We know, there’s a lot of TV out there—good TV. You probably don’t have time to look through all the press releases, trailers, and premiere calendars in order to remember when the new season of Killing Eve is due (April) or whether that Chris Pine / Black Dahlia show is really happening (it is). That’s why we’re here.
2019 is looking like another strong year for all things crime and mystery, thanks to the ever-expanding streaming services and a few plucky networks like FX and TNT looking to keep pace. On HBO, you’ll get the long-awaited new season of True Detective in just a few short days, then later this year, Meryl Streep joins the cast of Big Little Lies. Amazon has your next thriller obsession later this spring (Hanna), then Netflix comes back with more Mindhunter to run a chill down your spine; meanwhile old favorites like Billions, Better Call Saul, and Bosch return soon. You’ll get noir visions of Boston from Damon and Affleck (City on a Hill) and L.A. from Refn and Brubaker (Too Old to Die Young). It’s a crime lover’s bounty. In order to help plan your viewing agenda, we’ve broken down the highlights month-by-month. Here are our most anticipated shows of 2019.
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January
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Informer (Amazon/BBC) (January 11)
Informer is positioned to be Amazon’s answer to Netflix’s smash success with Bodyguard, a tense-as-all-get-out journey through modern London and its counterterrorism networks. A second generation Pakistani Brit played by Nabhaan Rizwan (absolutely poised for breakout success) is strong-armed by authorities into infiltrating immigrant communities and informing on suspected terrorist activities. This is shaping up like a John le Carré story for a paranoid modern-day Britain prone to eating its own tail.
True Detective Season 3 (HBO) (January 13)
The long awaited return of premium cable’s most brooding, existential, psycho-sphere smelling prestige hit, now poised for a big comeback: the new True Detective is finally arriving! This time around creator Nic Pizzolatto was given more time to develop the story (season 2 was reportedly rushed after the breakout success of the debut), and decided to head back east, away from all those creepy highways and rail programs, settling the new iteration in the Ozarks. Best of all Oscar-winner Mahershala Ali is set to star as a haunted detective going back over the case he can’t quite forget: a string of missing children. Expect the show’s trademark split time periods, and this go around Pizzolatto brought in some help, with David Milch serving as co-writer for some undisclosed number of episodes. This one premieres next week, at which time we’ll be back with much, much more. We’ve been waiting a good long while for this.
Riverdale Season 3 Part 2 (CW) (January 16)
Yes, in case you needed a reminder, Riverdale, the dishy teen melodrama based on the Archie comic series, is a crime show, as noir as they come. Just look at the lighting at Pop’s diner if you want a refresher. Sure, love is in the air in season 3, which continues this week after the winter hiatus, but there’s also gunplay, lingering trauma, and Betty is involved with a serial killer in some pretty strange ways, while good ol’ Jughead keeps typing away at his mystery opus. It’s back this January, so start bingeing if you need to catch up.
Deadly Class (Syfy) (January 16)
Already a cult hit amongst comic fans, Deadly Class looks to take its off-kilter brand of noir and martial arts to screens everywhere this winter with a splashy adaptation. Set in late 1980s San Francisco, it’s about a troubled teen who gets recruited to join a secret school where a shadowy guru teaches young people the art of assassination. It’s one part Breakfast Club, two parts noir, and about five or six parts badass fight movie.
Carmen Sandiego (Netflix) (January 18)
Look, all we really know before this one drops is that Netflix is making an animated reboot of Carmen Sandiego starring Gina Rodriquez and one of the kids from Stranger Things. That’s all we need to know. We’re ready for this. If you don’t have kids, find another excuse for watching it. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.
Conversations With a Killer: Ted Bundy Tapes (Netflix) (January 24)
Timed to air thirty years from the day Bundy was executed, Netflix has a new four part docu-series from filmmaker and activist Joe Berlinger, apparently including interviews with the notorious serial killer from his cell in a Florida death row. Bundy will have a lot of limelight (too much?) this year, as Zac Efron is scheduled to play him in a new movie dramatizing his horrifying life and crimes.
I Am the Night (TNT) (January 28)
It looks like TNT is going in deep on stylish historical crime, after last year’s sort-of success, The Alienist. This year it’s I Am the Night, a limited series inspired by Fauna Hodel’s memoir, directed by Wonder Woman’s Patty Jenkins and starring India Eisley and Chris Pine. Eisley plays Hodel, gone to California to find her birth parents, caught up in an epic scandal, and Pine is the reporter who thinks she holds the keys to solving the Black Dahlia murders. The big production value on this one looks like it went in heavy on lighting, suitable to its 1960s Hollywood lounge vibe.
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February
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O.G. (HBO) (February 23)
This one’s a bit of an outlier, since it’s not actually a series (it’s a feature-length movie), but we have it circled three times in red on our calendar, so we thought we’d let you know about it. Directed by Madeleine Sackler, O.G. was filmed entirely inside a maximum security prison in Indiana and stars Jeffrey Wright as a hardened prison gang leader who’s about to finish a twenty-four year sentence when he becomes something of a mentor to a young inmate and has his perspective upended. A documentary called It’s a Hard Truth Ain’t It was filmed during the same production period and was co-directed by Sackler and members of the prison’s film course.
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March
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Billions Season 4 (Showtime) (March 17)
TV’s most enjoyable hour of spy-versus-spy high finance legal drama is back this spring with a new season where, we’re led to believe, the show’s main antagonists, Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti) and Bobby Axelrod (Damian Lewis) are finally teaming up to take on mutual enemies. Or maybe they’re just finally coming to grips with the fact that neither of them is partner enough for Wendy Rhoades (Maggie Siff) and they’re going to have to combine their forces. Either way, there’s going to be some seriously aspirational real estate on display, a few unforgettable speeches, and a few damning but entertaining indictments of our financial and legal systems.
The Act (Hulu) (March 20)
For hardcore true crime readers this is probably the year’s most anticipated show, an adaptation from Michelle Dean’s 2016 Buzzfeed story “Dee Dee Wanted Her Daughter To Be Sick, Gypsy Wanted Her Mom Murdered,” about a toxic mother-daughter relationship. Dean and Nick Antosca are at the helm of the show, with Patricia Arquette the topline name alongside Joey King and Chloë Sevigny. If you’re not familiar with the story of Gypsy Blanchard and her quest to get out from under her mother’s very dangerous thumb, steel yourself, it’s going to be intense.
Hanna (Amazon) (March TBD)
A young woman is raised by an ex-mercenary obsessed with teaching her survival skills (with good reason), then set loose in the wilds of Europe, hunted by a dogged CIA agent trying to uncover the mystery behind the girl’s past. The series is spun out from a 2011 Joe Wright film and has potential to be this year’s Killing Eve-style identity thriller. (Right alongside season two of Killing Eve, that is.)
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April
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Killing Eve (BBC America) (April 7)
The espionage thriller that almost broke the internet. We don’t know much about the new season except that probably Villanelle and Eve Polastri are still going to be really into each other, and supposedly the new series picks up 30 seconds after the point where the first season came to a very dramatic conclusion. The Luke Jennings source material is out very soon, so maybe you can pick up some clues there.
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Coming Later in 2019
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Mindhunter Season 2 (Netflix)
After a breakout season 1, this David Fincher series about the early days of the FBI serial killer profiling program is expected back in season 2, jumping forward a couple years to 1979-81 and focusing in part on the Atlanta Child Murders. John Douglas and Jonathan Groff are back in the leads, and apparently they’ll be interviewing Charles Manson at some point in the new season, as Damon Herriman has been tapped to play the notorious killer in both Mindhunter and the new Quentin Tarantino movie, which makes for about as unsettling a crossover universe as you can find. Mindhunter season 2 is sure to stir up plenty of debate in the crime community and across the internet. There’s still no premiere date, but expectations are that it will drop sometime in the first half of 2019. Keep an eye out for some very creepy billboards soon.
Central Park Five (Netflix)
Ava Duverney is at the helm of this upcoming Netflix limited series, which will tell the story of the notorious Central Park Five case, in which five young men were wrongfully convicted of attacking a park jogger in 1989, and exonerated only after serving years in prison. Duverney has assembled an incredible team, with Michael K. Williams, Vera Farmiga, John Leguizamo, Felicity Huffman, Jharrel Jerome, and Jovan Adepo set to star and crime fiction standout Attica Locke, along with Robin Swicord and Michael Starrbury, co-writing episodes with Duverney, who will write and direct.
City on a Hill (Showtime)
Think of this as the extended universe of the 2010 Boston heist flick, The Town. If you’re not intrigued by that than the Bostonian on staff really doesn’t know what to do with you. City on a Hill is being developed for TV by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, and aims to tell the story of the early 90’s fight against organized crime and corruption in Boston, supposedly known as the “Boston Miracle,” although honestly we’ve never heard anyone utter those words in my life outside of that time the Celtics came back on the Nets from 26 down in the 2002 playoffs. Anyway, Kevin Bacon is starring as an old-school FBI agent, because Kevin Bacon can do anything he puts his mind to, including a Boston accent.
Too Old to Die Young (Amazon)
We know precious little about this series except that it’s set in Los Angeles and follows “a grieving police officer who, along with the man who shot his partner, finds himself in an underworld filled with working-class hit men, Yakuza soldiers, cartel assassins sent from Mexico, Russian mafia captains and gangs of teen killers.” That—which by the way is more than enough to get excited about—and the fact that it’s created by Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive, Only God Forgives, Pusher, etc) and CrimeReads favorite Ed Brubaker (Captain America comics, the Criminal anthology, and, most recently, My Heroes Have Always Been Junkies); it stars the very unlikely duo of Miles Teller and Billy Baldwin (John Hawkes also appears, naturally). In short, this is going to be one of the trippiest noirs on TV or streaming this year, without a doubt.)
Big Little Lies Season 2 (HBO)
There’s still no premiere date for the second season of what was supposed to be a limited series but really was just too good for anyone to quit. We do have some tantalizing info, namely that Meryl Streep is on board to play the mother of Alexander Skarsgard’s Perry Wright, presumably come to town to look into a few issues following her abusive son’s death.
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A Bunch of Other Shows About Which We Know Very Little Except They’re Probably Coming in 2019 At Some Point and We Can’t Wait to See Them
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Veronica Mars Limited Series (Hulu): A triumphant return and, frankly, our dream come true. The logline sounds pretty amazing, like Jaws with a private eye and a deep commitment to mystery / weirdness: “Spring breakers are getting murdered in Neptune, thereby decimating the seaside town’s lifeblood tourist industry. After Mars Investigations is hired by the parents of one of the victims to find their son’s killer, Veronica is drawn into an epic eight-episode mystery that pits the enclave’s wealthy elites, who would rather put an end to the month-long bacchanalia, against a working class that relies on the cash influx that comes with being the West Coast’s answer to Daytona Beach.”
Better Call Saul season 5 (AMC): Everyone’s favorite sleazy lawyer gets a little bit closer to the world of Breaking Bad. Better Call Saul is consistently the class of cable and hands-down the best ‘legal drama’ in the last decade.
Peaky Blinders season 5 (BBC/Netflix): Who among us can resist an epic crime tale about post-WWI England and its very peculiar and violent street gangs and organized crime networks? This one’s expected to go seven seasons, so you still have plenty of double crosses and family vengeance to look forward to.
L.A. Confidential (CBS): All we know is there’s an L.A. Confidential series coming to CBS at some point (relatively soon, we suspect), it stars Walton Goggins, and one of our favorite crime authors, Jordan Harper (She Rides Shotgun) wrote the pilot script and is executive producing. That means we’re all in.
Bosch season 6 (Amazon): Are you ready for some more West Coast Noir and jazz-laced brooding in that oh so beautiful hilltop home? Well, get ready, Harry Bosch is slated back for a new season later this year.
Devs (FX): A new limited series from Alex Garland starring Sonoya Mizuno (Crazy Rich Asians) and Nick Offerman (aka Ron Swanson), this one looks like a thriller about a tech engineer, a Silicon Valley bigwig, and a missing person. We’re ready for it whenever you are.
Ozark season 3 (Netflix): You would think this show would be utterly, devastating bleak but it’s actually kind of fun to watch, isn’t it? If you haven’t seen the first two seasons of this standout rural noir, do it now, so that you’ll be ready when season 3 drops late in 2019. Also, bone up on your money laundering and your fleeing-from-the-jurisdiction skills just in case.
Taboo season 2 (FX): Honestly, you haven’t lived until you’ve heard a muddied and gnarled Tom Hardy growl about gunpowder and the earth’s spirits. Here’s to father-and-son passion projects: to you, Chips Hardy.
Black Earth Rising (Netflix/BBC): An international war crimes legal and political drama that looks powerful and thrilling, liable to drop on Netflix any day.
The ABC Murders (Amazon): John Malkovich as Agatha Christie’s legendary sleuth, Hercule Poirot. Yes, you read that right. Rejoice.
Luther season 5: Already available in the UK (and probably if you want to you’ve already found a way to watch it). Rest assured, there’s more Idris Elba headed your way, now accompanied by Ruth Wilson!
Dublin Murders (Starz/BBC): The long-awaited adaptation of Tana French’s crime fiction opus, soon headed to the UK and US.
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A Long Awaited TV Movie We’re Very Excited About
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Deadwood (HBO)
The Deadwood movie is actually happening. Enough said.
