British TV Mysteries -- A Compilation By a Dedicated Reviewer
February 4, 2025 4:01 PM   Subscribe

Single Link Blog. It comes up often in AskMeFi what British mysteries are good to watch. Timothy Barron's website is very helpful in answering these questions, particularly when you're looking for something similar to what you've enjoyed in the past. Barron has kept up his site for decades now, updating it pretty much as new series of shows are introduced.

Barron has divided his reviews into categories:
Police Detectives
Private Detectives
Citizen Sleuths
Forensics
Profilers
Policing
Legal
Journalists
Espionage, Terrorism & Political
Heists & Organized Crime
General Mysteries & Crime

Listed with each series or movie is a brief synopsis and a link to the title either on Wikipedia or IMDb. He keeps a "updated" log to show what's been added recently.

As he describes his passion work, "British television is one of my addictions, and more specifically, crime and mystery series. After I added a page dedicated to that, the number of people viewing that page skyrocketed, and it became one of the top results of a Google search."
posted by drossdragon (6 comments total) 6 users marked this as a favorite
 
I'm impressed at the breadth of investigation, but based on these synopses, I would not be able to choose which of these shows I would enjoy. Anyone who thinks the reboot of "Maigret" is better than the original is not someone whose advice I would take.
posted by acrasis at 4:20 PM on February 4


This is right up my alley. One that's missing that I enjoyed, especially the first season, is Vigil.

Now we just need similar lists for British drama miniseries. Recently loved: Mr Bates vs The Post Office, Breathtaking, and Quiz.

I've randomly clicked around these decade-by-decade wikipedia lists of British miniseries (click at the top for different decades), but it's hard to know what will be worth the time. And here's the list, with some overlap, of 2020s British crime dramas and you can click through to different decades.

And then, while I'm asking, maybe we can do some similar Scandinavian lists? I've found some gems looking through MHZ (formerly Topic) lists. Here's a short list of Nordic Noir and you can also go by country (here's Sweden).
posted by msbrauer at 4:20 PM on February 4


Wow! There's a lot of stuff there.
I'm a big fan of M. C. Beaton's Hamish Macbeth books, but I found the BBC version much darker than the books.
posted by MtDewd at 4:24 PM on February 4


I was curious to see how he would categorize Professor T. Turns out he didn't make the list.
posted by Rivvo at 4:35 PM on February 4


He is not a fan of Poirot! Pffft.
posted by Glinn at 4:44 PM on February 4


it’s kind of amazing how prolific the brits are at producing police dramas. the entire nation had fewer murders than the city of chicago last year, but on screen the murder rate is sky high. also watch prime suspect it rules
posted by dis_integration at 4:45 PM on February 4


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