Boardwalk Empire

Series Similar to Boardwalk Empire

If you enjoyed Boardwalk Empire, these series share similar themes, tone, and quality. Each recommendation is scored on genre overlap, tonal match, and critical acclaim.

1. The Wire

   2002 · Drama, Crime · ended

   Recommended for similar Crime profile, highly rated (8.9), also on HBO.

   The first season of The Wire (2002) concentrated on the often-futile efforts of police to infiltrate a West Baltimore drug ring headed by Avon Barksdale and his lieutenant, Stringer Bell. In Seasons Two and Three, as the Barksdale investigation escalated, new storylines involving pressures on the working class and the city's political leadership were introduced. Season Four focused on the stories of several young boys in the public school system, struggling with problems at home and the lure of the corner - set against the rise of a new drug empire in West Baltimore and a new Mayor in City Hall. The fifth and final season of The Wire centers on the media's role in addressing - or failing to address - the fundamental political, economic and social realities depicted over the course of the series, while also resolving storylines of the numerous characters woven throughout the narrative arc of the show.

2. The Sopranos

   1999 · Drama, Crime · ended

   Recommended for similar Crime profile, highly rated (8.9), also on HBO.

   The Sopranos, writer-producer-director David Chase's extraordinary television series, is nominally an urban gangster drama, but its true impact strikes closer to home: Like 1999's other screen touchstone, American Beauty, the HBO series chronicles a dysfunctional, suburban American family in bold relief. And for protagonist Tony Soprano, there's the added complexity posed by heading twin families, his collegial mob clan and his own, nouveau riche brood.

3. Oz

   1997 · Drama, Crime · ended

   Recommended for similar Crime profile, highly rated (8.7), also on HBO.

   HBO's violent men-behind-bars drama is an addictive, testosterone-driven soap opera for guys. The eight episodes of the first season set the style for the show: a massive cast of a vivid characters on both sides of the bars, four or five stories unleashed at a breakneck pace and framed by angry, oddball introductions, and a soaring casualty rate. Created by Homicide producer Tom Fontana, this drama quickly earned its rightful reputation as the most brutal show on TV. It's simple chemistry: combine volatile ingredients in a confined space, shut tight, and shake.

4. The Penguin

   2024 · Drama, Crime · ended

   Recommended for similar Crime profile, highly rated (8), also on HBO.

   Starring Colin Farrell as Oz Cobb (aka The Penguin), the DC Studios series continues filmmaker Matt Reeves' The Batman epic crime saga that began with Warner Bros. Pictures' global blockbuster The Batman. Developed by showrunner Lauren LeFranc, the series centers on the character played by Farrell in the film.

5. The Shield

   2002 · Drama, Crime · ended

   Recommended for similar Crime profile, highly rated (8.6).

   Detective Vic Mackey is the leader of an elite Strike Team unit, a group of cops effective at eliminating crime but also operating under Vic's own set of rules. But his rules sometimes cross the fine line between legal and illegal. Now the precinct has a new captain who doesn't like Vic's tactics and wants to bust him off the force - even as the captain finds himself going to Vic for help whenever the going gets rough.

6. Narcos

   2015 · Drama, Action, Crime · ended

   Recommended for similar Crime profile, highly rated (8.4).

   Narcos chronicle the life and death of drug lord Pablo Escobar the ruthless boss of the Medellin Cartel and a known terrorist who was also a congressman, a family man and revered by the poor as a new Robin Hood.

7. Snowfall

   2017 · Drama, Crime · ended

   Recommended for similar Crime profile, highly rated (8).

   Los Angeles, 1983. A storm is coming and it's name is crack. Snowfall is a one-hour drama set against the infancy of the crack cocaine epidemic and it's ultimate radical impact on the culture as we know it. The story follows three characters on a violent collision course: Franklin Saint, young street entrepreneur on a quest for power; Gustavo "El Oso" Zapata, a Mexican wrestler caught up in a power struggle within a crime family; Teddy McDonald, a CIA operative running from a dark past who begins an off-book operation to fund the Nicaraguan Contras and Lucia Villanueva, the self-possessed daughter of a Mexican crime lord.

8. Breaking Bad

   2008 · Drama, Crime, Thriller · ended

   Recommended for similar Crime profile, highly rated (9.2).

   Breaking Bad follows protagonist Walter White, a chemistry teacher who lives in New Mexico with his wife and teenage son who has cerebral palsy. White is diagnosed with Stage III cancer and given a prognosis of two years left to live. With a new sense of fearlessness based on his medical prognosis, and a desire to secure his family's financial security, White chooses to enter a dangerous world of drugs and crime and ascends to power in this world. The series explores how a fatal diagnosis such as White's releases a typical man from the daily concerns and constraints of normal society and follows his transformation from mild family man to a kingpin of the drug trade.

9. Peaky Blinders

   2013 · Drama, Crime, History · returning

   Recommended for similar Crime profile, highly rated (8.5).

   An epic gangster drama set in the lawless streets of 1920s Birmingham.

10. MINDHUNTER

    2017 · Drama, Crime, Thriller · ended

    Recommended for similar Crime profile, highly rated (8.4).

    MINDHUNTER is based on the 1996 book Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit, by former special agent John Douglas and Mark Olshaker. For years, Douglas pursued some of the most notorious serial killers and rapists, developing profiling techniques to catch them. The book goes behind the scenes of some of his highest-profile cases, including the man who hunted prostitutes in Alaska, the Atlanta child murderer, and Seattle's Green River killer. To hone in his profiling methods Douglas interviewed and studied a skew of serial killers. Several book and TV characters have been based in part on him, including Jack Crawford in Thomas Harris' The Silence of the Lambs, Will Graham on Hannibal and Jason Gideon on Criminal Minds.