The winter of 2024 is fully upon us, and January brings a bumper crop of the figures to which we turn for solace and comfort during the shortest days of the year: detectives. It is a time for contemplating the cruel brevity of human existence and giving oneself over to the blessed narrative clarity of an unsolved mystery and the person who promises to find answers. The trouble, though, is that this January offers such a bounty of sleuths and gumshoes it’s hard to know which to choose. So we offer this guide to January’s detective TV, matching the qualities you most want in a detective with the show that best fits your needs.
Detectives should investigate crimes which provide a serious reflection of society’s failings. They should spend a lot of time doing paperwork. They should also be British.
You’re looking for Criminal Record (beginning January 10), an Apple TV+ series starring Peter Capaldi and Cush Jumbo as detectives at odds with each other. One is protecting the dark secrets within London’s law-enforcement institutions; the other is investigating them. You can tell things are going to get rocky early in the first episode, when Capaldi’s character offers Jumbo’s a cup of tea … and she declines. Sure, there’s violence, but there’s also racism, corruption, bias, and more. If you prefer your police dramas to uncover grim social schisms, this is the show for you.
Crime fiction should be spoooooky. The world-weary older detective should keep telling her subordinate he’s not asking the right questions. All detectives should wear enormous fur-trimmed parkas. When possible, time should be a flat circle.
True Detective: Night Country (HBO, beginning January 14) is the best the show’s been since its first season, and its Arctic Alaska setting has a lot to do with why. The season leans on the strained relationship between the community’s Indigenous residents and the white newcomers exploiting the area’s vast oil reserves, but that Arctic-noir vein is accompanied by plenty of True Detective’s early reliance on the gothic uncanny. The spiral is back. There’s a very creepy situation involving oranges. Something mysterious and disembodied seems to have awakened in the dark! Better watch your backs, Detectives Jodie Foster and Kali Reis.
Detectives should be fun! They should deliver aphoristic advice like “Pay attention — details matter.†They should investigate closed-door murders. They should also have undetermined accents that swing wildly between South African and … some part of New York City?
Hulu’s Death and Other Details (beginning January 16) stars Mandy Patinkin as “the world’s greatest detective,†whose star has now fallen. He’s on a boat full of wealthy people and trying to make up for his past mistakes, and he’s delivering voice-over lines like “Illusions are everywhere†and “What is real is precious and rare.†His name is Rufus Cotesworth, and his world is full of bright colors and people who gasp showily whenever a new twist is revealed.
Detectives should be grizzled, sad-sack European dudes who got fired from their last job because of a traumatic event. They should investigate grisly, dramatic murders. They should have dysfunctional relationships with women.
The show you’re looking for is Detective Forst (January 11), a Polish Netflix series that glides through every single dreary detective trope with the ease and blithe precision of a Mario Kart speedrun vlogger. By minute three, the show’s deployed a bloody naked guy in a ball gag, a woman’s bare breast, an establishing shot of a frigid mountain, and a Fleetwood Mac needle drop. By minute 20, the body count has risen to two, Forst has shaken a bottle of codeine into a breath-mints box, the coroner has eaten pizza while examining corpses, and a nosy lady reporter has already implied she knows more than the cops do. By the time mysterious coins are found in the victims’ mouths, you’ll wonder if this was written with a color-by-numbers crime-fiction guide, but you’ll also wonder if you have a nice adult coloring book to futz around with as you continue watching.
The main point-of-view character should not be the detective. When the detective does show up, he should be a by-the-book rule follower forced to confront the fact that justice and legality are not the same thing. Also, everyone should be Irish. And funny, but in a sad way.
Welcome to The Woman in the Wall on Paramount+/Showtime (January 19/21). A fictional crime drama based on the real-life tragedy of the Magdalene laundries, this is another entry in the “definitely not fun†list of January crime fiction. It has a more wry sense of humor than the typical sad-dude detective story, though, and stars Ruth Wilson as a survivor of the laundries whose memory is unreliable and who — whoops — finds a dead woman in her house but doesn’t know how she got there. Maybe Ruth Wilson did it; maybe we live in a morally gray world where the nice detective (Daryl McCormack) investigating the death of a local priest should consider the entire context before deciding who’s most at fault. Â
The ideal detective is a parody of detective tropes. He is also animated and voiced by Jon Hamm.
FOX’s Grimsburg (beginning January 7), which streams the next day on Hulu, is a nonsensical mishmash of every hoary noir trope packaged into a half-hour animated comedy and supplemented by a cyborg sidekick. Detective Marvin Flute is an alcoholic absentee father, doesn’t play by the rules, has a beer gut and a bad shave, misses his ex-wife, and solves crimes via semi-Surrealist dream sequences. The only things that make sense in his life are finding answers and providing opportunities for Jon Hamm to growl into a microphone.
Detectives should be American icons who wear trench coats and care about children and have relocated to the south of France only to discover that murder still exists in the south of France.
The show you want is Monsieur Spade (beginning January 14), an AMC series starring Clive Owen as Dashiell Hammett’s famous noir character Sam Spade. He’s in France, he’s trying to quit smoking, and his famous nonchalance is being tested by his need to care for helpless children at the mercy of forces beyond their understanding. He’s not particularly interested in rushing around, so you should be willing to extend Monsieur Spade some patience while he gets this crime party going.
Detectives should be American icons who wear trench coats and care about children and work with the district attorneys to prosecute the offenders; these are their stories DUN DUN.
After a strike hiatus, Law and Order and Law and Order: SVU are both back this month (January 18). Best of luck to Olivia Benson in her perpetual struggle to bring down rapists and pedophiles, find new squad members who will be worthy of her, and withstand the onslaught of ever-increasing shipper pressures.