READ: The Killing Times Top 20 Crime Dramas Of The Year: Part Three, 10-6. PDF, EPUB online free reviews.

Now we get to the big boys. After two days and 10 shows, we can finally reveal the Top 10 Crime Dramas of the year. We’re now starting to get to the shows that, in our opinion, really displayed excellence. Don’t worry, you’ll get a chance to vote for your own once we’ve announced the Top Crime Drama Of The Year on Saturday, but until then…

10. Ozark (Netflix)
Like many Netflix hits this year, this 10-part series crept up on us. So much so, we watched it but didn’t have time to review it. However, we can redress a little bit here – Ozark was a hugely competent, engrossing story that saw middle-class money man Marty Byrde (Jason Bateman, who’s never been better) given an ultimatum after all his associates were murdered by their Mexican crimelord boss – take your family, get out of town and make me a fortune in the remote Ozark mountains… or be slaughtered. The comparisons with Breaking Bad were a bit on the lazy side, but Ozark was, essentially, a family drama with whip-smart dialogue, achingly beautiful landscapes and a tension that simmered like chilli on a stove all the way through.

9. Dark (Netflix)
Since our recent review of this German-language show it has been recommissioned for a second season, so there’s no better time to enter its weird and wonderful world set across three time periods. Take a pinch of Lost, Jordskott and Stranger Things then mix with the traditional Scandi Noir formula and you have an inkling of what this show offered. Beyond the core premise, the real appeal of the show was in its huge cast of characters, straight out of the Twin Peaks school of acting and each as mesmerising as the last. Every portion of this show was a disembodied clue to another mystery elsewhere – often in another era – and it definitely demanded your full attention as you attempted to piece together the puzzle of what happened to Mikkel Nielsen, the child supposedly lost in the woods. The show wasn’t afraid to keep things unexplained, ensuring you constantly sensed anything could happen. Judging by the huge global audience this show enjoyed we weren’t alone in loving its twisting time narrative and can’t wait to see what happens next.
Andy D

For our review of Dark, go here

8. Fargo (Channel 4)
Fargo has always been a fantastic – and unpredictable – watch, and this year was no different. For Noah Hawley’s next trick, he cast Ewan McGregor in two parts – brothers Emmitt and Ray Stussy. If the placing of two warring brothers at its centre had the whiff of fairytale about it, series three of Fargo evolved into as much of a Prokofievian yarn as we’ve ever seen. And it was a delight. Strangely, the tale of the Stussy brothers was the least interesting element in the series, and instead a cast of fantastic supporting characters was what made this third run occasionally dazzling – from Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s fantastic avenging angel, Nikki Swango, and Carrie Coon’s quietly confident Gloria Burgle, to David Thewlis’s terrifying, almost supernatural criminal mastermind, VM Varga. It was uneven in places, but some of the storytelling was so bold and inventive (what kind of series gives one of its supporting characters her own stand-alone episode mid-series, set in a completely different location?) it often took your breath away. When Fargo is good, there’s still nothing quite like it on television.

For all our news and reviews of Fargo, go here

7. Unforgotten (ITV)
In a British TV landscape that is saturated with police procedurals, how many of them could you say really had properly interesting female leads? Sadly, in 2017 most were a letdown (we’re looking at you, Paula, Prime Suspect 1973 and Bancroft, although Sarah Parish played her best hand in a belly-flopping storyline that didn’t deserve her). So it says much for the crafting of Unforgotten – Chris Lang’s writing, Andy Wilson’s direction and the sublime onscreen chemistry of Nicola Walker (DCI Cassie Stuart) and Sanjeev Bhaskar (DI Sunny Khan) – that we wanted to spend more quality time with these characters. Rising above Difficult Second Album Syndrome, this Strangers-On-A-Train-style cold case about four disparate victims collaborating in the killing of a paedophile rapist again refused to follow the inferior boot-in-the-door, good vs evil detective story arc, never sacrificing characterisation to shock tactics. Back in pre-austerity policing days, when news reporters and cops mixed more often and (yes) sometimes actually became mates, we had heard of detectives who described most of those they nicked as decent people who had “just made a mistake” at a pivotal moment in their lives (one had even made someone he’d sent to prison a godparent to his child). Cassie and Sunny shared this understanding of human frailty (as must their counterparts in the real world), which made them up there with the most realistic cops on the box. We look forward to series three.
Deborah Shrewsbury

For all our Unforgotten news and reviews, go here

6. I Know Who You Are (BBC Four)
Where do you start with this hyperkinetic Spanish series? At the time we called it ‘Shakespeare on amphetamines’, because its breathless, relentless pace and presentation of some of the most loathsome characters crime drama has ever seen featured (almost) incest, attempted sororicide, betrayal, manipulation, murder and the kind of father/mother-and-son relationships Freud would have had a field day with. Every single character – from prosecutor Marta Hess to the investigative lawyer Eva Durán – had axes to grind, politics to play and people to bring down. The procedural thread running through it concerned successful lawyer and university lecturer Juan Élias (a superb Francesc Garrido), who was found wondering disorientated after a car crash. Having lost his memory, he was told that the passenger in his car – his niece Ana Saura – was now missing, presumed dead. Élias was the main suspect, but the questions creator Pau Freixas initially posed were: was he feigning amnesia, and was Ana dead or alive? For many procedurals, these questions would be enough. Not I Know Who You Are. As the layers peeled back, pre-crash Élias was revealed to be a very bad man indeed, and, along with his deliciously Machiavellian wife, Alicia (Blanca Portillo on astonishing form), had formed the kind of power couple you did not want to mess with. Yes it was flawed and yes it went on for far too long, but I Know Who You Are was this year’s best crime drama rollercoaster ride; the kind of thrill-a-minute experience that Line Of Duty should have been.