The great thing about Netflix is that it gives you a lot of TV and movie watching options. The bad thing about Netflix is that it gives you…a lot of TV and movie watching options. To cut down on your Netflix search and discover time, Netfix aims to ease the process of parsing the good from the bad. The great from the not so great. From action films to foreign dramas, we’re raked the catalogs to offer only the finest that the preeminent streaming service has to offer. So settle in, get your remotes ready and prepare for the red wave of Netfix to wash over you.

THE FALL (2013-)

It’s impossible to ignore as a society our consumerist addiction to subject matter about killers. The profits are shocking, and a new splice of this genome enters the marketplace at a disturbing rate. It’s not so much that we’re all disoriented, but the idiosyncrasies tap into a need. This extreme subject matter personifies our primal need to know, “why?” Why is this figure like this? Why is he/she doing this? Why are these things so special to this person? Why do we need to know why this person is the way they are? And like the central characters in this new police procedural iteration, we watch and examine with scientific scrutiny. In other words, we study ourselves as if we’re objects under the lens.

Creator Allan Cubit places The Fall in Belfast Ireland offering subscribers a twisted novelty served up by BBC2. Don’t expect gore porn and breakneck editing style as its anti-mass market fare requires patience and appreciation for every nuance. But it wants you to get to know the characters, which is why we’re walked a through a virtual tour of a killer’s instruction manual on how to be an efficient methodical sadist.

Twenty-eight days into a murder investigation, metropolitan police can’t find a wily serial killer, Paul Spector, played by Jamie Dornan. Already, we know who he is–a bereavement counselor by day, mechanical slasher by night, targeting professional women. He’s a family man with two children and a pleasant humanistic wife, a personified achievement with narcissistic undertones reminiscent of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho — a character profile that easily translates into his eponymous role in Fifty Shades of Grey.

Tracking his motions, is Stella Gibson, played by Gillian Anderson. Think of Scully’s deadpan delivery but drip-dried of every ounce of her humanism, thus, Gibson is a sterile resuscitation of Anderson’s famed role. She’s meant to be steely and enigmatic, a manifestation of the objectification of women, as she says, “Man fucks woman: subject man, verb fucks, object woman” she before she defiantly turns on one of her male colleagues “woman fucks man, woman subject, man object, that’s not so comfortable for you is it?”

Juxtaposed to Gibson’s gender issues, we experience the excruciating details of Spector’s egoist modus operandi and goodie bag with gaffer tape, bungee cords, and dummies as if we follow him on a black ops mission. But it’s not your standard operating procedure, as he meticulously studies his victims and collects mementos then finishes the job by placing them in final emotional tableaux. Like Dexter, we’re placed into the poetic and conflicting madness of the killer’s psyche. Every story intonation and word spoken is carefully crafted. Like True Detective, the characters and atmosphere are so engrossing the actual plot of finding the killer nobly loses our attention.

In the first season, the killer’s trappings seem so flawlessly simple and attainable chock full of Spector’s physique and blue eyed magnetism hinting at Charles Manson’s charm. As other police components lose steam in the chase, Gibson stays on the juice.

Yet, during the second season, Gibson’s close-pinned surface begins to fall away revealing a formative victim inside. And as one escapee identifies, Spector’s ritual resembles  “slow suicide.” Noses are getting keener and wiser as the killer’s damaged complex rages out of its carefully cultivated but fragile house. Secondary characters also provide more tone and enrich the central drama.

The show’s deep examination is viewed through the exterior lens of the objectification of women, but looking more closely it’s truly about how we compartmentalize our emotions and store them in special containers. The killer wants to know what it’s like to always feel not just in circumstantial settings matched by Gibson as she retracts and begins to reach into her emotional storage.

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BLOODLINE (2015-)

Bloodline is one of the best shows out there, and can hopefully keep its presence with season 2. With so many series accommodating such a range of tastes and demographics, family dramas are still one of the most widely produced and commercially successful genres. After all, any widely acclaimed series is structured on some sort of familial grounding. But any show that is truly visceral and cathartic and thus lasting, relies on firmly formed characters. Bloodline is defined as a character-driven family drama, but its pacing is like a thriller, using flashbacks, flash-forwards, visual internal monologs, and red-herrings without relying on plot twists to buoy suspense.

As Bloodline opens with the first episode, we flash forward knowing something bad is going to happen, as Kyle Chandler’s lead character, John Rayburn, narrates, “We’re not bad people. But we did a bad thing.”

The show is structured around a historically pivotal event. Its details slowly rise from the ocean’s bottom set in the idyllic Florida Keys. The Rayburns are a foundational symbol of the sleepy sunny dream town as owners and operators of a picturesque getaway hotel run by Robert and Sally Rayburn, Sam Shepard and Sissy Spacek respectively.

They’re celebrating their 45th wedding anniversary, as we’re introduced to the siblings, character compositions built from familiar profiles we all recognize. But the equilibrium gets jammed up when the dead-beat brother returns, Danny Rayburn, played with a perfect pitch by Ben Mendelsohn. Danny has had a history of visiting the family then falling off the radar in a constant self-destructive pattern. This time, he mysteriously wants to stay and help his parents with the hotel. The show is framed around the idiosyncratic relationship each parent and sibling has with Danny.

John Rayburn, Kyle Chandler’s character, vacillates between protecting the family from Danny’s destructiveness to Danny’s guardian. As the drama unearths we learn of the abuse Danny suffered from his father resulting from an accident that killed another sibling. The show does a superb job in making us sympathize with Danny while showing us how deep and damaging his scars are.

As Danny tries to improve himself, we watch his internal pendulum swing from alienated and unloved sibling to renewed caregiver. He questionably needs to get himself out of debt as he wraps himself up further into drug trafficking, as his siblings investigate why he fled while trying to piece together their parent’s past and Danny’s abuse.

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THE KILLING (2011-2014)

The Killing is another police procedural but not about the distinctive inner mechanics of a killer’s ethos or the bizarre links or patterns, but rather it focuses on one particular killing and the diagnostic history that produced it.

The Killing is one of Netflix’s first streaming television series, transplanted from AMC under the creative direction of Veena Sud. The show is based on a former Danish series, Forbrysdelsen, which directly translates as The Crime. Under Netflix, the series lasted until season 4.

The procedural follows the relationship between two detective partners, and consistent with the genre, both are paired against one another. Mireille Enos as Sarah Linden, the lead homicide detective, deliberative and reserved, is dynamically partnered with Stephen Holder (Joel Kinnaman), younger, direct, and aggressive. Throughout the four seasons, we watch their relationship ebb and flow as their troubled pasts interweave with one another’s and the present crime that fleshes it all out. The show examines how a weak family foundation leads to a child’s destruction. Each season follows a murder that chalks up to a certain domestic profile as the two detectives follow the victim’s former movements. The Killing doesn’t draw our attention to disturbing psychological metrics but instead focuses on how simple motivations can spiral out of control.

In the first two seasons, the most lauded, Linden and Holder investigate the mysterious murder of a young woman and the grieving aftermath of a family, which coincides with an election campaign of an idealistic young mayor. The victim is the daughter of Mitch and Stanley Larson, played by Michelle Forbes and Brent Sexton respectively. We center on the aftermath of their daughter’s murder and their disintegrating family as the campaign for Darren Richmond (Billy Campbell), an idealistic candidate running for mayor, uses the press as a promotional device to bolster his working man pathos. As the investigation deepens, we watch Linden grapple with her demons as a foster child as Holder tries to prove his self-worth as a recovered meth-head while the victim’s steps lead to a larger political conspiracy.

Season 2 follows up with the constant track of red-herrings into new ones as we delve into the Larson’s domestic portrait and history tied to organized crime. The political intrigue discovered last season broadens even further as Linden struggles to raise her own son and questions her worth as a mother.

The third season Holder investigates a runway girl who was murdered tied to a former string of murders that was formerly investigated by Linden. No longer a detective, she’s pulled into the crime’s undertow as she falls to her recidivist tendencies. Holder now married and turned around wanting a child, needs to be practical and questions his loyalty to Linden and the blowback of their mishandling of a murder.

Season 4, the series terminal, ends with Linden and Holder patching up their differences and examining a family murder where the only survivor is a student of an elite military academy.

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