There has never been a better time to be a fan of true crime. Ever since the first season of “Serial” took the podcasting world by storm, studios and creators around the entertainment industry landscape have raced to produce as much true crime content as possible. That’s meant a lot of not-great stuff; plenty of streamers, including Netflix, have released some salacious trash over the past decade. 

Thankfully, the true crime boom has also given us a number of excellent miniseries that push the genre forward, using the format to investigate the criminal justice system, what we mean by “law and order,” who we think of as “innocent,” and whether we really should be looking to the police to save us. Some of the best true crime even turns the camera around and looks at the true crime genre itself, interrogating the very question of why we keep telling each other these terrible stories in an attempt to learn something about society. Are we simply being titillated by the shocking details of awful crimes, or are we interested in staring the worst of humanity in the face so that we can prove we’re not afraid?

The miniseries on this list are the best of what Netflix has to offer. Many were produced by the streamer itself, but others have been licensed, building out a library that’s among the best true crime destinations on the internet. Here are the 10 best true crime miniseries currently streaming on Netflix.

In the early days of true crime — your “Dateline,” your “20/20” – re-enactments were typically melodramatic, blue-tinted cutaways dramatizing the worst parts of the stories they were telling. In the modern, prestige true crime era, however, various filmmakers have found interesting ways to use re-enactments, making us think about what we want out of the genre when we watch stories like these.

“American Nightmare,” a 2024 miniseries produced by Netflix, tells the strange story of Denise Huskins and her boyfriend, Aaron Quinn. He told police that he woke up one night to a man in a wetsuit kidnapping his girlfriend. The man installed a security camera in the bedroom, taped off an area on the floor, and, before feeding Quinn a sedative, told him that if he were to leave the taped-off area visible on camera, she’d be killed. Cops assumed that either Quinn had killed her or the whole thing was a hoax, especially when Huskins turned up alive and well, refusing to speak to anyone about her ordeal. Was a crime even committed here?

Intriguingly, the re-enactments in “American Nightmare” are shot in first-person point of view, as though we’re looking through Quinn’s eyes as he assesses his strange situation. The move raises interesting questions about true crime as a whole: Is the idea that we are identifying with the victims of these crimes? If the person whose eyes we’re looking through might be lying about what he saw, where does that leave us?

When you watch true crime, it’s important to pay attention to who is guiding the story being told. That’s the point of Netflix miniseries “The Confession Killer,” which was released in 2019. It’s about Henry Lee Lucas, a man who confessed to hundreds of crimes, insisting that he’d murdered a horrifying number of people across a vast swath of the United States. He claims to have killed people using every method you can think of except poisoning, and that lack of a typical modus operandi is what allowed him to escape undetected for so long … or so he says.

“The Confession Killer” wants you to think about why we tend to believe affable-seeming white men like Lucas, but it also wants you to think about why the police might be eager to believe him despite a severe lack of evidence that he actually did what he claimed to have done. Might cops have an ulterior motive in trying to close scores of cold cases all at once? Would that not make them look good, helping cover up their incompetence in letting so many murders go unsolved for so long?

In investigating whether any of this really happened, “The Confession Killer” destabilizes the very idea of even the best true crime docuseries as reliable accounts of history. Everyone has a motive in situations like this, even the documentarians, and “The Confession Killer” spins gold out of all that confusion.

While “Serial” may have kick-started the modern true crime wave, there were respectable true crime documentaries made before the 2010s. That includes Joe Berlinger’s “Paradise Lost” trilogy, which examined the fallout from the horrifying Arkansas child murders at Robin Hood Hills. Berlinger followed the trial, imprisonment, and eventual exoneration of the so-called West Memphis Three in a series of films that are both archive and activism.

In 2019, he directed a pair of Ted Bundy-related projects for Netflix. “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile” is a fiction film that stars Zac Efron as the infamous serial killer; casting an all-American heartthrob as Bundy was a brilliant way to make visible his now-inexplicable, undeniably charismatic hold over people.

“Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes,” on the other hand, is a documentary series that pulls off a similar trick by letting Bundy narrate his own story. We know Berlinger to be a devoted chronicler of miscarriages of justice, so we find ourselves lulled into a “what-if” scenario by Bundy’s repeated insistence that he was being framed. Of course, this is Ted Bundy; he wasn’t framed at all, and he likely did far worse than we know. The wealth of archival material that Berlinger presents in this series ultimately makes it into perhaps the definitive account of his crime spree, making it a must-watch for true crime fans … especially now that Ryan Murphy has said “no” to a Ted Bundy season of “Monster.”

Joe Berlinger has developed a number of true crime brands at Netflix; in addition to several installments in his “Conversations with a Killer” franchise and a few “Cold Case” documentaries, Berlinger also directed a few shows under the header “Crime Scene.” The first, “The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel,” is still the series high. It’s about the tragic case of Elisa Lam, a woman who became an object of morbid internet fascination after a video of her in an elevator on the night she died went viral. Lam’s body was ultimately found in a water tank on top of the rundown Downtown Los Angeles hotel where she was staying, and internet crime aficionados have endeavored to reconstruct her final night ever since.

“The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel,” however, acknowledges that this is likely just a sad case of someone who was experiencing a mental health crisis and didn’t get the support they needed. It’s well aware that it’s playing into the internet fascination with her death — that it’s re-traumatizing her family — and it wants you to sit with that discomfort in what end up being some pretty productive ways. It becomes a portrait not just of Lam but of L.A.’s notorious Skid Row, a place where we don’t need to invent crimes to discuss online because many happen there — not least of which is that we’ve failed our fellow human beings by letting a place like that develop.

As the true crime genre exploded in popularity in the 2010s, there was much hand-wringing about whether people were in it for the right reasons. In November 2019 — just a month before Netflix released “Don’t F**k With Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer” — a piece in The New Republic called it “the ‘My Favorite Murder’ problem,” after the popular podcast. “The stories we tell about crime too often prop up fantasies about law enforcement and justice,” wrote Andrea DenHoed, taking issue with the way the podcast hosts gleefully encouraged harmful, oppressive structures of justice as a corrective to the evil in the world.

“Don’t F**k With Cats” tells the story of Luka Magnotta, a fame-obsessed man who escalated from killing kittens online to killing a human being. Furthermore, it’s the story of the online community of true-crime sleuths who banded together in an attempt to stop him … and in giving him the attention that he wanted, might have inadvertently encouraged him to kill. In the show’s final moments, an amateur sleuth who goes by Baudi Moovan turns directly to the camera and implicates the viewers in what Magnotta did. Is it our fault?

It’s a landmark moment in the true crime boom, one that forces us to reckon with the fact that we are sometimes treating the loss of real human lives as entertainment. Would the murderer exist without people who are fascinated by him?

When we think of true crime documentaries, we tend to think of films about killers, but plenty of great true crime docs deal with scams, cults, and more. Netflix miniseries “The Family,” which came out in 2019, is something else altogether. It takes its name from a shadowy, Christian nationalist organization that has been operating behind the scenes of American politics for decades, pulling the strings in an effort to install … well, exactly the kind of government we have now.

As narrated by the excellent writer Jeff Sharlet — and adapted from two of his books of reportage — “The Family” lays out all of the manipulation, influence-peddling, and corruption conducted by The Family in recent history. Sharlet makes very clear what the goals of this nefarious group are, and as a result, “The Family” is an effort to drag the organization’s activity into the light. Of course, years after its release, a lot of the figures in this documentary have reached even greater national prominence; still, people somehow seem unaware of just how long this has all been in the works.

This could, of course, all seem like a crazy conspiracy theory were it not for the evidence. “The Family” brilliantly lays bare the fact that a lot of this has been happening in plain sight, right in front of our eyes, enabled largely by the inaction of people willing to look the other way. Talk about “miscarriage of justice.”

In the year after “Serial,” two docuseries cemented true crime as a bona fide phenomenon. HBO’s “The Jinx” was a brilliant investigation into the women murdered by real estate developer Robert Durst; the filmmakers even managed to capture a confession on a hot mic, though they caused controversy over when and how they gave that evidence to the cops.

In late 2015, Netflix’s “Making a Murderer” became a holiday sensation. This, too, is a foundational text in the true crime genre boom, in large part because of how it also raised questions about the responsibility that true crime storytellers owe their audience. “Making a Murderer” is about Steven Avery, a man imprisoned for a long time for a crime he was eventually exonerated of; shortly after his release, another woman wound up dead, and Avery found himself back in jail. The series seems to posit that Avery was framed, that a resentful small-town police department manufactured evidence to get revenge on a guy who made them look ridiculous.

Like the team behind “The Jinx,” the “Making a Murderer” EPs were criticized for omitting evidence, claiming it wasn’t significant to the narrative they were crafting. The series later returned for a considerably less successful second season, all about the reaction to the first season, defending the exclusion of certain details. It’s hard not to see the impact of these creative choices every time a true crime TikToker ambiguously suggests that “something doesn’t seem right” about an official narrative.

Though Netflix doesn’t produce the ESPN Films sports-documentary series “30 for 30,” many installments are available to stream on the service. That includes “OJ: Made in America,” which is not only one of the best sports documentaries ever made and one of the best true crime documentaries, but one of the best documentaries ever, period. The series stretches to nearly eight hours, and in 2016 it sparked quite the discussion about what counts as “film” and what counts as “television.” It was named to the AFI Awards’ Best TV of 2016 list, for example, but it also won the Oscar for Best Documentary Film.

Regardless of its specific classification, it’s a masterwork. “OJ: Made In America” carefully reconstructs the media sensation surrounding football player O.J. Simpson, examines race relations in Los Angeles leading up to the 1990s, dives into the Rodney King trial and resulting riots, and finally recounts the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman in excruciating detail. Then there’s the trial. There are crime scene photos here that are among the most gruesome real-life images ever shown on film, but thankfully, a wide constellation of talking-head interviews gives everything its proper context, like few other documentaries bother to do.

“The Staircase” is a Peak TV treasure released in 2004, right at the start of the so-called Peak TV era. This was initially a French production that was later bought (and extended) by Netflix, meaning the show, in totality, bridges the gap between two different eras of the true crime genre. The series is about Michael Peterson, a novelist who was accused of killing his wife Kathleen after she was found dead at the bottom of — you guessed it — a staircase. Michael maintains his innocence, but as he stood trial for her death, some seriously salacious facts emerged that complicated his defense. Still, just because a man cheats on his wife — with another man, no less! — doesn’t mean he’s a murderer … or does it?

Watching “The Staircase” now, we can see the blueprint for so many true crime shows that followed. The filmmakers were embedded with the Peterson family in real time, as the trial unfolded; that’s basically how “Making a Murderer” came about, too. It’s also an interesting, early example of a show that came back for more long after its initial release; other landmark shows like “The Jinx,” “Making a Murderer,” and even “Serial” later came back to examine their own impact. Those extra Netflix-produced episodes of “The Staircase,” though, are more successful than any of those others at maintaining the curious, compelling tone that initially made the show a hit.

The strange case of the Zodiac Killer is one of the most famous unsolved cases in the annals of crime history, rivaling only Jack the Ripper in its intrigue and oddity. The man who killed numerous people sent coded, threatening letters to various San Francisco newspapers in the 1970s, shooting young people on lovers’ lanes and sometimes even wearing an elaborate hooded costume with a strange symbol on the front. His reign of terror was like something out of a comic book … and then he stopped, and he’s never been caught.

In “This Is The Zodiac Speaking,” directors Phil Lott and Ari Mark put forward a theory of the crime spree that, for my money, is as good as definitive. They’ve managed to reconstruct a parallel story to the Zodiac murders: the life of Arthur Leigh Allen, who fans of David Fincher’s “Zodiac” will remember was memorably played by “Big Sky” star John Carroll Lynch in some of that film’s most sinister scenes. People who knew Allen have held on to some compelling evidence over the years, and “This Is The Zodiac Speaking” gets them on the record for the first time, presenting all sorts of pieces that may just put this puzzle together for once and for all.