10 Shows Like Dexter for Fans Who Can’t Get Enough Crime 

Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) seems like an average 20-something New York man, prone to romanticizing women he hardly knows and to pretension in his reading habits. But Joe also has a cage in his basement, and a trail of bodies left behind him on his search for a soul mate. 

All four seasons of You are currently available on Netflix, and they follow Joe on his homicidal path from New York to suburban California—with lots of gruesome pit stops in between. Dexterfans will be compelled by how the series tunes into Joe’s interior voice and mines his early trauma to explain how he grew into a man who would do (or kill) anything for ‘love.’   

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Part serious crime drama, part farce, Search Party follows Dory (Alia Shawkat), an aimless woman who becomes preoccupied with the disappearance of an acquaintance, and ropes her boyfriend (John Reynolds) and eccentric friends into her obsession. 

Over the course of the four existing seasons, Dory goes to greater and greater lengths to protect her reputation, and becomes acquainted with cults, seedy PIs, and homicidal maniacs in the process.     

This campy Shonda Rhimes thriller is defined by Viola Davis’ powerful performance as Annalise Keating, a manipulative law school professor with a drinking problem, a cheating husband, and a criminal defense firm her students would die to intern with. 

Season 1 follows the interns as they struggle under Annalise’s mercurial managerial style while a gruesome campus murder puts pressure on the firm. If you like crime stories with morally gray characters, How to Get Away With Murder will quickly become addictive. 

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Serial killer Dennis Nilsen murdered 12 men and boys in 1970s/80s London. He was caught only after Nilsen and other residents of the Cranley Gardens flats made complaints about issues with pipes at the apartment complex—issues caused by Nilsen himself flushing bodies down the drain. Des, a three-part miniseries from ITV, stars David Tennant as Nilsen. The events of the series begin after the discovery of victim remains. Tennant’s Emmy Award-winning performance is compelling and nauseating, and The Guardian wrote that Des shows “the unrelentingly bleak reality of the monstrous narcissist.” If your interest in Dexter coincides with an interest in true crime, this dark drama will grip and disturb you. 

At first glance, Dare Me—a drama about high school cheerleaders—might seem like an odd choice for this list. But the prematurely-cancelled series is a surprisingly compelling psychosexual drama about an unscrupulous coach (Willa Fitzgerald) whose students would do anything for her. 

Just as bloody and brutal as actual competitive cheer can be, Dare Me’s tense first (and only) season marries sapphic suspense and small-town secrets for a show that’s wholly unique, but also shares some of Dexter’s genetic material. 

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This Irish drama flips between the perspectives of serial killer Peter Paul Spector (Jamie Dornan) and DSU Stella Gibson (Gillian Anderson). Paul is a grief counselor and family man by day. By night, he derives satisfaction from sneaking inside Belfast homes and murdering women. 

The series follows a cat-and-mouse game between Paul and Stella, a newcomer to Belfast who must contend with interdepartmental politics in addition to the predator terrifying the city.

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Sandra Oh stars as Eve Polastri, an MI6 agent who specializes in the psychology of female killers. When Eve is assigned to take down Villanelle (Jodie Comer), an unusually brutal female assassin, she develops a surprising obsession with her quarry. 

Eve and Villanelle stray from their respective missions as they push themselves closer and closer together. Comer’s charismatic and impeccably-dressed killer steals the show, but both she and Oh have received numerous awards for the series. The fourth and final season of Killing Eve is set to air in 2022.

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This gripping Netflix Original series follows the nascent days of Quantico’s FBI Behavioral Science Unit, and is based on the classic true crime memoir Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit by John Douglas and Mark Olshaker. 

The period drama follows agents Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff) and Bill Tench (Holt McCallany). Along with psychologist Wendy Carr (Anna Torv), they interview serial offenders such as Ed Kemper (Cameron Britton), David Berkowitz (Oliver Cooper), and Montie Rissell (Sam Strike).

If the psychology of serial killers and sadists is what fascinates you about Dexter, then you’ll quickly get addicted to this depiction of early forensic psychology and criminal profiling. 

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Hannibal brought us the iconic line, “is your social worker in that horse?”

This sometimes-ludicrous and always-morbid crime drama from Bryan Fuller follows the relationship between FBI wunderkind Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) and Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen). The latter’s respected professional facade hides his second life as a cannibal serial killer.

A forensic psychiatrist, Dr. Lecter is tasked with overseeing Will on a search for a Minnesotan serial killer. Along the way, the two men develop a toxic but powerful bond—and the audience may struggle not to root for the series’ genteel cannibal.

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Does Dexter: New Blood have you missing the Miami setting of the original show? Perhaps this iconic CBS series, which ran for 10 seasons, will provide some distraction. CSI: Miami follows a crime scene investigation unit led by Lieutenant Horatio Caine (David Caruso), whose penchant for sunglasses and one-liners has made him a meme. 

Miami is a character all its own in this procedural, which lacks some of the gravitas of Dexter, but makes up for it in outlandish deaths (including toilet drownings, death by ‘bong olympics,’ and one unfortunate person shot by a dog). Yeeeeah!