The Serpent

Series Similar to The Serpent

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

1. Tokyo Vice

   2022 · Drama, Crime · ended

   Recommended for similar Crime profile.

   Loosely inspired by American journalist Jake Adelstein's non-fiction first-hand account of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police beat, the crime drama series, filmed on location in Tokyo, captures Adelstein's daily descent into the neon-soaked underbelly of Tokyo in the late ‘90s, where nothing and no one is truly what or who they seem.

2. Black Bird

   2022 · Drama, Crime, Thriller · ended

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

   Inspired by actual events, when high school football hero, decorated policeman's son and convicted drug dealer Jimmy Keene is sentenced to 10 years in a minimum security prison, he is given the choice of a lifetime — enter a maximum-security prison for the criminally insane and befriend suspected serial killer Larry Hall, or stay where he is and serve his full sentence with no possibility of parole. Keene quickly realizes his only way out is to elicit a confession and find out where the bodies of several young girls are buried before Hall's appeal goes through. But is this suspected killer telling the truth? Or is it just another tale from a serial liar? 

3. Escape at Dannemora

   2018 · Drama, Crime · ended

   Recommended for similar Crime profile.

   Escape at Dannemora is based on the stranger-than-fiction prison break in upstate New York in the summer of 2015 which spawned a statewide manhunt for two convicted murderers, aided in their escape by a married female prison employee who carried on months-long affairs with both men.

4. Ripley

   2024 · Drama, Crime, Thriller · ended

   Recommended for similar Crime profile.

   Ripley follows Tom Ripley, a grifter scraping by in early 1960s New York, who is hired by a wealthy man to try to convince his vagabond son, Dickie Greenleaf, who is living a comfortable, trust-funded ex-pat life in Italy, to return home. Tom's acceptance of the job is the first step into a complex life of deceit, fraud and murder.

5. 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.

6. The Widower

   2014 · Drama, Crime, Thriller · ended

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

   The Widower is a three-part drama from ITV Studios based on the crimes of convicted murderer, Malcolm Webster, played by Reece Shearsmith (Psychoville, The League of Gentlemen, A Field in England).The Widower tells how, over a 13 year period Malcolm Webster set about poisoning and murdering his first wife, attempting to do the same to his second wife and moving on to a further scheme to deceive his third fiancée.

7. Des

   2020 · Drama, Crime, Thriller · ended

   Recommended for similar Crime profile.

   Des is based on material from the book Killing for Company by Brian Masters, which focuses on one of the most infamous cases in UK criminal history, that of serial killer Dennis Nilsen. Told through the prism of three men—Dennis Nilsen, Detective Chief Inspector Peter Jay and biographer Brian Masters—the series exploring the personal and professional consequences of coming into contact with a man like Nilsen.

8. The Gold

   2023 · Drama, Crime · ended

   Recommended for similar Crime profile, hidden gem, also on BBC iPlayer.

   The Gold opens with the events of November 26th 1983, when six armed men broke into the Brink's-Mat security depot near London's Heathrow Airport, and inadvertently stumbled across gold bullion worth £26m. What started as ‘a typical Old Kent Road armed robbery' according to detectives at the time, became a seminal event in British criminal history, remarkable not only for the scale of the theft, at the time the biggest in world history, but for its wider legacy.

9. The Salisbury Poisonings

   2020 · Drama, Crime · ended

   Recommended for similar Crime profile, also on BBC iPlayer.

   The Salisbury Poisonings focuses on the impact the 2018 Novichok poisonings had on the local community. The drama tells the remarkable story of how ordinary people and public services reacted to a crisis on their doorstep, displaying extraordinary heroism as their city became the focus of an unprecedented national emergency. Salisbury captures the bravery, resilience and, in some cases, personal tragedy of the unsuspecting locals, who faced a situation of unimaginable horror so close to home.

10. Gangland Undercover

    2015 · Drama, Crime · ended

    Recommended for similar Crime profile, highly rated (8.1), hidden gem.

    The only man brave enough to sneak into three outlaw biker gangs and live to tell the tale, Charles Falco, author of "Vagos, Mongols and Outlaws", goes from convict to infiltrator as he secretly documents the Vagos' illegal activities and ultimately brings them to justice. With the real Charles Falco starting each episode in a silhouetted interview, his story is brought to life in this fact-based docudrama series that sees Falco work as an informant for the Feds on a covert mission inside the dangerous Vagos' world of violence, murder and drug trafficking. Having climbed the gang's ranks while facilitating 62 arrests, Charles Falco exposes how he crippled the criminal enterprise from the core of the biker underworld in this mind-blowing true story, Gangland Undercover.