5 gritty British detective dramas on Showmax and Netflix

The action is always better when the cuffs are slammed on by a gritty detective whose policies and methods of getting the bad guy bend the law a little… and the good news is you can stream loads of gritty cop drama and action shows across streaming platforms in South Africa.

Holliday Grainger takes on the role of Detective Inspector Rachel Carey in this dark crime thriller. It’s her job to find and arrest Lance Corporal Shaun Emery (Callum Turner) after he’s accused – again – of being caught committing a serious crime on camera.

The problem is that while Emery proclaims his innocence and there is footage of him with his now-murdered barrister, DI Carey believes that he’s innocent and she starts her own off-books investigation into Emery’s claims that he has been framed (complete with video footage) for the second time. Her methods aren’t clean and what you’d call police protocol, and the evidence she discovers will shock you… because the exact same thing is happening in the real world right now.

Morven Christie plays Detective Constable Lisa Armstrong in Season 1 (there is a different story in S2 and a new lead character in S3) and she is backed into a corner with her new case. She’s part of a social worker team as Family Liaison Officer at the West Lancashire Police Service. After sex with a stranger in an alleyway during a bachelorette party, Lisa discovers that the man she hooked up with is at the centre of a missing-children’s case the very next day.

While the man is a person of interest as the police investigate his missing stepchildren, Lisa could simply provide an alibi for him – because she was with him when the kids disappeared. Instead, she keeps the info to herself and makes life difficult for herself and her hook-up. You want to see dirty underhanded policing? Wait till you see what Lisa does when the pressure starts mounting…

Matt Compston takes on a world of corrupt cops as Detective Sergeant Steve Arnott. After refusing to lie about one of his team members “accidentally” shooting a suspect, he is transferred to AC-12 (Anti-Corruption Unit 12) and told to investigate corruption in the police force. “Where to start” isn’t his biggest question – he needs to first make sure that he is safe from retribution. Because anyone he starts investigating is going to want him dead and out the way.

There’s a bigger problem, though – Steve’s work isn’t just involving a couple of lowly charge officers and detectives out on the street: the corruption in the police force goes all the way up the food chain to the very top. How is he going to expose that the police chief is as crooked as the letter Z?

Detective Chief Inspector Tom Mathias (Richard Harrington) has his work cut out for him in this Welsh noir crime thriller. While Tom lives and works in a tiny village-sized community, he’s dealing with some impossibly huge crimes – everything from missing World War veterans who’re hiding secrets from the conflict, to drug dealers who’re using the region as a base for their multi-million-pound operations that extend well into Europe.

Thankfully Tom has seen it all before and that experience left him not only hardened to serious crimes, but also experienced enough to know when he should follow police procedure and when it’s “okay” to bend the rules a little…

Made by the same team from gritty Nordic series The Bridge, this show sees ex-London detective Marcella Backland (Anna Friel) forced onto the back foot in her personal life when her husband walks out on her. That sends her into a crisis that can only be solved one way: by diving headfirst into police work and focusing her energy there. But she’s retired, so what now? There are three murder cases that Marcella was never able to solve during her career, no matter how hard she tried.

Now, with free time and not being tied down by a husband (even though she loved him dearly), the ex-cop can get on with her rogue investigation to find the serial killer she believes was to blame. And since it’s an off-the-books investigation, it’s not like Marcella needs to obey the rules of police work – she can and does do exactly what she pleases to get her guy. And there are more unsolved cases in Seasons 2 and 3…