the process. It takes time. You set the grounds. You pour the water and you have to sit there and wait for it to filter

7:10through dropped by deliberate drop. Yeah. It's not instant. Right. It actively demands your patience. But if you are willing to give it that time, the flavor profile you get at the end is deep. It's robust. It's a complete textured experience, whereas modern television is modern streaming television is an instant espresso shot of adrenaline. Oh, totally. It is a direct injection straight into the nervous system. Bam. Start in media. Res, loud noise, rapid cuts, hook the viewer in the first 14 seconds or they click away. Yeah, if there's no explosion by minute two, I'm out. Exactly. And I feel like we as an audience have become so neurologically addicted to that immediate, highly stylized caffeine hit that when a show offers us a beautifully brewed slow drip experience, we take one sip and complain that our hearts aren't beating fast enough. I think that's a brilliant articulation of the viewers dilemma. We demand the cinematic rush, but we have entirely lost the patience for the procedural buildup required to actually earn that rush.

8:12We want to climax without the rising action. Exactly. But the pacing isn't the only hurdle Watkins mentions regarding the streets of San Francisco. Is it? No, it's not. He points out a thematic hurdle as well. You have to remember this show was operating in the mid 1970s, which was a period of massive social upheaval for sure. And Watkins notes that the show as approach to these issues, specifically it's handling of gender dynamics, mental health topics, and the various counterculture movements of the era is well heavy handed. And just to be clear to you listening, we aren't here to litigate the cultural politics of a network television show from half a century ago. Right. No sides being taken here. We are just looking at the mechanics of why a show falls out of the public consciousness. Watkins is observing that the cultural lens has shifted so fundamentally that the heavy handed moralizing of the 70s can feel deeply alienating to a modern viewer. It creates a barrier to entry. When the pacing feels slow and the social messaging feels blunt, modern

9:12audiences simply click away. Yeah. But the shift away from the slow drip coffee in the moralistic messaging didn't happen in a vacuum. As audiences slowly grew fatigued by the safe breezy formulas of the network era, a new hunger started to develop. They wanted something that tasted real, something raw, authentic, and completely unafraid to look at the ugly side of the street. And that hunger brings us crashing straight into the 1990s. Oh, best decade. Right. If the 70s were the foundation, the 90s were the era of disruption. The 1990s are a fascinating transition period. I mean, the major broadcast networks were still the undisputed kings of the castle, but you could see the cracks starting to form in the foundation. People were getting bored. Exactly. Creators were getting restless. They were actively testing the boundaries of what middle America would tolerate in their living rooms at eight zero p.m. And one of the most vital boundary pushers of that decade was Fox says New York undercover. Yes, which ran from 1994 to 1998. And Watkins doesn't just call this a good show.

10:14He highlights it as a truly groundbreaking moment for the police procedural format because it shattered the demographic mold. New York undercover was the very first police drama on American broadcast television to feature two people of color in the starring roles. Not the side kicks. Right. It wasn't the side kick roll. It wasn't the commanding officer barking orders behind a desk. They were the leads and it completely changed the texture of the genre. They took the traditional crime thriller framework. Yeah. The standard cops chasing robbers set up and they injected it with a thoroughly authentic raw urban aesthetic. Yeah. Watkins points out how heavily the show relied on actual hip hop culture. Oh, the music was incredible. It was. It showcased the fashion of the era. It utilized massive iconic needle drops that grounded the show in a specific time and place. It didn't just feel like a show about policing. It felt like a show deeply embedded in the cultural fabric of New York city. But the legacy of New York undercover is incredibly complicated and

11:15frankly tragic. It really is because while the show was wildly innovative and the first two seasons were massive hits with audiences, it ultimately fell victim to the business side of television. Art getting crushed by commerce. Precisely. Watkins details how the show was played by severe behind the scenes drama. The friction between the cast and the executives eventually culminated in a high profile cast walk out. Wow. Yeah, the stars were demanding fair pay and a level of creative control over their own characters and the network just blocked. I mean, a cast walk out for a character driven procedural is practically a death sentence. How do you recover from the stars of your show refusing to work? You don't really. The network scrambled, which led to highly disruptive forced cast changes. Watkins observes that from season three onwards, the storytelling became incredibly erratic. That's a shame. The superb natural chemistry that existed between the original leads, which was the very thing that made the show a breakout hit was visibly ruined. I always wonder how much the audience can actually feel that behind the scenes

12:18tension, you know, like if you don't read the trade magazines, you know, the actors are fighting with the network. You absolutely feel it. Yeah. Chemistry on screen requires immense trust between performers. When that trust is broken by contract disputes, resentment and forced rewrites, the performance is stiffened. The timing is off. The dialogue feels unnatural. Yeah. Watkins explicitly warns that if you decide to go back and binge watch New York undercover today, you have to brace yourself for a massive sharp, drop-off inconsistency halfway through its run. It's just heartbreaking. You have a show with massive cultural momentum, a show breaking real barriers, and it gets derailed by suits and contracts rather than a failure of creative vision. Right. But speaking of suits and creative vision, we have to talk about another Fox show from the 1990s. Oh, this one. This is perhaps the most fascinating entry on the entire list. Because while New York undercover was bringing the gritty, blue collar street level view to audiences, this next show attempted to bring the thriller genre into the absolute last place people expected to find a monster corporate

13:23boardroom. Yes. We are talking about profit released in 1996. Profit was the ultimate white collar crime drama. And when we say crime drama, we aren't talking about cops investigating a bezler. No, not at all. Watkins describes this show as following a literal sociopathic corporate executive. Yeah, profit. Right. The protagonist of the show actively used blackmail, extortion and systemic psychological warfare to ruthlessly climb the corporate ladder. I need to pause and make sure we fully grasp the context here. This was 1996, a very different time. The protagonists of network television were doctors, lawyers and cops who at the end of the day wanted to do the right thing. And Fox introduces a main character who is fundamentally pathologically immoral. What's fascinating here is the audacity of it. It's staggering. If you look at the mechanics of television history, profit was operating about 30 years ahead of its time. Well, easily Watkins makes a very bold, but I think entirely accurate claim here. He says profit is the direct precursor to the prestige television

14:27mega hits that define our modern era. Like what? Before you had Tony soprano and therapy before you had Walter White making meth, you had Jim profit destroying lives in a corporate office. It was the edgy, dangerous alternative to literally every other crime show on television. It broke every rule of protagonist like ability. Yep. And it's reward for that sheer innovation. How old cancellation? It was punished. The network produced nine episodes and they pulled the plug after airing only five, five episodes, accorded massive controversy. Audiences were apparently horrified. The network executive's panicked. They just were not ready for a lead character who is a villain. It is the defining tragedy of being a pioneer in any medium. You take the arrows. So the settlers who follow behind you can take the land. That's a great way to put it retrospectively critics and television historians look back at those few episodes of profit and consider it an absolute masterpiece of foresight. But because the network panicked and canceled it so abruptly, the narrative

15:28will forever remain unfinished. You have to go into it knowing that the story simply stops, which is so frustrating. But I want to throw a thought experiment out to you, the listener. I really want you to visualize this scenario. Okay. Let's hear. Imagine if a show identical to profit, same script, same sociopathic protagonist, same corporate setting dropped on your favorite screaming service tomorrow morning. Think about the media landscape you and I live in right now. Right. We live in a world built by the sopranos. We spent years rooting for the Roy families to destroy each other on success. We absolutely revere the anti hero. Right. So would a show that caused actual moral outrage in 1996 for being too edgy and too controversial, even register as shocking to us today? Or would we watch a guy use blackmail to get a promotion and think, well, that's just a standard Tuesday night binge watch. It is a profound question about the overtoned window of television morality. I strongly suspect that the very elements that made profit unerable in 1996

16:29would make it critically acclaimed, but perhaps considered a bit tame in 2026. Yeah. I mean, our threshold for bad behavior on screen has been raised so significantly. It makes you realize that the guardrails of television haven't just been moved. They have been completely dismantled and sold for scrap. Exactly. And if we connect this dismantled framework to the broader timeline of the genre, a very clear trajectory emerges. Okay. Trace it for us. The broadcast network executives of the 1990s were absolutely terrified of immoral protagonists. They were terrified of too much grit. They wanted clean resolutions and likable heroes. Right. But as we cross the threshold into the 2000s, a new player entered the arena. The basic cable networks looked at that exact same dark, gritty, morally compromised formula that terrified Fox. And they saw a gold mine. The cable revolution was about to begin. Yes. And it was going to systematically blur the moral lines of the crime thriller genre forever, which brings us to the battering ram of the basic cable revolution.

17:29The show that arguably kicked the door down for everyone else, FX series, the shield, which ran from 2002 to 2008. If profit was the pioneer that took the arrows, the shield was the settler that built a fortress on the new land. Wow. It is a monument in television history. Watkins highlights it as one of the most relentlessly original police dramas ever put on screen. It started Walton Goggins and Michael Chickles. And the premise alone was a massive departure from standard procedures. Oh, completely. It followed a specialized Los Angeles police department strike team that operated almost entirely outside the bounds of the law to tackle sky high crime rates. They didn't just bend the rules. They broke them, set them on fire and parade the ashes. And Watkins notes that by any means necessary was not a tagline. It was an operational philosophy. The core characters in the shield range from desperately well meaning to downright despicable often within the same episode. Exactly. But the crucial element that made the show work, the thing that elevated

18:30it above mere shock value was that every single character was deeply layered, meticulously developed and completely morally complex. This was the defining shift of the 2000s. Yeah. The shield took the comforting, formulaic police procedural structure and smashed it. Right. Think about the older shows we talked about. They always offered a silent promise to the viewer. The good guys will win. Justice is clearly defined and order will be restored before the final commercial break. The shield looked at that promise and laughed. It really did. It refused to offer comfort. It wasn't afraid to deliver massive status quo shattering twists, incredibly early in a season. It would abruptly change the entire direction of the narrative when you least expected it. It remains one of the most wildly unpredictable shows ever to air. It is incredible to think about how groundbreaking that was at the time. But it's also a little sad to read Watkins final assessment of the show. What does he say? He meets that despite its monumental influence, the shield has largely been overshadowed in the public consciousness by more recent, highly polished,

19:34streaming mega hits like minehunter and true detective. Oh, that's true. People talk about true detectives all the time, but the shield rarely comes up now. It's the inherent burden of the trailblazer. You invent a new language, but the shows that come after you get to write poetry with it. They build on your foundation and often eclipse you in cultural memory. Right. But the shield is vital because it proved an essential point to network executives. Audiences have a deep psychological appetite for ambiguity. We don't just tolerate blurred moral lines. We actively crave them. I have to ask the why. Why do we seek out media that makes us feel morally compromised? Well, it's a mix of factors. Partly, it reflects a growing cultural cynicism over the last two decades. The idea of institutions functioning perfectly and justice always prevailing feels increasingly like a fairy tale to modern viewers. We don't buy it anymore. We don't, but more importantly, it's a desire for psychological authenticity. A show where the hero is capable of villainous acts feels much closer to the

20:36chaotic gray reality of the human experience. We are drawn to complexity on screen because it mirrors the internal conflicts we navigate every day. Here's where it gets really interesting, though. Because if audiences claim they want ultimate realism, Watkins provides the perfect crushing counter example of what happens when you actually give it to them. Oh, yeah. We need to talk about Southland. Yes, Southland, which ran from 2009 to 2013. Ah, Southland. This is a show that took the mandate for greedy realism and pushed it to its absolute physical limits. Watkins calls it a cult classic that deserves significantly more recognition than it ever received. Definitely. Visually, Southland was distinct. They heavily utilized handheld cameras. They relied on natural lighting. The entire goal of the production was delivered ultra realistic take on the crime genre that felt almost documentary-like in his presentation. You were meant to feel like a right along passenger in the squad car. Exactly. And that documentary approach extended to the writing.

21:38It focused intensely on character development alongside the episodic cases. But Watkins issues a very stark, explicit warning for potential viewers. Lights the warning. Do not watch this show if you're looking for clear cut, easy to root for protagonists. The officers populating Southland are deeply flawed human beings. They're perpetually overworked, drowning in trauma. And as a result, they make highly questionable, deeply unsympathetic moral decisions. So you have a show delivering the exact gritty realism audience is supposedly wanted. And what happened to it? NBC canceled it after a single season for being too dark. Too dark. It was eventually picked up by TNT where it managed to build a very passionate cult following, but it completely failed to achieve any sort of mainstream breakout success. Today, it's largely forgotten by the general public. And I think there is a profound, almost tragic irony here about how we consume media. I look at a show like Southland, like a mirror. Okay. A mirror. How so audiences and especially critics always say they want realism.

22:39They claim they want the gritty truth of the streets unvarnished and raw. Sure. But when a show like Southland actually holds up a hyper realistic, unpolished, smudged mirror to society, the audience recoils. They look away because the reflection shows the pores, the dirt, the bleakness of reality. Yes. Ultimately, they realize they don't actually want the documentary truth. They want the stylized, polished, dramatically satisfying Hollywood version of the truth. They want grit with good lighting. That is a phenomenal analogy. And it cuts to the core of the entertainment industry. We want the aesthetic markers of realism, but we still fundamentally demand the narrative comfort of fiction and Southland aggressively refused to offer that comfort. Exactly. And it paid the ultimate price in terms of viewership and legacy. So if you are a showrunner and you've pushed physical, street level grit as far as it can possibly go with a show like Southland, and the mainstream audience rejects it because it rose to real. Well, where on earth do you take the crime thriller genre next?

23:40You can't go further outward. So you have to go inward, inward. Once the external landscape of the streets has been thoroughly explored and exhausted, the only frontier left is the internal landscape. You take the genre directly into the minds of the characters. Welcome to the 2010s, the era of psychological warfare, the decade where the traditional who-doonit was officially replaced by the why-doonit. And the absolute perfect embodiment of this transition is the gritty, incredibly tense, Northern Irish BBC thriller The Fall, which aired from 2013 to 2016. For those who know what this show is legendary, it is set in the damp atmospheric streets of Belfast. It stars Gillian Anderson playing this fiercely intelligent, icy American detective who was brought in to hunt down a sadistic serial killer played with chilling calm by Jamie Dornan, such good casting, unbelievable casting. Now, what gets notes that this show was a massive undeniable phenomenon in the UK and Ireland. But for some reason, it's only failed to make the same kind of cultural waves

24:40here in the US, which is a tremendous shame because it's incredibly dark, brooding tone directly harks back to classic, beloved 90s crime thrillers, like C7 and zodiac. Oh, totally. It has that same heavy, oppressive atmosphere, but the most fascinating aspect of The Fall and the reason it is so crucial to the evolution of the genre is how it completely subverts the foundational golden rule of mystery storytelling. It reveals the killer's identity to the audience in the very first episode. Exactly. It takes the genre conventions and completely flips them on their head. Instead of a mystery, it becomes a dual character study. Right. It tracks the parallel lives of the hunter and her seas detective and the hunted Dornan's killer simultaneously. The entire narrative focus shifts entirely away from gathering clues to figure out who committed the crimes and instead zeros in on the intense suffocating psychological warfare between these two deeply compelling, strangely similar finders. I just have to marvel at the sheer unadulterated confidence of the writers of

25:43The Fall. I mean, I really struggle with this concept, to be honest, doesn't giving away the killer in episode one just fundamentally destroy the main engine of a crime show. I know what you mean. The whole point of the genre is the mystery. Right. It feels to me like a magic trick where the magician brings you on stage shows you exactly how the trapdoor works, explains the mirrors and the points to you and says, I dare you to be captivated by my performance anyway. If we connect this to the bigger picture, that is precisely what it is and that is exactly the level of performance it requires to pull off. Sustaining tension for multiple seasons without the crutch of a who do not mystery requires an immense amount of heavy lifting from both the script and the actors because you can't rely on a gimmick. Exactly. You can't rely on a shocking twist ending to save a mediocre episode. You can't hide weak character development behind a trail of clues. Everything's exposed. Every single scene, every conversation, every silent look has to be absolutely dripping with psychological dread. You are watching a chess match where you can see all the pieces on the board,

26:46but the tension comes from antisensiting the next move, which brings us perfectly to the next show Watkins highlights from the 2010s. This is a show that also heavily leaned into this concept of psychological dread. The shift toward the why do you know the center? Yes, the center, which ran from 2017 to 2021 on the USA network. The center is a masterclass in the specific subgenre. It's started the veteran actor Bill Pullman as detective Harry Ambrose. And Watkins goes out of his way to praise Pullman here as he should. Right, noting that he delivers one of his most nuanced, intense and physically exhausted performances to date. He plays a deeply damaged yet incredibly empathetic detective. And Watkins explicitly calls out the show's boundary pushing and taboo breaking nature. The crimes in the center are often inexplicable at first glance, but he also notes a structural reason why it might not be for everyone. Oh, the structure is very specific. Yeah, if you, the viewer, are a fan of the typical case of the week structure where crime is committed at eight dull zero, investigated it eight for

27:47sign and tied up with a neat little bow by 8.55. The center is going to frustrate you deeply in this show. A single complex case spans an entire season. And during the course of that season, the battle Harry Ambrose fights isn't just about finding physical evidence or matching DNA. It's about Harry battling the psychological warfare inflicted by the suspects digging into their buried traumas. All while his own mental health is visibly and dangerously deteriorating. It is a grueling, highly introspective look at the toll that this kind of work, this constant relentless proximity to darkness and violence takes on the human soul. So look at the timeline we have built. We have gone from the breezy lighthearted procedures of the 70s. We moved into the ruthless corporate sociopaths of the 90s. We navigated the morally gray rule breaking anti heroes of the 2000s. And we dove right down to the bottom of the psychological depths in the 2010s. We have dug as deep into the human mind as a television narrative can possibly

28:48go without becoming completely avant-garde. Where do you go from there? What happens next? Well, once the psychological depths were thoroughly plurmed, modern creators hit a wall. They realized they had to find entirely new ways to innovate to capture an audience's attention. They couldn't just go darker. They had to go weirder. They needed to cross cultural boundaries. They needed to mash up previously incompatible genres just to keep audiences hooked in an increasingly crowded chaotic streaming landscape, which brings us into the present day, our final section. Modern iterations. We are now living in the era of genre bending, the streaming wars and the overwhelming, inescapable burden of intellectual property. And the first show Watkins points out in this modern era is frankly wildly unique. Unique is the perfect word. We are talking about Netflix's Gary Haji from 2019. I sure that Watkins describes as a spectacular genre bending collision of British and Japanese cultures. Yeah, the premise follows a Japanese detective who has to travel from Tokyo into the sprawling chaotic underworld of London to unravel the mystery of his

29:51missing brother, who has become entangled with the Yakuza. And the core tension of the show isn't just the mystery. It is the cultural friction. How so? It is how this detective's rigid, deeply ingrained honor culture from Tokyo contrasts violently with the absolute lawless chaos of London. The word bizarre comes to mind when reading the description, but the absolute best possible way. Watkins highlights this incredible, almost impossible mix of tonal elements. That's all over the place, but it works. On one hand, you have brutal, highly stylized violence and deeply heartfelt family drama. But on the other hand, you have moments of surreal, choreographed musical sequences. Wait, really? Musical sequences in a violent crime thriller. Yes, it is a massive, audacious, creative risk. It's the kind of thing that could easily derail the show and turn it into a parody. I think so, yeah. But creatively, it paid off in spades. Watkins notes that Giri Haji achieved the highly coveted, incredibly rare, perfect 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes.

30:53It was deemed critically flawless by the people whose job it is to judge television. And yet, and yet it remains largely unknown in the United States. It came at a chief perfection and advanced. Is the defining paradox of modern streaming in the network era? If a show got a perfect score, it was on the cover of TV Guide and everyone watched it. Today, you can be utterly perfect, totally unique and brilliantly acted, and still just vanish instantly into the algorithmic void because Netflix didn't put your thumbnail on the top row that week. It's a terrifying reality for creators. Oh. But if utter critical perfection doesn't guarantee an audience, what does? Well, sometimes the safest bet is leaning heavily on a proven author's highly specific, well-worn tropes. And that concept brings us to the five, a 2016 thriller that aired on Sky One. The five was created and written by Harlan Coban. Now, that is a name that carries massive weight and guarantees an audience in the crime thriller genre today. Definitely. But this show is interesting because it aired before Coban struck his massive,

31:56highly-liukative partnership with Netflix, which later produced global mega hits like Fulmy Once and I will find you. Watkins describes the five as a taught, fast-paced mystery. It follows four childhood friends who are forced to reunite and confront the mysterious disappearance of a brother decades earlier. And the inciting incident is that his DNA is suddenly discovered at a fresh murder scene in the present day. It sounds incredibly gripping on paper. It does sound gripping, but Watkins introduces a very real, very modern concept here as a caveat, the fatigue factor. The fatigue factor. He explicitly warns that if you have already watched a bunch of Coban's subsequent Netflix adaptations, you might actually want to skip the five. Really? Just skip it entirely. Yeah, and the reason is structural. It relies heavily on the exact same formulas that made his later work famous. Watkins lists them out for us. Let's hear them. The reliance on double twist endings, the obsession with lost or hidden loved ones, past sins resurfacing to ruin the present,

32:57and the slow, inevitable disintegration of what he calls safe suburbia. Well, these are his trademark tricks. They are the things that delight his fans. True, but if you've seen those specific narrative tricks executed five or six times already across different shows, returning to an earlier iteration like the five might feel highly repetitive. It might feel like you can see the strings pulling the puppets. That is such an insightful point about modern viewing habits. Because we have access to everything instantly, we are so saturated with content that we become hyper aware of a creator's structural formulas. We binge their entire catalog in a weekend. And suddenly their magic tricks don't work on us anymore. But if audience fatigue with the creator's tropes is a tough challenge, it is nothing compared to the challenge faced by the next show on our list. We have to talk about the crushing burden of established intellectual property. Ah, yes. The reboot specifically Fox's television adaptation of lethal weapon, which ran from 2016 to 2019.

33:58Whatkins describes this as a genuinely excellent three-season run of buddy cop mastery. You had actors, clean Crawford and Damon Wayans stepping into the incredibly iconic, culturally massive shoes of Mel Gibson and Danny Glover, which is terrifying. And by Watkins account, they didn't just survive the attempt. They rose to the occasion with a plum. They blasted, bickered and bantered their way to consistent, highly positive critical reception. The show was actually good. And yet, despite being a critically successful, highly entertaining show in its own right, Watkins notes a depressing reality. Legal weapon the television series is destined to forever live in the shadow of its iconic movie predecessor. It is and always will be unfairly overshadowed by the source material. He specifically points out how tough this show is for the purists. The avid fans of the 1980s movies, the people who grew up with Gibson and Glover, might shudder at the very thought of anyone else playing those leads. Oh, they definitely do. That purist mentality makes it incredibly difficult for a large segment of the audience to just

35:00sit back and enjoy the series as a separate, entertaining entity without making constant, unfair, one-to-one comparisons. Which is a tragic, unavoidable fate for a well-made show. It is the trap of IP. You get an immediate audience because of brand recognition, but that same audience will hate you for not being the original. You can't win. But it's not the only way an IP driven show can evolve. Watkins provides a fascinating, highly successful, counter-example to conclude his list. What's that? Criminal minds. Evolution. I find this one so interesting. The original criminal minds was a network behemoth. It ran for 15 seasons on CBS. It was the definition of a procedural. It concluded in 2020. Right. But it didn't stay dead for long. It was revived and moved to streaming in 2022 under the new title, Evolution. And the question is, how did an aging network procedural survive the jump to a modern streaming platform? How did they do it? By aggressively adapting to the new ecosystem, Watkins points out that the creators made deliberate changes.

36:02They introduced a noticeably darker, more mature tone. Okay. And crucially, they swapped the episodic crime of the week cases for complex, single-killer season-long arcs. It's brilliant. It morphed from a traditional network procedural into a highly serialized streaming thriller. They look at the landscape and evolve the format. It's the name. Yeah. And while Watkins admits it might not have the massive water cooler mainstream buzz of its early 2008 day, it proves a vital point. The door is always open for resurgence if creators are willing to let the format evolve with the audience's taste. If we take a step back and synthesize this entire modern streaming landscape that Watkins has laid out for us, the reality of the industry is quite stark. In what way? To survive today, a crime thriller essentially has to fall into one of three distinct buckets. You either have to be utterly weird, radically genre-bending, and critically flawless like Gary Hodgey. Okay. Bucket one. You have to be heavily reliant on a proven author's highly specific

37:05addictive tropes like the five, or you have to do battle with the ghosts of beloved intellectual property, whether you're trying to escape their shadow like lethal weapon, or successfully updating their legacy like criminal minds, evolution. So what does this all mean? We've cared 50 years of television history today. What does this all mean for us? For you, the listener, sitting on your couch tonight with the remote in your hand. It's a lot to process. I keep going back to that concept of the purist that Watkins mentioned regarding lethal weapon. It really makes me wonder, are we, the viewers, actually our own worst enemies when it comes to screaming? In what sense? Like, do our own preconceptions ruin the experience for us? Our absolute demands for a specific adrenaline-fueled pacing, our stubborn adherence to beloved old movies, preventing us from accepting reboots, our exhaustion with certain tropes because we binge too much, our rejection of realism when it makes us uncomfortable. The Southland problem. Exactly. Do these self-imposed barriers prevent us from enjoying perfectly good or even masterful,

38:06modern television? It's a vital, deeply-convicting question. We actively build these internal barriers. We demand stark realism, but we reject Southland because the reflection is too grim. Yeah. We loudly demand originality from Hollywood, but we ignore masterpieces like Keri Haji, because they don't immediately fit into the comfortable algorithmic boxes we're used to clicking on. By letting the algorithm dictate our taste, we are absolutely complicit in these incredible shows being lost to time. We really are. We let the machine tell us what we like. Well, this has been an incredible timeline to walk through today. It has. We started with the breezy, light-hearted 70s foundations of the Rockford files and the dated but influential streets of San Francisco. We navigated the raw, cultural disruptions, and the corporate sociopathy of the 90s with New York undercover and the tragically short-lived profit. We watched the moral lines completely blur and shatter in the 2000s cable revolution with the shield and the rejected realism of Southland. Then we descended into the intense psychological warfare

39:07and the wide-unit era of the 2010s, subverting mysteries with the fall and exploring psychological tolls with the center. And finally, we landed right back on our couches in the chaotic, genre-abending, IP heavy streaming wars of today. The overarching lesson here to you listening is that building a true, deep understanding of media and finding something genuinely great to watch means you have to be willing to look past the front page of your streaming app. You have to actively dig for the gems. You have to endure the slow-drip coffee sometime. And tracing this entire evolution leaves us with one lingering, rather provocative thought. If absolute masterclasses and television shows that were decades ahead of their time, like profit or shows that achieved literal, unarguable, critical perfection like Geary Haji, can be so highly rated and yet completely utterly forgotten by the mainstream. Yeah. It raises an important question for right now. What hidden masterpiece is airing this very week, buried on page four of a streaming menu that we are completely ignoring?

40:08What brilliant piece of art won't we fully appreciate until it too is lost to the sands of time? Oh, that is a haunting thought. A masterpiece could be buried in your queue right now and your scrolling right past it to watch the sitcom from 2005. It's very likely. So the next time you order that takeout and you sit on the couch and you feel that heavy wave of choice paralysis washing overview as you stare at those endless thumbnails, break the cycle. Take a risk. Dive into one of these forgotten gems this weekend. You might just find your new favorite show.