If you love a good crime story but want your case-of-the-week serials punched up with more psychological danger and emotional depth, then you've gotta go for a crime thriller show. And BritBox — the streaming service created by the BBC and ITV, designed specifically for fans of British television — is packed with them, from harrowing serial killer stories to tense cat-and-mouse mysteries.
But the sheer size of that streaming library makes it hard to track down a high-quality show, even when sorting by a single genre like crime thriller. So Tom's Guide is here to help. We've done the dirty work for you and narrowed your choices down to three of the best crime thriller shows streaming now on BritBox. Consider your next weekend binge sorted!
'Happy Valley'
He'll next be seen in the new season of "House of the Dragon" as Lord Ormund Hightower, but a decade ago, James Norton was better known for playing bleach-blonde criminal Tommy Lee Royce in "Happy Valley," a hard-hitting thriller that originally aired for three seasons on BBC One from April 2014 to January 2023.
With serial rapist, drug offender and eventual murderer Royce as the main antagonist, the Sally Wainwright-created drama follows the police career of no-nonsense police sergeant Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire), whose life and work are upended when Royce — whom she blames for her own daughter's death years earlier — is released from prison.
Stream "Happy Valley" on BritBox now
'Irvine Welsh's Crime'
In this intense adaptation of Irvine Welsh's 2008 novel of the same name, Dougray Scott stars in an Emmy- and BAFTA-winning role as Ray Lennox, a detective in the Edinburgh police force who is forced to balance battling his own personal demons (including drug addiction and childhood trauma) with hunting a serial killer in gritty, urban Scotland.
Anita Singh in The Daily Telegraph praised Scott's "incendiary" lead performance ("Scott delivers every line with a burning intensity yet manages at the same time to convey the character’s emotional fragility, and the toll that his job is taking," she wrote), as well as the "great" supporting cast, which includes Joanna Vanderham, Jamie Sives, Michael Abubakar, Gordon Kennedy, Angela Griffin and Ken Stott, among others.
Stream "Crime" on BritBox now
'River'
In this 2015 British procedural, two-time Golden Globe winner Stellan Skarsgård stars as Detective Inspector John River, a brilliant but brooding Swedish-born police officer who is traumatized by visions of his recently murdered work partner, Detective Sergeant Jackie "Stevie" Stevenson (Nicola Walker). The titular investigator is stuck psychologically between the living and the dead, interacting with Stevie's "ghost" as he works to solve her case.
Across six hourlong episodes, the gripping thriller becomes "more than just crime drama," wrote Sam Wollaston in The Guardian: "It's about personal tragedy, demons; it's a study of loss and grief (which it shares with the greatest Nordic noir of them all: the first series of 'The Killing'). It's also a study of that — killing — and why people do it."
Stream "Crime" on BritBox now
More from Tom's Guide
- Critics and audiences do not agree about Denzel's 26-year-old serial killer crime thriller movie — so I had to stream it for myself
- Netflix's new crime thriller show is the streaming service's answer to 'Slow Horses' — and I literally couldn't stop watching
- 3 new to Prime Video thriller movies to stream this week — one of them is a classic masterpiece ranked among the best films ever made
