10 Best Crime Dramas To Watch After 'MobLand' and Where to Find Them on Streaming Services

The presence of director Guy Ritchie is fairly easy to spot in MobLand, but it’s not Ritchie at full throttle because MobLand is, most of the time, a pretty serious drama. For the complete experience, spool back to The Gentlemen, Ritchie’s spin-off from his own film of the same name. This show is raucous and cartoonish, delighting in taking the mickey out of several different stereotypes, from posh layabouts to lairy Scousers and from low-rent criminals to American billionaires. Mostly it’s a romp through a twisted version of the English upper classes, led by Theo James as Eddie, a duke who inherits a cannabis empire.

A drama that changed the game as far as British-based gangster sagas go, delivering the sort of grand, sweeping, operatically violent extravaganza UK viewers can only usually find in American shows. Sope Dirisu and Joe Cole are both immense as the undercover cop and the heir to a criminal family’s throne: Gangs of London is notorious for its incredible fight sequences, but its character work and storytelling are top-class too, and it certainly isn’t afraid to kill off a main protagonist just when you least expect it.

A word-of-mouth hit in the UK on BBC iPlayer, Irish crime saga Kin has all the elements you look for in a good, gritty gangster drama. Two families control territory in the city of Dublin, with wise old bosses played by Ciaran Hinds and Aidan Gillen. But sage, calm mob dons in TV dramas tend to have hot-headed sons and, when one of the younger men oversteps the mark, it sparks a war that puts everyone in peril and tests loyalties to breaking point. There’s nothing particularly original about Kin, but the acting, the realistic urban setting and some brutal character deaths will keep you nicely on your toes.

A mob drama in disguise! Admittedly not as much of a disguise as Colin Farrell, who is literally unrecognisable inside a colossal fat suit as would-be criminal kingpin Oz Cobb, but viewers who heard about another entry in the Batman cinematic universe didn’t get the fun superhero action they might have expected from The Penguin. Instead, Farrell delivers a deeply impactful performance as a villain powered by awkwardness and sadness, the nuances of which are somehow not blunted by the fact that the actor is essentially invisible. His ongoing sparring match with Cristin Milioti as the psychopathic Sofia Gigante is a thing of dark wonder.

MobLand head writer Ronan Bennett made his name with this tough crime epic. Inspired by Bennett witnessing a frighteningly young boy dealing drugs outside a London supermarket, it follows the kings and the footsoldiers of the fictional Summerhouse estate in Hackney, east London. Ashley Walters and Kane Robinson are Dushane and Sully, who at first are partners in the drug-dealing game, but are destined to become mortal enemies. While telling that big story, Top Boy is excellent at including the smaller, sadder tales that show how tough living in a place overrun by crime can be.

To get as close as you can to the tone and look of MobLand, you could give this almost completely overlooked drama a spin. A prequel to the fantastic Jonathan Glazer film of the same name, Sexy Beast fills in the backstories of Gal and Don (Ray Winstone and Ben Kingsley in the movie; here played by James McArdle and Emun Elliott), as they make their way into the dirty, violent criminal underworld of London in the 1990s. One surprising, stellar piece of casting is worth tuning in for on its own: Tamsin Greig is not who you would expect to be playing Don’s sinister, domineering sister Cecilia, the monster who is the explanation for a lot of Don’s worst personality traits, and yet there she is, and she’s superb.

It doesn’t look like a gangster drama at first glance, since it’s set in the early 19th Century, but Taboo has plenty of the dynamics that make mob sagas tick. For a start, it treats global trading behemoth the East India Company as essentially a criminal organisation, reversing the usual genre set-up (as seen in MobLand) where crime syndicates operate like hierarchical corporations. It also has actual criminal gangs in operation as it explores the dark side of London in 1814. Plus, most importantly for MobLand, Tom Hardy plays the lead and, although he does it in a very different way, his character still has more or less the same energy, which is: severe threat.

It’s light relief compared to most of the other shows on this list, but with its London criminals being a bit cheeky while conducting serious business, Hatton Garden still hits a lot of the right notes. It also has the added intrigue of being based on a true story, namely the notorious burglary committed by a gang of elderly thieves during Easter bank holiday weekend, 2015. MobLand’s Geoff Bell plays Carl Wood who, at the age of 58, is one of the younger members of a crew who daringly drill into a secure underground vault beneath the streets of the capital.

If you haven’t seen it by now perhaps you never will, but it’s always worth repeating that The Sopranos is the best organised-crime drama ever, and possibly the best TV drama ever full stop. Heck, you could even make a case for it being one of the great works of art of the 20th Century. Almost every other show on this list owes a major debt to this New Jersey saga. In a show that’s as much about actual families as it is the Mafia “family”, James Gandolfini is immense as the boss who is troubled enough by his job to be seeing a shrink. But almost every one of the scores of supporting characters is just as beautifully drawn.