10 Best Crime Drama Shows To Binge On HBO Max

From The Wire to The Sopranos to True Detective, there are plenty of great crime dramas to binge-watch on the recently re-rebranded HBO Max. HBO Max’s library has all the old classics from the HBO back catalog, like Oz and Boardwalk Empire, as well as newer Max originals, like the hit DC spinoff The Penguin. There are a ton of bingeworthy crime dramas streaming on HBO Max.

10

True Detective

Credit:  HBO via MovieStillsDB

Anthology shows are fun to binge-watch, because it’s like starting a whole new show every season. The first season of True Detective was a gripping Southern Gothic murder mystery, but the series has since delivered a gritty urban thriller set in California, a macabre triple-timeline crime epic set in the Ozarks, and a supernatural horror story set in Alaska.

Every season introduces a brand-new cast of characters played by a who’s-who of A-list actors. The first season starred Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey, but subsequent seasons have featured Colin Farrell, Rachel McAdams, Mahershala Ali, and Jodie Foster. Not every season has lived up to season 1, but they all have nuanced characters and compelling plot twists.

9

Oz

HBO’s first ever original hour-long drama series still holds up as one of its very best. Oz takes audiences inside the walls of a notorious maximum-security prison and introduces the inmates behind its bars and the guards who keep an eye on them. The prison is fictional, named after L. Frank Baum’s fantasyland, but what happens there feels hauntingly real.

Oz established all the hallmarks of an HBO drama. It has compelling characters played by recognizable actors, gruesome violence that gets a little too gruesome sometimes, and cinematic visuals bringing a well-worn movie genre to the small screen with a fresh spin. It feels like a classic prison drama stretched out into a long-running series.

8

Sharp Objects

Gillian Flynn immediately made a name for herself as one of the most distinctive and idiosyncratic thriller writers with her debut novel Sharp Objects. Before she would write Dark Places and Gone Girl, Flynn proved with Sharp Objects that she could write a riveting mystery driven by a deeply flawed yet sympathetic female antihero.

Unsurprisingly, Sharp Objects made for captivating television when it was adapted into an HBO miniseries. Amy Adams stars as a troubled journalist who reluctantly returns to her hometown and her estranged family to cover the murders of two young girls. As she tackles the case, she has to confront the demons of her own past.

7

We Own This City

David Simon’s true-crime miniseries We Own This City is probably the closest thing we’ll ever get to The Wire season 6. Based on Justin Fenton’s book of the same name, it chronicles the rise and fall of the Baltimore P.D.’s Gun Trace Task Force, which was founded with good intentions but quickly got mired in corruption.

Much like The Wire, We Own This City presents the facts of the case with a journalistic eye. Simon’s storytelling is never biased or judgmental; there are no heroes or villains. We Own This City has sympathy for all sides. It doesn’t just blindly depict corrupt cops as bad guys; it shows how underpaid police officers can be driven into corruption by their financial struggles.

6

The Penguin

The Penguin is technically a spinoff of The Batman, with Colin Farrell reprising his role from the movie, but Lauren LeFranc’s take on the character was so compelling in its own right that it would be must-see television even if it had no connection to Batman. It’s just a straightforward gangster drama that happens to take place in Gotham.

Following Carmine Falcone’s death in the movie, there’s a power vacuum in the city. Farrell’s Oz is the underdog hoping to take over, and Cristin Milioti’s scene-stealing Sofia is the partner-in-crime who can get him there. The Penguin makes masterful use of backstory to get you to understand the characters and where they’re coming from.

5

Boardwalk Empire

Martin Scorsese directed the pilot episode of Boardwalk Empire, and set a precedent of dramatic nuance, cinematic imagery, and historical commentary that the following five-season saga managed to live up to. Set in Atlantic City in the 1920s, Boardwalk Empire chronicles the Prohibition era through the eyes of a crooked treasurer and the bootleggers around him.

Boardwalk Empire has an eye-popping visual style, a nice mix of history and fiction, and a fantastic lead performance by Steve Buscemi. Sopranos writer Terence Winter brought everything he learned working on that show to this one; his keen eye for character pairs perfectly with the cinematic aesthetic that Scorsese pioneered for the show.

4

Mare Of Easttown

Kate Winslet came to the small screen to investigate a murder in a small town outside Philadelphia in Mare of Easttown. One young girl has been killed and another has gone missing, and it’s up to the eponymous Detective Sergeant Marianne “Mare” Sheehan to get to the bottom of it. Winslet’s performance is as enchanting as the mystery itself.

The series has been widely acclaimed for its acting, writing, and characterization, but lots of TV shows are praised for those things. What makes Mare of Easttown stand out is its nuanced, three-dimensional portrayal of female characters and the cast’s surprisingly accurate Philadelphia accents, which can rarely be heard in mainstream media.

3

The Night Of

Based on the British TV drama Criminal Justice, The Night Of stars Riz Ahmed as a college student accused of murder and John Turturro as the lawyer hoping to clear his name. The series doesn’t do much to shake up the whodunit formula, but it is a really strong example of it.

Richard Price and Steven Zaillian’s carefully crafted scripts keep you engaged through the whole horrifying ordeal. From the moment Naz wakes up next to a woman who’s been stabbed to death, and insists he didn’t do it, you can’t wait to see how it’ll all get explained and (hopefully) Naz will be exonerated.

2

The Sopranos

Oz may have been the first original drama on HBO, but The Sopranos was the show that really put HBO on the map as the home of prestige television. David Chase subverted the audience’s expectations of gangster stories by introducing an intimidating mob boss who sees a psychiatrist, looks after a family of ducks living in his pool, and has serious mommy issues.

The Sopranos is the most realistic portrayal of the mafia on television. It captures the day-to-day activities of mobsters — from the mundane to the murderous — with a shocking degree of verisimilitude. But it’s also chock-full of pitch-black humor and surreal dream sequences. There’s no other show quite like The Sopranos, and it still holds up today.

1

The Wire

David Simon worked as a crime reporter in Baltimore for years before becoming a TV writer, and he used those experiences to imbue the police procedural with an unexpected degree of realism. The Wire has an almost documentary-like sense of authenticity in showing how hard it is for the police to build a case against a criminal organization.

The Wire revolutionized television. It doesn’t have a main character; the main character is the city of Baltimore. Simon and his team of writers explore the broken institutions in Baltimore — the illegal drug trade, the ineffective local government, the unruly public school system, the sensationalist media — for a well-rounded, fully realized journalistic study of corruption in the American city.