The 11 Most Gripping Serial Killer TV Shows

When an anti-immigration judge is found dead on a bridge connecting El Paso, Texas, and Juárez, Mexico, it’s up to detectives from both sides of the border to find the serial killer responsible. And the tension between Det. Sonya Cross (Diane Kruger) and Det. Marco Ruiz (Demián Bechir) shreds viewers’ nerves even more.

Turns out, a lot happened at the Bates Motel before Marion Crane checked in, as we see in this modern-day prequel to the Alfred Hitchcock film Psycho. Freddie Highmore plays serial killer Norman Bates as a young man descending into madness, and Vera Farmiga plays his codependent (and ill-fated) mother.

Malcolm Bright (Tom Payne) is the FBI profiler who ID’d the serial killer known as The Surgeon (Michael Sheen) decades earlier. Now Malcolm to depend on that man, born Martin Whitley, to nail a copycat criminal. The twist? Martin is his father… and Malcolm is more than a little worried that murderous tendencies run in the family.

After Gossip Girl, Penn Badgley played another bookish, lovestruck young man — this one with a murderous streak. As his romantic obsessions take hold, Badgley’s Joe Goldberg kills off anyone who gets in his way, and his first-person narration takes us, willingly or not, inside the mind of a murderer.

Based on a book by Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn, this series stars Amy Adams as an alcoholic reporter investigating the deaths of two young girls in her Missouri hometown. The identity of that serial killer, however, isn’t revealed until a toothy twist in the miniseries’ final seconds.

There’s no whodunit question in this series — viewers know from the jump that it’s family man and grief counselor Paul Spector (Jamie Dornan) who’s the serial killer targeting young women. Instead, the narrative tension lies in how — or if — DSI Stella Gibson (Gillian Anderson) will bring Paul to justice.

A spy thriller with a romantic and even comedic bent, Killing Eve stars Jodie Comer as Villanelle, a psychopathic assassin, and Sandra Oh as Eve, the intelligence officer on her tail. As the two women circle each other, they develop a fascination-turned-obsession with one another.

One of many canceled-too-soon series, Mindhunter adapts the work of FBI criminal profiler John E. Douglas into a psychological thriller with the discomfiting style of director David Fincher. As the FBI launches its Behavioral Science Unit in the 1970s, agents consult imprisoned serial killers to catch ones still at large.

Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall) doesn’t kill the innocent; he kills other killers, which is the only way he knows how to satisfy the “dark passenger” of his murderous mind. That he also works for the Miami Metro Police Department means he has access to case files… and the means to keep one step ahead of his colleagues.

Time is a flat circle in the first season of this crime anthology, the story of which unspools across multiple timeframes. Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson play Louisiana State Police homicide detectives investigating and haunted by serial killings that go unsolved for nearly two decades.

In another adaptation on Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Lecter novels, Hugh Dancy plays a criminal profiler who visualizes serial killers’ crimes with unnerving clarity, and Mads Mikkelsen plays a psychiatrist (and cannibal gourmand) whose interest in Will goes from professional to personal. The drama is delicious; the visuals, stomach-turning.