5 Near-Perfect Thriller Series if You Love Sicario

A big news announcement landed in the entertainment sphere earlier this month, an announcement bound to have any fan of the thriller genre, well, thrilled. Sicario 3 is officially moving forward with Emily Blunt, Benicio del Toro and Josh Brolin all returning from the original cast. Padraic McKinley, the director behind one of this year's Sundance hits, The Weight, is pinned to direct, and Steven Knight, creator of Peaky Blinders has been chosen to write the screenplay. This is the first Sicario film not written by Taylor Sheridan, a part of his broader transition away from the Paramount world.

Sheridan recently signed a five-year deal with NBCUniversal valued at up to a billion dollars, that officially begins in 2029. Paramount retains ownership of existing libraries and series like Yellowstone, Tulsa King, Landman and Mayor of Kingstown while Sheridan delivers his remaining contractual seasons before the change. The question of what a Sicario looks like without Sheridan is an interesting one. His voice was the connective tissue between Denis Villeneuve's formal precision and the institutional cynicism at the franchise's core. But, the pedigree that Knight comes from gives optimism that he can capture Sicario's depth of moral complexity and atmospheric seriousness. Production is targeting early 2027 to bring the original cast and crew back for its third entry. The switch up in authorship is bound to provide a different sensibility, and determine whether the franchise can sustain its distinct identity through a creative transition.

While you wait for the third installment, the five series below operate in the same thematic space and narrative functioning that made Sicario such a modern classic eleven years ago. They share the franchise's interest in the institutional machinery of the drug war, in the grey zone between law enforcement and criminal activity, and in the kind of psychological cost of working in such tense environments. But every entry has a separate identity while still living off the same structural principles that Sicario has put in such demand from audiences.

5 'Dope Thief' (2025)

Peter Craig's adaptation of Dennis Tafoya's novel follows two DEA impersonators who accidentally steal from the cartel instead of the local dealers they were hoping to take from. It begins as this caper-like premise that evolves into a much darker and morally weighted as its lone season progresses. Dope Thief stars Wagner Moura and David Tyree Henry, who both provide a level of complexity and inner conflict to the characters. It's the gap between expectation and proper execution that makes the story work in a comedic aspect as a part of a larger crime thriller.

Ridley Scott executive produced and directed the pilot, which sets a visual and tonal template that the episodes following it sustain with an unexpected consistency. Its Philadelphia setting separates the show from the southwestern border landscape that tends to engulf this genre. It gives the leads a different set of institutional relationships to work through. Dope Thief was one of the more underrated series of 2025, and its aesthetic tone is the kind to generate an audience akin to that of the Sicario universe.

4 'Ozark' (2017-2022)

The Byrde family's descent into Missouri money laundering for a Mexican drug cartel is one of the more sustained exercises in moral deterioration in prestige television. But what distinguishes Ozark from comparable material is how seriously it takes the cost of every decision that the family makes and the bleak effect it causes on each character. Jason Bateman and Laura Linney work well off each other as Marty and Wendy, and as the mounting consequences of their actions become irreversible, the violence and corruption become much louder.

The peculiar dynamic of the Ozark environment is one under visited in entertainment, and gives the show a rooted and specific sense of economic conditions and financial desperation. The cartel operates in Ozark the way institutional evil operates in Sicario, present and structural in place of stereotypical abstract genre mechanics. With characters that become progressively harder to root for, it's quite an achievement for the show to maintain its tight grip on audiences across its four seasons. The final season takes narrative risks rarely seen in prestige TV, and feels costly in a way most television tends to avoid.

3 'Narcos: Mexico' (2018-2021)

Diego Luna's Felix Gallardo is the best performance in the Narcos franchise produced across any of its iterations. He is equally charming as he is monstrous. There is a construction of charisma and calculation that evolves into this desperation that the show carries across two seasons, and it should be considered one of the better acting achievements in Netflix's original programming history. The shift from Colombia to Mexico gave the franchise the room it needed to become something much more complex than a prestige procedural retelling of events the audience already knew. However, the third season without Luna is a lesser show.

Narcos: Mexico treats the drug war as a political story first. It's the framing that connects most directly to what Sicario is doing, understanding that the cartels' power is inseparable from their relationships with shady government officials on each side of the border. But it's the show's willingness to expose the American government's role in the war with the same critical eye that applies to the Mexican side that separates this project from more conventional turns in the genre. It's an essential viewing for anyone whose appetite for this world was first garnered by Villeneuve's tense thriller.

2 'ZeroZeroZero' (2020)

Stefano Sollima made Day of Soldado and then made this, which is the more formally ambitious piece of work, by a significant margin. The series is based on Roberto Saviano's book about a cocaine shipment that moves from the cartel to the Camorra through an American shipping family. It covers eight episodes over three simultaneous storylines that converge from three different continents. Sollima treats each story with equal visual rigor and depth, which gives ZeroZeroZero a scope that most TV series struggle to sustain.

ZeroZeroZero isn't a very comfortable viewing nor is it paced for a distracted viewer. Andrea Riseborough and Gabriel Byrne lead the American strand, and their story functions along the same morality level and cultural cynicism tied to the best of this genre. It is considered to be such a big swing project because of the show's depiction of the brutality of drug trade violence. Sollima doesn't shy away from unearthing how the corruptions aren't aberrations but the product of a global system where every party is implicated. It is the show on this list that most resembles the formal register of Sicario.

1 'Snowfall' (2017-2023)

John Singleton's series about the CIA's involvement in the crack cocaine epidemic's origins in 1980s Los Angeles ran for six strong and tightly wound seasons from the late 2010s to early 2020s. The show created a complete portrait of the destruction it caused to the community in South Central Los Angeles. It tracks the drug's arrival in South Central Los Angeles through Franklin Saint's rise from street-level dealer to a cartel-connected distributor. Damson Idris in the lead role is the show's defining achievement, a deliberately dark character arc that traces the full trajectory of a young man born into the origins of a drug trade.

Snowfall perceives the crack epidemic as a political story with economic and personal ramifications in a multi-faceted web of municipal indifference. The character transformation of Franklin Saint is so gradual and internally consistent that it has the audience sympathizing with how he became this monstrous drug pin leader by the end of the series. It has that same intentional technique as Sicario of producing high-quality and fast-paced storylines into one sequence. Snowfall ends with the weight of everything that came before it fully present, woven seamlessly into the drama. If Sicario is a film that opened up this darker drug-focused thriller subgenre to you, Snowfall is a place to go to fully inhabit that world.