6 Best Thriller TV Shows Released Since 2020

Thriller might be the single most oversaturated genre on television right now, and there’s a simple reason for that. It works. No other genre is built quite so perfectly for the streaming era, where every platform is fighting for your attention. A thriller has one job, and that’s to keep the hook in your mouth from the cold open to the credits, episode after episode, until you’ve somehow burned through an entire season in a weekend without meaning to.

The problem is that for every Ozark or Dark, there are plenty of forgettable shows that rely on twists that come out of nowhere and go miserably off the rails by the end. So, we looked back at every major thriller series released since 2020 and narrowed the list down to the very best. These are the thriller shows that truly deserve your time.

6

‘The Day of the Jackal’ (2024-)

Image via Peacock

This is a procedural cat-and-mouse story executed with such precision that it makes most modern action movies look lazy by comparison. Eddie Redmayne plays the Jackal, an assassin who travels the globe picking off targets in elaborate set pieces that genuinely rival big-budget blockbusters. The show spends a lot of time showing you every meticulous detail of the assassination process. You watch the Jackal physically become other people, prosthetics applied in real time, speech patterns rehearsed until they’re flawless. And unlike Mission: Impossible, where the mask usually means another actor is taking over, it is actually Redmayne underneath the disguise the entire time, and it’s mesmerizing to watch.

Similarly, you see him build his sniper rifle piece by piece, set up a fan to measure wind conditions, and fire trial shots just to gauge bullet drop before he ever takes the real one. It feels like a HITMAN game brought to life, but the show smartly refuses to let the Jackal stay a one-note killing machine. By the end of that first episode, you learn he’s also living a double life as a family man whose wife and daughter have no idea who he really is. As MI6 begins closing in, his two lives slowly start crashing into each other, and the stakes keep getting higher with every episode.

5

‘Severance’ (2022-)

Image via Apple TV

Severance feels like a top-tier Black Mirror episode turned into a full-length series, but it never runs out of ideas. The core hook is that Lumon Industries offers its employees a procedure that splits their consciousness in two. The “outie” lives a normal life and remembers nothing about work. The “innie” exists only inside Lumon’s windowless basement, with no memory of anything outside it and no idea who their outer half even is.

And that is where the show’s brilliant mystery begins. What exactly are they doing on the severed floor? Why are the numbers scary? What do the data file names mean? And seriously, what is going on with the baby goats? It’s become one of the most meticulously constructed mystery boxes on television, where every strange detail feels like it is hiding something much bigger. In many ways, it feels like Lost, but you actually get the answers, and it never feels like the writers are making things up as they go. Every reveal feels like a natural extension of what came before, and Ben Stiller has confirmed that he knows how the series ends, so when you sit down to watch this show, you know you’re in good hands.

4

‘Task’ (2025-)

Image via HBO

From Mare of Easttown creator Brad Ingelsby, Task follows Tom Brandis (Mark Ruffalo), an FBI agent who’s pulled off desk duty to lead a task force investigating a string of violent home invasions all done by the same crew. On the other side of the case is Robbie Prendergast (Tom Pelphrey), a sanitation worker moonlighting as the crew’s leader, robbing drug houses to dig his family out of debt. The series starts as a fairly standard cat-and-mouse story, but then one of Robbie’s robberies goes sideways, and the crew ends up taking custody of a kid who was never supposed to be part of any of this.

Everyone is so insanely likable in this show, on both sides of the law. You’re rooting for the task force because you genuinely love these characters, but you end up rooting just as hard for the people they’re chasing, and that cognitive dissonance is what gives the show its teeth. It also refuses to play it safe. Characters you love, even the ones you’re sure are protected by plot armor, can and do get killed off. That willingness to follow through on real consequences is what makes Task one of the best crime dramas to come out in years.

3

‘Squid Game’ (2021-2025)

Image via Netflix

Few shows in recent memory have had a premise this instantly gripping. Hundreds of desperate people compete in twisted versions of childhood games for a life-changing cash prize. But then the first game begins, Red Light, Green Light, and the players who move after the stop signal are suddenly gunned down. That is the moment you realize the real catch: losing means instant death, and there can only be one winner.

The sets look great. Everyone in the cast brings their A-game. The world-building around the games, the guards, and the mysterious VIPs pulling the strings gives the whole thing a sense of scale that goes far beyond a simple survival contest. And it’s so fascinating to see how the games bring out the absolute worst in human nature. People lie, betray each other, form alliances, and turn on their friends the moment survival is on the line. And you constantly find yourself wondering what you would do in the same situation. Would you trust someone? Would you betray them first? How would you actually play these games if losing meant dying?

2

‘Paradise’ (2025-)

Image via Hulu

Paradise opens as a fairly grounded murder mystery. Secret Service agent Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown) wakes up to find former President Cal Bradford (James Marsden) dead, and because he was the last person to see the President alive, he quickly becomes the prime suspect. Then, right as you think you’ve got the show figured out, it pulls off a genre-shifting plot twist that recontextualizes everything you just watched and turns Paradise into a very different kind of show.

If you’ve seen Parasite, you know how the story completely changes once the hidden basement comes into play. Paradise does something similar, but on a much, much grander scale. Honestly, it might just be the single greatest reveal television has pulled off in recent memory. Season 2 then doubles down on the ambition and expands into a full-blown, high-concept sci-fi epic involving supercomputers and alternate timelines, but it never once loses sight of the emotional human drama that made the first season work in the first place.

1

‘The Last of Us’ (2023-)

Image via HBO

Adapted from one of the greatest stories ever told in gaming, The Last of Us is easily the best zombie series ever made for television. The series takes place 20 years after a Cordyceps fungal outbreak wiped out most of civilization. Joel (Pedro Pascal), a hardened smuggler still carrying the grief of losing his daughter on the first night of the outbreak, is hired to escort 14-year-old Ellie (Bella Ramsey) across the country. What begins as a simple cargo job turns into a brutal, continent-spanning odyssey through a country where the infected are terrifying, but the surviving humans are often worse.

The show faithfully adapts the game’s biggest moments while expanding on storylines that were barely more than easter eggs in the original. The Bill (Nick Offerman) and Frank (Murray Bartlett) episode especially stands as one of the most beautiful and heartbreaking hours of television the genre has ever produced. If you’ve never played the games and somehow avoided the discourse around the sequel, be warned, because no one is safe here. The series keeps taking massive emotional swings and breaking your heart over and over again, and with Season 3 reportedly set to adapt some of the game’s most divisive material, it’s shaping up to be the biggest swing yet.