Five smartest Netflix detectives who are always ahead of you
What’s the first name that comes to mind when someone says detective? Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot? Either answer feels a little unfair to C Auguste Dupin, considering Edgar Allan Poe had him solving true crime-like cases back in 1841, decades before Holmes reached for the magnifying glass or started fiddling with his chemistry kit.
Holmes earned his legend, sure, but he also cast one hell of a shadow. For years, every brilliant detective was portrayed with the same smirk and overconfidence of a person who just watched one YouTube video and thought they could be the next surgeon. Netflix, thankfully, has been having more fun with the job description.
Remember Kat Donovan in Missing You? The woman got one spicy case and didn’t take her long to wind up in her own past, then Bodies handed Shahara Hasan the administrative nightmare of the same corpse turning up in different periods.
It’s a good thing that Netflix gives its better detectives their own peculiar ways of getting to the truth, because that’s what stops them from becoming Sherlock photocopies and helps them stick in our memories. Here are five such detectives, at your service.
Five smartest Netflix detectives
Benoit Blanc (Knives Out / Glass Onion / Wake Up Dead Man)
Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc works best when he knows that people around him are as cocky as a rooster. Watch him in Knives Out. The Thrombeys talk and talk, each convinced their version is the best, while Blanc lets them dig their own grave, and Glass Onion is even cheekier.
Miles Bron presents his grand murder-mystery game, expecting a night of clever clues, and Blanc has it cracked before dinner. The man barely lets the game breathe!
Apart from his Southern drawl, which became part of Blanc almost overnight, the other thing that makes him likeable is how Johnson has not smothered him with some tragic detective backstory. Instead, Blanc gets by on watching people, asking questions and letting them talk themselves into a corner.
Cordelia Cupp (The Residence)
A murder in the White House, during a state dinner, with around 200 people in the building and 157 potential suspects to worry about, and Cordelia Cupp walks into that circus. Rather than getting distracted by the grandeur of the place, she starts looking for things which even the best of detectives would’ve missed.
But before that, try placing yourself in her situation and think that with 150-plus guests in the White House, would you have been able to solve it? And yes, she is a birdwatcher, but don’t write that off as some quirky little flourish the writers fancied giving her.
It tells you exactly how Cupp operates: patience first, conclusions later, and don’t you dare forget the sharp eye to spot a bird, in this case, a clue. While everyone else is desperate to wrap the thing up and call it solved, our curious cat Cupp is eyeing everything from a tiny eye twitch to a fallen strand of hair. And wouldn’t you know it, that’s usually where the case starts coming apart.
Enola Holmes (Enola Holmes 1–3)
Do not let the Holmes surname do all the talking here, because Enola is not some junior version of Sherlock waiting in the wings for her turn. If anything, the films work because this girl does not play by his rules.
She is a lot younger and is underestimated at every turn, which, if it makes sense, is her biggest advantage. Nobody takes her seriously. Add Victorian England’s ideas about what a young woman should and shouldn’t be doing, and half the room has dismissed her before she’s even opened her mouth.
What Enola has is nerve and instinct, her biggest weapons and, of course, her bravery. She cracks codes and slips into disguises when she needs to and notices the detail everyone else has already decided doesn’t matter. And yes, she talks straight to us, which makes it, umm, a little conspiratorial, but don’t get too excited about being in on it; she’ll still get to the answer first. After all, she is a Holmes.
Carl Morck (Dept Q)
Carl Morck gets dumped in the basement with a pile of cold cases in Dept Q, which is meant to keep him out of everyone’s hair after he returns to work. All the show needed to do was give Morck a case everyone else has written off, and the man starts pulling at loose threads until the file is torn to pieces.
He is abrasive and stubborn as hell and has no patience for an official answer that doesn’t hold water, so he goes looking for a better one. Take Merritt Lingar’s disappearance. The trail has gone cold, but Morck spots enough holes to know something smells off, and once that happens, the jig is up.
He goes back over what people said and questions the bits others swallowed. The man keeps digging when most detectives would pack it in. That’s his real edge: if something doesn’t add up, Morck simply won’t let the bloody thing lie.
Jake Peralta (Brooklyn Nine-Nine)
Sure, Jake Peralta looks like the odd man out on a list full of very serious detectives, and fair enough, the man comes straight out of a sitcom and cannot be blamed. To be honest, half his shenanigans do not make a good point of him being a good detective, given he spends half his time messing about and has the attention span of a goldfish.
But don’t let all that childish carry-on fool you, because Jake is actually frighteningly good at his job, and every now and then, Brooklyn Nine-Nine reminds you just how sharp he can be.
‘The Box’ is the one that really proves it. Jake has almost no physical evidence against Philip Davidson, so he stops chasing what isn’t there and starts working on Davidson himself, clocking that the man’s ego is the weak spot. From there, he just keeps pressing until the confession spills out. That’s Jake, really: looks like a mess but thinks like a detective.
