Shows Like
15 Shows Like Breaking Bad — Antihero Crime Dramas
Finished Breaking Bad and need the same feeling? These shows deliver moral decay, slow-burn tension, and protagonists you shouldn't root for but absolutely do.
15 FILMS·April 2026·By MoviesPack
Section 1
The Breaking Bad Formula
Breaking Bad invented a new television genre: **the protagonist's gradual moral collapse, told in real time, with you complicit in it**. You watch Walter White become Heisenberg and realize, somewhere around Season 3, that you've been cheering for a monster. The best shows in this vein don't just show you crime — they make you understand the logic that gets people there, step by inexorable step. [Use our tool: Shows Like Breaking Bad](/shows/similar/breaking-bad) — algorithmically matched
Section 2
The Closest Matches
01
Better Call Saul
2015–2022
★9.0IMDb
Jimmy McGill is a scrappy small-time lawyer trying to go legitimate, working in the mailroom of his brother's prestigious firm and defending clients his brother's partners would never touch. Over six seasons he becomes Saul Goodman — Walter White's sleazy fixer. The transformation is so gradual, so completely motivated, that you believe every step. Bob Odenkirk delivers a performance of devastating subtlety. The final season is the best television of the 2020s.
Why it matters
Same creative team, same world, slower-burn examination of the same question. Where Walter's descent is fueled by ego, Jimmy's is fueled by love — which makes it more heartbreaking. Non-negotiable.
02
Ozark
2017–2022
★8.4IMDb
A Chicago financial advisor gets caught skimming from a drug cartel's money-laundering operation. Instead of being killed, he negotiates a deal: move to the Ozarks and launder $8 million in three months, or die. He moves the family without fully explaining why. Four seasons of escalating stakes, each mistake requiring a larger crime to cover it, with Laura Linney as his wife Wendy slowly becoming the more frightening of the two.
Why it matters
The constant sense that one mistake ends everything, and the way ordinary family life becomes grotesque when built on criminal infrastructure.
03
The Wire
2002–2008
★9.3IMDb
Baltimore drug dealers try to run a corner. Police try to build a case against them. Politicians manage the statistics. Journalists cover the story the statistics are hiding. School kids get recruited. Each season zooms out to a new institution, showing how all of them — the drug trade, the police, city government, the docks, the schools, the press — are broken in interlocking ways that produce and perpetuate everything they claim to fight.
Why it matters
The most truthful crime drama ever made. If Breaking Bad showed you a man choosing evil, The Wire shows you the world that makes that choice logical.
04
Fargo
2014–present
★8.9IMDb
Each season is a new story in a new decade: a meek insurance salesman meets a hitman and decides he wants to be someone different. A small-town criminal operation gets taken over by a Kansas City syndicate. A 1950s parking lot attendant stumbles into something enormous. Inspired by the Coen Brothers film — the same blend of Midwestern normalcy and sudden, absurd violence. Season 1 is the best, though every season has at least one villain who'll stay with you.
Why it matters
Same moral rot beneath Midwestern niceness, same inevitability once the first wrong choice is made.
05
Narcos
2015–2017
★8.8IMDb
Pablo Escobar turns a cocaine smuggling operation into a cartel that controls Colombia's government, terrorizes its cities, and makes him the wealthiest criminal in history. Two DEA agents are sent to stop him and spend years finding out how little that means. Wagner Moura's Escobar is simultaneously charming, delusional, and monstrous. The DEA agents chasing him are nearly as morally compromised. Narcos: Mexico extends the story with equal quality.
Why it matters
The drug trade from the other end of the telescope — not a man building an empire but the full scale of what that empire looks like once built.
Section 3
The Slow-Burn Crime Dramas
06
Peaky Blinders
2013–2022
★8.8IMDb
Tommy Shelby comes back from the World War I trenches with a head full of horror and a plan to turn his family's Birmingham street gang into a legitimate empire — by whatever means necessary. Six seasons of him outmaneuvering everyone from local rivals to the IRA to the fascist political movement taking hold across Europe. Cillian Murphy plays Tommy as a man who survived the trenches by becoming something harder than human. The anachronistic soundtrack and stylized violence are distinctive and entirely earned.
07
Succession
2018–2023
★8.9IMDb
Logan Roy is the seventy-something patriarch of a global media empire and can't decide if he wants to hand it over or just keep dangling the possibility until his children destroy each other competing for it. His four children — none of them remotely qualified to run it — spend four seasons backstabbing, humiliating, and betraying each other in increasingly spectacular ways. The show makes you watch people who are genuinely terrible with complete fascination. What Breaking Bad does with meth, Succession does with inheritance.
08
Mindhunter
2017–2019
★8.6IMDb
Two FBI agents have an idea: what if you interviewed the serial killers already in prison to understand how they think, then used that knowledge to catch new ones? In the late 1970s, this is radical. The agency thinks it's dangerous. Their boss gives them just enough rope. The most unsettling thing about the show isn't the killers — it's watching the younger agent slowly absorb what he studies. Fincher-produced and stylistically cold throughout.
Section 4
The Moral Descent Shows
09
Bloodline
2015–2017
★8.1IMDb
The Rayburn family runs a respected inn in the Florida Keys. When the black sheep brother Danny comes home, old resentments and buried secrets start coming up. The show tells you in the first episode what happens at the end of the season — and then spends twelve episodes making you understand how these decent, loving people arrived there. Ben Mendelsohn is exceptional as Danny. The later seasons couldn't sustain the premise, but Season 1 alone is worth it.
10
Rectify
2013–2016
★8.7IMDb
Daniel Holden spent nineteen years on Georgia's death row for the rape and murder of his teenage girlfriend. New DNA evidence gets him out — but doesn't exonerate him. He returns to his small town where his family wants to protect him, the victim's family wants him punished, and everyone wants to know if he actually did it. Aden Young's performance is one of the quietest, most devastating things in television. If you want Breaking Bad's moral complexity without the adrenaline, this is it.
11
The Americans
2013–2018
★8.4IMDb
Philip and Elizabeth Jennings are a perfectly normal suburban couple in 1980s Washington DC — travel agent, two kids, nice house. They're also deep-cover Soviet intelligence operatives who seduce assets, run informants, and occasionally kill people. Their American-born children have no idea. Their FBI neighbor across the street is starting to suspect something. Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys make you care deeply about people doing genuinely terrible things in service of an ideology you don't share — which is exactly what Breaking Bad does.
Section 5
The Tension-Driven Crime Shows
12
Justified
2010–2015
★8.6IMDb
Raylan Givens is a US Marshal who shoots people in a technically justified way and keeps getting transferred closer to home as a result. He ends up back in rural Kentucky, facing off against Boyd Crowder — his childhood friend, now a criminal with political ambitions and a bible verse for every occasion. Timothy Olyphant and Walton Goggins have the best antagonist chemistry in television. Quick, funny, and never lets you forget it can turn violent in an instant.
13
Yellowstone
2018–present
★8.7IMDb
John Dutton owns the largest ranch in America and will do anything — anything — to keep it from developers, politicians, and his own children's worst instincts. The ranch borders a Native American reservation and a national park, which means every faction wants a piece of it. Five seasons of brutal moral compromise: everyone has done something unforgivable, everyone has a reason, and the show doesn't let anyone off the hook for either.
14
City on a Hill
2019–2022
★7.5IMDb
It's 1990s Boston and the FBI is as corrupt as the criminals it's supposed to be catching. A sleazy veteran agent and an idealistic new DA form an unlikely partnership to take down a gang of armored car robbers — using methods that are barely more legal than the crimes they're fighting. Kevin Bacon in full sleaze mode. A show about how institutions rot from within and keep operating anyway.
15
Barry
2018–2023
★8.4IMDb
Barry Berkman is a depressed hitman from Cleveland who follows a target to a Los Angeles acting class, falls in love with the idea of becoming someone else, and tries to quit the killing business. The problem is that the killing business doesn't let people quit, and Barry's attempts to maintain a normal life keep colliding with consequences he thought he'd left behind. Bill Hader's dark comedy gets progressively darker until Season 4 becomes something close to a horror show about how violence deforms everyone it touches. The tonal control is extraordinary — genuinely funny until it absolutely isn't.
Section 6
Quick Match Guide
| Want... | Watch | |---------|-------| | Same world, more craft | Better Call Saul | | Family under criminal pressure | Ozark, Bloodline | | Big drug trade picture | Narcos, The Wire | | Dark comedy + crime | Fargo, Barry | | Stylish criminal rise | Peaky Blinders | | Slow-burn identity | The Americans, Rectify | | Corporate moral rot | Succession |
Section 7
Want More?
- [Full list: Shows Like Breaking Bad](/shows/similar/breaking-bad) — 20+ algorithmic matches - [Crime drama shows](/shows/mood/crime) — the best in television crime - [Antihero shows](/shows/mood/dark) — protagonists you shouldn't root for - [Slow-burn thrillers](/shows/mood/tense) — tension that builds over seasons - [What show should I watch?](/shows/discover) — random recommendation
More from Shows Like
15 Shows Like Desperate Housewives — Suburban Secrets, Murder Mysteries, and Delicious Drama
Wisteria Lane left a void no other street could fill — until these shows arrived. Suburban scandals, female ensembles, dark secrets, and the soapy drama that keeps you watching at 1am.
15 Shows Like Dexter — Serial Killers, Dark Antiheroes, and Psychological Tension
If Dexter's blood-spatter analyst by day, vigilante killer by night premise hooked you, these shows deliver the same dark antihero thrills, psychological complexity, and moral ambiguity.
15 Shows Like Downton Abbey — Upstairs, Downstairs, and Unmissable Drama
Finished Downton Abbey and need something to fill the void? These shows deliver the same lavish period drama, class tension, family secrets, and compulsive storytelling.