Best South African crime series
Get ready to binge. We've found a collection of must-watch crime shows from South Africa, now streaming on Netflix, HBO, Hulu, Prime Video, and other top services!
Unseen 2023
A house cleaner desperately searches for her husband as a dreaded criminal syndicate dredges up past tragedies and ultimately drives her to violence.
66Queen Sono 2020
A highly trained South African spy must face changing relationships in her personal life while taking on her most dangerous mission yet.
65Fatal Seduction 2023
A married professor is pulled into a passionate affair with a younger man that uncovers a path of tragedy and betrayal from those closest to her.
59Trackers 2019
Three story strands are interwoven into a sophisticated action-packed thriller that covers the length and breadth of South Africa, explosively colliding in Cape Town in a violent conspiracy involving organized crime, smuggled diamonds, state security, Black Rhinos, the CIA and an international terrorist plot.
61Shadow 2019
Haunted by a tragic loss, an ex-cop with a rare inability to feel pain strikes out on his own to catch offenders who've eluded Johannesburg police.
66Reyka 2021
In 1994 South Africa, the daughter of a multiracial couple is kidnapped. She escapes and as an adult becomes a detective. Continuing to deal with her past trauma, Reyka Gama uses her skills to raise her child and solve mysteries that have challenged others.
63White Lies 2024
Set in the wealthy neighbourhood of Bishopscourt, Cape Town, investigative journalist Edie Hansen gets caught up in the ugly underbelly that lies beneath the picturesque beauty of the city, dragging her back to a turbulent past.
61Recipes for Love and Murder 2022
Tannie Maria sees food as "medicine for the body and heart". She envies romance as much as she enjoys cooking and eating. But it's death that shakes up Tannie Maria's life, when one of the correspondents to her column is brutally murdered.
65Ludik 2022
To save a kidnapped family member, an enterprising furniture tycoon must use his secret diamond smuggling operation to transport guns across the border.
63Kings of Jo'Burg 2020
The Masire brothers rule Johannesburg's criminal underworld, but a supernatural family curse and a tangled web of betrayal threaten to destroy them.
61Lioness 2021
A woman is wrongly convicted of fraud and in the process losses her children. She emerges from prison eight years later intending to reunite with her children and clear her name.
79The Queen (SA) 2016
The show revolves around the Khoza family, drug lords who hide their dealings behind their logistics company, and their conflicts with their competitors and the Tembisa Police Service. Connie Ferguson plays the role of Harriet Khoza, the widow of a drug lord and a drug lord known as "The Queen" while Shona Ferguson plays the police officer Jerry Maake.
100Devil's Peak 2023
Based on Deon Meyer's 2004 best-selling novel of the same name - centres on Detective Benny Grissel, tasked with tracking down a righteous vigilante killer whose crimes capture the city's imagination.
59Cape Town 2016
Cape Town. Police captain Mat Joubert used to be the best, solved every crime, got every killer. But that was a year ago, before his wife Lara was murdered while working undercover. Mat's been on a downward spiral ever since, haunted by a blurred past, uncertain which role he played in the murder of his wife. Now Mat is an out of shape chain smoker who is ambivalent about the crime-ridden world around him. Gradually, Mat begins to overcome the ghosts of his past. But in order to stop the violence of his current cases he must relive the nightmare of his wife's murder.
52Spinners 2023
Ethan is a 17-year-old driver working for a local gang. Disgusted with gang life, Ethan discovers a possible way out via spinning, an extreme motorsport. But the looming gang war jeopardises that hope.
68Donkerbos 2022
When the bodies of six children are found in the backwater forests of Donkerbos, Limpopo, an ostracised detective must wrestle with her dark past, her family and a distrustful community to catch the killer before another child is taken.
68Koek 2024
When Cape Town housewife discovers evidence her husband is having an affair with a stripper, her investigation takes her to a world poles apart from the suburban utopia she knows.
70Boetie Boer: Inside The Mind Of A Monster 2023
As Nelson Mandela is released from 27 years in prison in 1990, Stewart 'Boetie Boer' Wilken starts his killing spree. Unlike most serial killers, he had more than one type of victim. He also claimed to engage in necrophilia and cannibalism.
70Soon Comes Night 2024
A former freedom fighter orchestrates a series of heists in defiance of the law while trying to evade corrupt authorities and a cop with a tragic past.
60Die Spreeus 2019
Die Spreeus (The Starlings) is a South Africa, Afrikaans-language supernatural crime procedural series which tells the story of two fearless detectives - Bas Koorts and Beatrice Mack - who investigate a new phenomenon each week and try to solve crimes... even in worlds that are not our own.
45Die Byl 2016
The unit specializes in the investigation of serial murders and is led by Van der Bijl, a former murder and robbery detective who gained fame for his handling of several high-profile cases. Each episode focuses on a serial killer. The main character, Colonel Piet van der Bijl, also known as Die Byl, is loosely modeled on the famous ex-detective Piet Byleveld.
40Yizo Yizo 1999
36Room 9 2012
A television series set in an alternate Pan-African world, where evil thrives and darkness rules. Here, a specialized Police Occult Unit led by ambitious young detective Alice Kunene together with seasoned veteran Harkness and their high-tech detective team, hunts down the perpetrators of evil, both in the world of the living and of the dead.
30My Name Is Reeva 2023
Paralympian Oscar Pistorius fatally shot his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp in 2013. Almost a decade later, Reeva's parents prepare to confront their daughter's murderer.
25Die Vierde Kabinet 1998
Die Vierde Kabinet revolves around corruption in the police and the Organised Crime Unit, the hated internal investigation unit of the police who set traps for and spy on other police units to try and uncover corrupt members.The same corrupt police attempt to turn the tables by trying to find information about who is in this specialised unit.In 1993, shortly before the first democratic election in South Africa, a group of policemen rushed to get rid of files containing information about illegal police operations.The files were placed in filing cabinets, taken to a secret place and destroyed with explosives. But in the atmosphere of panic and disorder a cabinet - the so-called "fourth cabinet" - got lost and was forgotten.In 1997, Bonnie Badenhorst (Vanessa Pike), a policewoman attached to the special police unit investigating corruption, discovers the cabinet. Badenhorst, whose brother died in Angola, decides to remove the cabinet and hide it without informing her colleagues.
25Snitch 0
15Arsenaal 2002
Arsenaal is a South African, Afrikaans-language thriller drama television series created, written and directed by Jan Scholtz and produced by his production company Scholtz Films which is set against the backdrop of investigative journalism, corrupt security companies and corrupt police.
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