8 Crime Dramas That Improve With Every Season

There are plenty of outstanding crime dramas on television, but only truly exceptional TV series in the genre manage to keep raising their game season by season. Crime shows that start out with compelling premises too often lose focus or begin treading water after a few years on the small screen.

Even crime dramas that are perfect from start to finish struggle to top episodes and storylines which have gone before. For instance, The Sopranos couldn’t live up to astronomical expectations in its final season. While the show does maintain impossibly high standards throughout its run, season 6 is a noticeable step-down from the two which precede it.

TV shows getting better with each season is a rarity in every genre, but crime shows have it tougher than most. Their writers need to come up with a seemingly endless array of criminal acts for their characters to commit or investigate which are novel and entertaining for their audience but also true to the original premise of the series.

It’s easy to see why crime dramas tend to lose intensity and direction over time. On the other hand, the eight shows in this list not only stay the course with distinction. They actually improve with every season.

The Shield

2002–2008

A subversive police drama that deserves far more recognition than it gets, The Shield follows a fictional team within the LAPD which specializes in drug busts, led by ruthlessly corrupt detective Vic Mackey. The show features some of the most brilliantly drawn characters in uniform ever to appear on the small screen, who only get more intriguing as it develops.

The Shield’s best seasons are unquestionably towards the end of its run. The personal aspirations of Mackey and his team increasingly come into conflict with their brutally underhand approach to policing Los Angeles, while some of their more sordid deeds come back to bite them. The series concludes with one of television’s greatest-ever finales, including a particularly powerful final scene.

Breaking Bad

2008–2013

Every Breaking Bad season has a different standout performance, and all five of this legendary crime drama’s seasons are worth their weight in gold. The show is fairly consistent throughout its 62 episodes, with creator, showrunner and lead writer Vince Gilligan scarcely putting a foot wrong.

As Walter White descends into the depths of the criminal underworld he inhabits, however, Breaking Bad only gets more and more extraordinary. Walt’s transformation into Heisenberg is subtle and gradual, but by the end of the series we’re dealing with an even more thrilling TV masterpiece from the one we started watching.

While many fans name season 4 as their favorite, the final season, which completes Walt’s jawdropping journey through meth-making mythology, is Breaking Bad’s greatest accomplishment. With masterfully crafted payoffs aplenty, this last batch of episodes is arguably the pinnacle of 21st century crime television.

The Wire

2002–2008

It’s hard to argue with the cast of The Wire’s view that season 4 is the show’s best. Tying together all the elements which the three previous seasons introduce to us, this season presents the most complete picture of a city’s social fabric that’s ever been broadcast on the small screen.

After consistently taking things up a gear season by season, in its fourth year The Wire effortlessly balances plotlines between Baltimore’s local government, police department, public school system, and street gangs. Fan favorite Omar Little and up-and-coming drug kingpin Marlo Stanfield feature in several season highlights.

There’s no denying that season 5 of The Wire can’t quite match what comes before it. Yet, it’s still an all-time great among final seasons, and comes after four years of incomparably superlative crime drama.

Narcos

2015–2017

The makers of Narcos made the right decision scrapping season 4 in favor of an all-Mexican spinoff. Season 3 of the show, which sees the internecine war between Colombian drug cartels escalate in the wake of Pablo Escobar’s death.

Given that Escobar was initially the main attraction of the series, this final season without him could easily have been anti-climactic. Instead, it’s anything but, as Narcos season 3 shines a light on lesser-known historical details about Colombia’s drug wars, while weaving an even more intriguing web of plots around the American DEA.

Escobar or no Escobar, this crime drama delivers the goods. The show starts off strongly, but its second and third seasons are generational works of art.

Snowfall

2017–2023

There are a fair few TV shows like Snowfall, but none of them can compare with its dazzling ascent to TV greatness across six seasons. This fictionalized account of the historic crack epidemic in Los Angeles during the mid-1980s focuses its lens on a black mob family at the top of the game.

It also zooms out to look at the bigger picture, which involves CIA collusion with Mexican cartels in Nicaraguan cocaine trafficking to the United States. Snowfall’s historical details are painstakingly rendered, while lead actor Damson Idris gives a powerhouse performance across all six seasons of the show.

However, it’s seasons 5 and 6, which catalog the successive attempts of Idris’ character Franklin Saint to quit the drug business and expose the CIA, that showcase the series at its very best. Snowfall digs deeper into its main characters than ever before, at the same time as raising the stakes in its central plot.

Hannibal

2013–2015

The best episodes of Hannibal are undisputed masterpieces, and most of them feature in the show’s second and third seasons. This definitive screen adaptation of Thomas Harris’ novels Red Dragon, Hannibal and Hannibal Rising tells the story of the FBI’s fictional collaboration with Dr. Hannibal Lecter.

As it develops, the series ensnares us in the midst of Hannibal’s disturbing relationship with brain-damaged FBI agent Will Graham, pulling us deeper into the darkest corners of the title character’s twisted world. The show increasingly opts shocking narrative twists over graphic violence in its later episodes, and features a truly stunning conclusion to its finale.

Justified

2010–2015

As with most of the other shows on this list, Justified’s best episodes tend to occur in its later seasons, as the cat-and-mouse dynamic between fugitive criminal Boyd Crowder and U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens increasingly becomes an obsession for Raylan. This neo-Western crime drama brings shades of Old-West swagger to its complex tale of small-town felons.

Raylan Givens is a lone ranger of modern law enforcement, who has little respect for his superiors in the Marshal Service, and for less concern for legal protocols. In fact, the essence of Raylan’s maverick approach to police work is distilled in the timeless final scene of the series.

Having come hundreds of miles to tell Boyd Crowder a lie about his runaway wife dying to spare his feelings while he spends years behind bars, Raylan puts his concern for Boyd down to the fact that they once dug coal together in the mines of Harlan County. Its ending alone proves that Justified is the earthiest crime drama around.

Better Call Saul

2015–2022

Release Date

2015 – 2022-00-00

Showrunner

Peter Gould

Directors

Vince Gilligan, Thomas Schnauz, Peter Gould, Michael Morris, Adam Bernstein, Colin Bucksey, John Shiban, Michelle MacLaren, Melissa Bernstein, Larysa Kondracki, Terry McDonough, Gordon Smith, Minkie Spiro, Jim McKay, Daniel Sackheim, Andrew Stanton, Norberto Barba, Rhea Seehorn, Scott Winant, Michael Slovis, Keith Gordon, Deborah Chow, Giancarlo Esposito, Bronwen Hughes

Writers

Ann Cherkis, Marion Dayre, Ariel Levine, Jonathan Glatzer

The Breaking Bad spinoff Better Call Saul has completely rewritten the rule book for TV shows getting better with every season. The show starts off a masterpiece, before gradually ascending to the rarefied air of all-time greats over the course of 63 episodes.

Most of the moments that define Better Call Saul appear in the second half of the series, while its sixth season is perhaps the greatest final bow any television show has taken before leaving our screens. If there’s anyone who’s perfected the art of finishing strong, it’s Vince Gilligan.

Although not many crime dramas get better with each passing season, Better Call Saul manages to make it look as though it’s supposed to be this way. Jimmy McGill saves the best till last, and we’ll forever be grateful that he does.