Edge of Your Seat: the Best Thriller TV Series

The Fall names its killer in the first episode: the story is not who but the parallel lives of Belfast bereavement counsellor Paul Spector (Jamie Dornan) and DSI Stella Gibson (Gillian Anderson), the Metropolitan Police officer brought in to review a stalled investigation. Three series, BBC Two, 2013–2016.

The Missing is a BBC thriller in which James Nesbitt plays Tony Hughes, a father whose young son Oliver disappears during a family holiday in France. It runs two timelines at once - the search as it happened and the same search years later - so each episode reveals what the other timeline withheld. The second series drops the Hughes story entirely for a different disappearance in Germany, with Tcheky Karyo's detective Julien Baptiste the link between them.

A TNT procedural from Steven Bochco that spends an entire season on a single San Francisco homicide, following detectives Terry English and Hildy Mulligan from the crime scene through to the verdict. Taye Diggs and Kathleen Robertson carry it; the first season turns on a young tech mogul the police cannot quite pin down.

Motive inverts the crime drama: each episode opens by showing you both the killer and the victim, so the hour is spent on why rather than who. Detective Angie Flynn, played by Kristin Lehman, works the case while flashbacks fill in the motive. It ran four seasons on CTV between 2013 and 2016.

Shane Smith's team dispatches correspondents into conflict zones, criminal underworlds, and political crises, producing documentaries that read like dispatches from civilization's fault lines. The 7.6/10 rating captures the raw energy of episodes that follow arms dealers through 14-year-old conflicts or embed with cartel members during a 6-hour standoff. Unlike the crafted suspense of other entries, each segment draws from 2,000+ hours of raw footage, with one episode reducing a war to a 22-minute sequence of gunshots and whispered negotiations. The show's power lies in its unwillingness to flinch: it reports what it sees, making the thriller tag as much a warning as a genre label.

Under the Dome (CBS, 2013-2015) adapts Stephen King's novel: an invisible, impenetrable barrier drops over the town of Chester's Mill, sealing the residents in with dwindling supplies and each other. The first season, developed by Brian K. Vaughan, holds the siege premise tight; the two that follow expand the mythology and lose much of the audience along the way.

Bluestone 42 ran on BBC Three from 2013 to 2015, following a British bomb disposal detachment on tour in Afghanistan. Created by James Cary and Richard Hurst, it works as a barracks comedy that keeps stopping dead for the long walk up to a device, so the jokes and the danger occupy the same half hour.