Hello CrimeReads. I haven’t seen you in a while. How are you? I’m doing well. I spent the last three months on parental leave, which also went well. I had a baby. That was the big thing. I also learned how to take care of a baby, and specifically how to do that in the midst of an ever-increasing sleep debt.
Anyway, I’m back at work now and I brought with me a store of television recommendations, because when you have a newborn baby, you find yourself watching TV at random hours and it really adds up. So get ready!
This is a list of everything I consumed. Well, it’s a list of all of the crime programming I consumed, because this is a crime website. I watched a lot of non-crimey things too, and believe me, I tried to find crimey angles to everything I saw so I could shoehorn as many as I could into this list. But it’s time to face the music; Running Point is simply not a crime show, no mater how many times Justin Theroux smokes crack while driving.
Righto. Back to the list. This list is very tightly organized. I watched new TV and old TV, and I kept those categories separate. I’ve included streaming info so you can watch, if you haven’t already.
Let’s get going!
New TV:
Photo: Netflix, via Indiewire
Big Mistakes, Season 1
Dan Levy and Rachel Sennott’s madcap family crime comedy is laugh-out-loud funny. Levy and Taylor Ortega play two dysfunctional siblings (Nicky and Morgan) living unfulfilling lives in suburban South Jersey—lives which take a turn for the unpredictable, anxiety-producing, and sometimes exciting when Morgan shoplifts a tennis necklace and the siblings find themselves tracked down by low-level operatives in a local gangster outfit, and are made to perform numerous shady tasks to make up for it. The great Laurie Metcalf co-stars as the siblings’ harried mother Linda, who is currently running in a local election and definitely doesn’t need her kids to be mixed up in something unsavory. There is a lot of yelling in this show, but it’s the funny kind.
Streaming on: Netflix
Photo: Dana Hawley/Disney, via The Hollywood Reporter
RJ Decker, Season 1
I can’t tell you how relaxing RJ Decker is. The Florida crime series is very loosely based on Double Whammy, the 1987 novel by Carl Hiassen, but, unlike the Apple TV adaptation of Bad Monkey, it is both a serious departure from the source text, and, formally, is a network procedural. Our protagonist RJ (played by the always likable Scott Speedman) is a chilled-out photographer ex-con who lives in a camper and becomes a PI helping out people in need, and if you think he sounds like Rockford, then you are very correct. The whole thing is basically The Rockford Files but in Ft. Lauderdale. It tamps down the nuttiness of that source text and breezily rolls along. Nothing grisly, nothing garish, nothing truly upsetting happens in the whole first season. Watch it in your hammock.
Streaming on: Hulu+
Photo: Christopher Saunders, via Tudum by Netflix
The Night Agent, Season 3
I didn’t realize that The Night Agent had a second season until January of this year, and was even more delighted to find out that it had a third season dropping a month later. Season 3 was the first thing I watched on mat leave, and the adrenaline that those characters feel while stopping a dangerous conspiracy at the top tier of government is probably exactly the same feeling that shoots through you when you are awoken by the shrieks of a barely-sentient infant.
Streaming on: Netflix
Photo: ‘The Burbs’ Elizabeth Morris/PEACOCK via The Hollywood Reporter
The Burbs, Season 1
The TV reboot of the 80s Tom Hanks cult classic is perky, charming, and a tad spooky without ever being truly sinister. Keke Palmer plays Samira, our bored, neighbor-watching lead—only unlike Tom Hanks’s staycationing dad in the original, she’s a litigator and a new mom on maternity leave who has just moved, with her husband Jack Whitehall, to a mid-Atlantic suburban cul-de-sac where, according to local myth, something bad once happened in spooky abandoned Victorian. Samira is determined to solve the mystery—and brings along a rag tag group of quirky new neighbors. Sometimes it quavers in how to balance the inheritance of its silly predecessor with real life issues and relevant themes, as well as develop a new and interesting haunted house storyline of its own—but I don’t really care. I’d follow Keke off a cliff. Or (gasp) into the suburbs.
Streaming on: Peacock
Photo: Apple TV Press
Widow’s Bay, Season 1
Stay tuned for my thoughts on this spooky, salty gem, which I can only describe as Jaws meets Twin Peaks inside the loving embrace of Stephen King.
Streaming on: Apple TV +
Old TV:
Photo: Jean-Claude Lother/AMC via The Hollywood Reporter
Monsieur Spade, Season 1
I missed this miniseries when it came out in 2024, but I was intrigued by the premise: it’s the 1960s and a retired Sam Spade is living in the South of France when he winds up embroiled in an inchoate local mystery. Clive Owen plays Spade, which I like, but I didn’t otherwise vibe with the show, which greatly departs in tone, narrative sensibility, and sentimentality from both the novel and film The Maltese Falcon. But even if it didn’t, I was underwhelmed by the mystery itself… and its resolution.
Streaming: AMC+
Chad Powers, Season 1
You might be asking, is Chad Powers—Glen Powell’s (for now) six-episode TV series about a washed-up, unlikable former college football star who dons movie-level prosthetics to try out for a college football team with hope of leading the players to the victory that eluded him more than a decade before—REALLY a crime show? Because if Chad Powers is crime, then so is Tootsie, because Chad Powers is basically the same exact thing as Tootsie only in the world of football. But I say, maybe both movies are crime movies, then, because FRAUD is a crime, Your Honor!
Orphan Black, Season 1
I’m catching up on shows I missed! From 2013-2017, when this show aired, Tatiana Maslany was the hardest-working woman in show business, playing a total of 17 clones. What is the show about? Clones. It’s about clones.
Sherlock, Seasons 1-3
The very moment I learned that my husband had not seen the BBC Sherlock series, we put it on. (It actually went down like this: him remarking “oh hey, what’s this Sherlock Holmes show?” while flipping through Hulu, and then me shrieking with disbelief and excitement.) I like to pretend Season 4 doesn’t exist, and he was fine with that. But what a treat it is to get to show the love of your life a show you really enjoy!
