How do you plan to spend New Year’s Eve this year? For some, crowded parties are the way to go with the traditional Auld Lang Syne song capping a night of sweaty revelry. For others, they head to the multiplex, which this year holds the cinematic pleasures of Nosferatu, Babygirl, and A Complete Unknown.
For myself, I plan on staying home and watching a good mystery or two. The British are great at spinning tales of crime, deceit, and murder, and there’s no shortage of them on streamers like Netflix, Peacock, and BritBox. The following three crime shows can be consumed in one long night and offer enough stories of lies, deceit, and mysterious deaths to please any fan of the genre.
When you’re done here, check out the best new movies to stream this week, as well as the best shows on Netflix, the best shows on Hulu, the best new shows on Max, the best shows on Amazon Prime Video, and the best shows on Disney+.
The Capture (2019 to 2022)
Just how reliable is technology when solving a crime? That’s the central premise behind The Capture, a British crime series that shows how tech, specifically surveillance video, can be manipulated to make the innocent look guilty and vice versa. Strike‘s Holliday Grainger stars as Detective Inspector Rachel Carey, who is part of the Homicide and Serious Crime Command division and must determine what is fact and what is fiction.
In season one, she is assigned the case of Shaun Emery (Masters of the Air‘s Callum Turner), an Afghan war vet who is accused of killing his lawyer. His protests of innocence are ignored as video evidence shows him committing the crime. But Shaun insists he didn’t do it and that the footage has been manipulated to make him look like a murderer.
In season two, Rachel must solve the mystery of Isaac Turner (Black Doves star Paapa Essiedu), an up-and-coming politician whose career is in ruins after a deepfake video shows him repeating racist ideologies. Who is behind the deepfake, and what are their motives?
The Capture is streaming for free on Peacock.
Strike (2017 to present)
Strike, also known as C.B. Strike, is based on a series of popular mystery novels by Robert Galbraith, the pen name for Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling. The show, which airs on BBC One and streams on Max, adapts several novels into two-, three-, or four-episode installments, so each season is self-contained and tells one mystery story.
The basic setup is this: Cormoran Blue Strike (Furiosa‘s Tom Burke) is a war vet with one good leg and one bad attitude. He’s trying to be a good private investigator, but he needs help. Enter Robin Ellacott (Holliday Grainger), a recently engaged woman looking for a purpose and a job. Together, they set up shop in downtown London and solve a variety of crimes, from cold cases involving murdered women to current crimes of the heart, while also trying to deny their growing feelings for each other.
Each season’s quality is dependent on the mystery novel it adapts. The first season, The Cuckoo’s Calling, is the best and concerns the apparent suicide of a haute couture model. The model’s brother hires Strike and Robin to find the killer behind her death, and the ending is genuinely surprising. But really, each season has its own distinct pleasures and is told in a way that you can start fresh in season two or season five and still be able to follow the story without too much confusion.
Strike is streaming on Max.
And Then There Were None (2015)
The queen of crime, Agatha Christie, wrote many novels in her lifetime that have been adapted for the stage, film, and TV. Her best novel, And Then There Were None, has been adapted the most, and its most recent version is the best of the bunch. That’s because it fully preserves and exploits the author’s pitch-black pessimism when she created her tale of bad people who are being menaced by an even worse person.
Ten strangers are invited to an isolated island under the threat of blackmail. Each person has committed a heinous crime in the past, so to keep it quiet, they have to attend this macabre party held by someone they don’t know. One by one, each guest is brutally killed, and a taunting clue is left behind after each death. Who is behind the murders and the whole sick game of cat and mouse? Is it one of the guests? Or someone they haven’t accounted for just yet?
This three-episode miniseries is artful in ways you wouldn’t expect, with a score that evokes mounting dread and evocative flashbacks for each guest that gradually reveal what they did and who they did it to. As the bodies pile up and each remaining guest turns against one another, And Then There Were None ratchets up the tension quite effectively. It’s a strange way to ring in the new year, but you may be so engrossed by the show’s mystery that you won’t realize 2025 has already begun. Now that’s the mark of a truly good crime show.
And Then There Were None is streaming on Acorn TV.
