10 Best Crime-Mystery Shows of All Time, Ranked

Crime mysteries have a strange hold over viewers. Even when one knows the ending might be bleak, people still press play and hope to make sense of what comes next. When done right, the genre is addictive: the best series make every clue matter, let every character contribute to the payoff, and commit to building tension and paranoia until the very last moment.

Here are the shows that get all of this right and hook viewers from the first episode to the end. Murder, She Wrote makes the crime genre feel welcoming rather than unsettling. Created by Peter S. Fischer, Richard Levinson, and William Link, it stars Angela Lansbury as Jessica Fletcher, a widowed former English teacher who becomes a bestselling mystery novelist and an amateur detective.

The show ran twelve seasons as Jessica traveled the world solving crimes; it’s escapist, cozy, and designed as a family-friendly whodunit that shouldn’t be taken too seriously, even if many feel the later seasons lost some spark.

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