The Guardian Wants to Know Your All-Time Favourite True Crime TV Show
Finn's Take· TL;DR- True crime dominates TV thanks to cheap production costs and massive loyal audiences seeking psychological engagement and puzzle-solving satisfaction.
- Guardian ranked 25 best true crime shows; genre exploded after Making a Murderer, now producing unprecedented volume of streamers' docuseries content.
- Critics debate whether sensationalizing crimes and trauma exploits victims, while best shows center victims over perpetrators and examine criminal justice issues.
A Genre That Has Taken Over the Small Screen
True crime has become one of the most dominant forces in television, and the Guardian wants to hear from you about it. The outlet recently published its own ranked list of the 25 best true crime shows ever made — spanning titles from OJ: Made in America to Tiger King — and now it's turning the question back to readers: what is your personal favourite, and why?
Since the true-crime explosion a decade ago — kickstarted by Netflix's Making a Murderer — audiences have been fed a steady small-screen diet of cold-case killings, catfishing scams, and creepy cults. The genre has never really slowed down. If anything, it has accelerated, with streamers pumping out new docuseries at a pace that makes it nearly impossible to keep up.
Why We Can't Stop Watching
True crime remains an extremely popular genre, with a growing number of podcasts and movies. On TV, streamers have begun to invest heavily in creating true crime shows — often adapted from popular books, podcasts, or documentaries. The economics are simple: these shows are relatively cheap to produce and command enormous, loyal audiences.
Psychology Today notes that far from being mindless viewing, the genre may even fulfill key psychological needs for audiences, providing opportunities for human connection, emotional regulation, and more. There's also the armchair detective factor — the satisfying sense that you're piecing together a puzzle in real time, even if the crime happened decades ago. These days, true crime stories are virtually inescapable. Thanks to the rise of citizen investigations and social media, even ordinary viewers feel like active participants in the stories they're watching.
From Classic Docs to 2026's Biggest Hits
The Guardian's list draws from the full sweep of the genre's history, touching on landmark productions that shaped what true crime TV could be. Tiger King leans closer to reality television than to traditional investigative documentary filmmaking, and Joe Exotic, the Oklahoma zookeeper who allegedly hired a hitman to kill big-cat activist Carole Baskin, was already a singular internet figure before the film. Released in the early weeks of the pandemic, Tiger King delivered exactly the unhinged collective viewing experience the cultural moment needed.
The genre has also produced more sober, investigative work that has had real-world consequences. The Thin Blue Line examined the case of Randall Adams, who was convicted and sentenced to death for the shooting of a Dallas police officer in 1976. In the documentary, another man confesses to actually committing the crime, and Adams was released from prison a year after the movie came out. The film pioneered reenactments and demonstrated the use of true crime documentaries to point out and correct issues in the criminal justice system.
The Genre Keeps Evolving — and So Does the Debate
In 2026, audiences are diving into shows like "The Cult Behind the Killer: The Andrea Yates Story," "The Hillside Strangler," and "Handsome Devil: Charming Killer," with many more to come — including the much-publicized fourth season of Ryan Murphy's Netflix series "Monster," which will focus on Lizzie Borden's alleged crimes in the late 19th century. The pipeline shows no signs of thinning.
Of course, the genre isn't without its critics. Watching true crime sensationalizes and romanticizes criminal activity, some argue. The genre is trauma porn. It's shameful to use stories of anguish as entertainment. These are legitimate concerns, and the best entries in the genre wrestle with them honestly — centering victims rather than glorifying perpetrators. The Guardian's reader callout is, in its own small way, part of that conversation: asking audiences to reflect on not just what they've watched, but what made it matter to them.
As the true crime landscape grows ever more crowded and competitive, the shows that endure tend to be those that go beyond the shock of the crime itself and illuminate something deeper — about justice, human psychology, or the systems that fail us. Which one did that for you?