7 Best TV Shows Similar to Breaking Bad
Death and Other Details
Hulu’s entry in the massive cast mystery trend starts with sexy confidence before collapsing under its own weight. Mysteries have steadily made a comeback on screens and in multiplexes over the past several years. Kenneth Branagh offered old-school fun with his triptych (so far) take on master of the genre Agatha Christie’s works. Rian Johnson took Christie into modern times with a helping of class insight in Knives Out and Glass Onion. Things even get meta with the murder at an Agatha Christie play shenanigans of See How They Run. Series like The Afterparty and Murder at the End of the World took the genre to the small screen. With all this competition, of course Death and Other Details would try to find a new way of telling a familiar tale. Early on, it seems series’ creators Heidi Cole McAdams and Mike Weiss have hit upon a simple but ingenious solution. Let’s get some sex in here! For all the delights of the massive cast mystery revival, each project has been noticeably short on heat. Daniel Craig can still fill out some swim trunks with the best of them, but he’s a married man with a barely glimpsed sweet hubby back home. Emma Corin’s Darby Hart had a romance with Harris Dickinson’s Bill in End of the World, but by the time we know them, those days are over. Death and Other Details, however, boldly declares that, to paraphrase High Fidelity, it’s ok to be investigating a murder and horny at the same time. Continue Reading →
Criminal Record
AppleTV+’s new crime drama compellingly juggles issues of race, internal politics, and family dynamics. Criminal Record drips with a sinister sense of foreboding in the first episode’s cold opening. Daniel Hegarty (Peter Capaldi), a high-ranking cop moonlighting as a car service driver, guides an age-mismatched couple to their destination, trying to play nice with them. The man of the lovers obnoxiously probes Hegarty for gruesome tales. In reply, the detective briefly indulges them before trailing off. To bring things to a close, he declares he’s seen far worse than what he’s described, and more often besides. Nothing more happens. We never see the couple again. Presumably, Hegarty got them where they were going without anything further of interest occurring. Still, the scene bristles and pulses with danger. One can easily imagine Hegarty arresting them both. Or, worse, revealing his corruption and killing them both. Criminal Record isn’t that kind of show, as it turns out. However, the series smartly sets its tone in those early moments. No matter what it shows the audience after that, it’s impossible to shake the sense that this aging cop, played by Capaldi as somehow both spry and fragile, could be a ticking time bomb. Continue Reading →
Culprits
The heist thriller series stays compelling even as it grows more typical. Joe Petrus (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) is a Black gay man living in a very white suburb in Washington. His neighbors whisper about how great he is when he drops off his soon-to-be stepchildren Frankie (Maria Nash) and Bud (Baeyen Hoffman) at school. However, when he applies for a permit to convert a long-abandoned hardware store on Main Street, he encounters racially charged suspicion from a cop on the beat and judgment from the town council. Both dress them up to various degrees in standard procedure and questions of propriety, but the message is clear: “You don’t belong here.” It turns out they’re onto something, but for entirely the wrong reasons. Entrepreneur-in-love American Joe also happens to be British former organized crime heavy David Marking, who did “one last job” and actually walked away. He started a new life in the US and accidentally fell in love with Jules (Kevin Vidal). Unfortunately, the consequences of the job have finally started to catch up with him as members of his heist team begin to show up dead as Culprits opens. Continue Reading →
Fargo
The crime drama returns to the Land of 10,000 Lakes and rediscovers its best storytelling self. Throughout the six episodes of Fargo Season 5 screened for critics, the series isn’t exactly subtle. From opening the season with an on-screen graphic defining “Minnesota Nice” as neighbor attacks neighbor during a school board meeting to Sheriff Roy Tillman (Jon Hamm) staring up at a campaign billboard of himself, the show loudly states its theses at the viewer over and over. However, it never feels like creator Noah Hawley has lost control of the storytelling. It’s methodically over-the-top. The audience is on a roller coaster, but they can feel the quality of the engineering keeping them on the tracks. In other hands, this approach can feel alienating or blunting. Fargo Season 5 benefits from meeting Hawley’s signature energy with a game cast and impressively insightful art direction. As a result, the series turns in its best offering since Season 2’s near-perfect effort. Continue Reading →
Hijack
Hijack, like 24 before it, is billed as a thriller television series told in real-time. In execution, however, it feels similar to a carrier full of other TV actioners. While it may, in fact, be seven hours from Dubai to London, there’s nothing about this show that makes the real-time gimmick sing. Instead of intense immediacy, it feels like a run-of-the-mill suspense series stakes. Continue Reading →
Стъклен дом
In 2019, the Walt Disney Company released Avengers: Endgame, the culmination of an 11-year-long project of crossovers, callbacks, foreshadowing, and franchising. The result was, for a time, the single highest-grossing film in cinematic history. This success seemed to mark the undisputed coronation of the superhero movie as the defining film genre of the modern era. But just a few months earlier, to quieter but not unsuccessful fanfare, another superhero film was released, one whose foundations were laid long before the Marvel Cinematic Universe's were, a film that was, in its way, an epic farewell to a cinematic universe. M. Night Shyamalan's Glass is the third and final film of his "Eastrail 177 Trilogy," a trilogy of supernatural thrillers that rely not on pyrotechnics and action but on sincere, intimate moments of character. Continue Reading →
Heist
The appetite for true crime stories can seem insatiable. Mountains of podcasts, TV series, and movies, the latter two sent directly to streaming services, have been released over the last decade, making it more difficult for these narratives to find a wider audience. Netflix’s newest documentary series, Heist, attempts to cash in on this trend to mixed results, telling three stories over the course of six episodes. Continue Reading →