Below, the Newfoundland squid-centric gory thriller, hit Netflix earlier this month and I wanted to love it more than I did. Josh Hartnett and Mackenzie Davis star in it and the limited series sets its characters in a remote fishing community. It felt like a premise that had everything going for it, but was limited in its scary and gory moments, leaving its more dialogue-heavy sequences lacking substance. While it might have underwhelmed, it gets the TV nerd’s mind thinking about what a truly bankable thriller series on streamers to binge in a single weekend.
The platform has become known for that specific type of media consumption: a series that can be made available in its entirety in one day, a more modern method that some viewers prefer to the slower, more linear approach of an episode a week. While Netflix has been known to miss badly at times, it has cultivated one of the stronger libraries of serialized thriller content out there right now. Some of its most popular projects arrived with little excitement and built their audiences slowly through word of mouth and algorithmic resurfacing, a key strength of Netflix’s catalog.
A good bingeable thriller trusts its audience to piece together the story quickly enough to keep up with its often tense and immediate pacing. It does not over-explain but fosters its suspense through character work and atmosphere. The best of these series reward the commitment you’ve made by the time the finale has arrived, an especially key aspect that many seem to fall flat on.
5
‘The Gentlemen’ (2024-Present)
Image via Netflix
Guy Ritchie bringing his brand of stylized British crime comedy to television felt like either a great idea or a disaster waiting to happen. It really is dependent on how you feel about his filmography that’s been received as quite a mixed bag from the critics. However, The Gentlemen lands decisively in the former category. Theo James anchors the series as Eddie Horniman, an aristocrat who inherits his family estate and the full cannabis empire that lurks in the shadows of its public imagery. Ritchie builds an ensemble cast around James featuring the likes of Kaya Scodelario, Daniel Ings and Giancarlo Esposito, and utilizes his classic overlapping dialogue and verbal wit to support the stakes behind the more action and violence-dominated sequences.
The Gentlemen consists of eight episode seasons that move at a pace that quickly has you forgetting what time it is. Ritchie’s ability to keep the audience off balance at all times here is what makes the element of the unknown so entertaining and engaging. Like some of his most beloved films including The Gentlemen (2019), this show spawns a sense of true comedic timing between its characters, weaved seamlessly into the darker and heavier moments riddling the sprawling English Country Estate.
4
‘Dept. Q.’ (2025-Present)
Image via Netflix
This Danish crime procedural starring Matthew Goode adapts Jussi Adler-Olsen’s novels with a grimness and a formal discipline that few Scandinavian-English language productions have seemed to convincingly replicate. The cold case unit at its center gives the show a structural elegance, a group of people assigned to cases everyone else has given up on. It is a specific kind of premise of institutional exhaustion and decay that surrounds them and gives the more straightforward aspects a sense of realism and edge.
The performances in <em>Dept. Q</em> keep the emotional tension from feeling melodramatic, something that can often kill the background work on a crime show like this that builds it out in such a thorough and deliberate manner. But what separates the show from comparable material is its dedication to each victim at the center of the cases. The team sees each murder or crime beyond the cold case being a puzzle to solve but as a story about people who deserved better than what the system had provided. It is dark and patient and occasionally brutal, but leaves a layer of institutional failure underneath the mystery that will have many viewers left thinking about the ramifications of such ineptness.
3
‘Fool Me Once’ (2024)
Six episodes, a clean ending, and one of the more surprising mystery constructions Netflix has to offer. Harlan Coben‘s adaptation for the screen follows Maya Stern, a former soldier who spots her recently murdered husband alive in footage from a nanny cam. The show builds outward from that singular image and the performance of its lead, Michelle Keegan, who doesn’t fall for the kind of tortured protagonist clichés this source material easily could have invited.
The twists in this one arrive from directions that feel inevitable in retrospect but are pretty shocking in the moment, something that Coben’s stories have consistently proven to accomplish. Fool Me Once is the perfect show to recommend to someone claiming to not be into thriller TV because it doesn’t feel like some kind of genre exercise. Its structure feeds off a specific person being in this impossible situation and lets the drama work off that exact contradiction.
2
‘Bodyguard’ (2018)
Jed Mercurio’s political thriller gaveRichard Madden the role that definitively separated him from hisGame of Thrones associations and established him as one of the more compelling dramatic actors working in British television. David Budd is a war veteran assigned to protect the Home Secretary, which, by way of order, focuses on central relationship series between Budd andKeeley Hawes ‘ Julia Montague with tension operates on multiple registers: political, personal and simply dangerous. Budd has significant PTSD and finds Montague’s political agenda quite morally troubling yet that contradiction only adds suspense thrill action.
Mercurio knows how to construct sequence keeps you physically tense your seatBodyguard has several across six episodes show can afford be generous with pacing relationship alone holding most viewers attention first few chapters however back half Bodyguard somethe most tense television made in2010s with sequences designed make heart rate go up then keep going much longer than you’d expect.
1
‘Adolescence’ (2025)
There is not more formally ambitious piece television on Netflix right nowStephen Graham andJack Thorne four episode limited series about thirteen year old boy arrested murder classmate singular unbroken take structural choice removes safety net editing leaves intimacy immediacy can’t replicated post forces every performance present very moment since nowhere cut away from.
Stephen Graham extraordinary father role portrait man trying understand something beyond fathomability having conception child shattered real timeAdolescence anchored by Graham’s relationship son Jamie played Owen Cooper who never provides easy explanations what happened why creative decision worth championing keeps entire piece put boxmessage tied social media masculinity or any other frameworks press naturally reached upon premiere.
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