How many episodes are in Karen Pirie?

Karen Pirie has 3 episodes in this listed season.

When does Karen Pirie premiere?

Karen Pirie premieres on 2025-07-20.

Is Karen Pirie a new series?

Karen Pirie is a returning series (Season 2).

Karen Pirie(2022)

Archived · ITVX

7.63 eps

S02

DramaCrimeMystery

ON AIR: JUL 20Season 2Archived listing

What to Expect

PremiereLens read

Karen Pirie works a single cold case across its run, using a true-crime podcast as the catalyst that forces a historic St Andrews murder back into official scrutiny. The structure is dual-timeline, cutting between the original events and the present-day reinvestigation so that each flashback recontextualizes what the modern inquiry has just uncovered. Progress comes through accumulated detail rather than action, and the pacing holds to that methodical rhythm without apology.

Institutional friction shapes a lot of the procedural texture here. DS Pirie pushes against the people around her, bosses and colleagues alike, and those dynamics stay dry and unsentimental rather than melodramatic. The case itself is constructed to reward close attention to small inconsistencies, and the ending lands differently depending on how carefully the earlier episodes were tracked.

Best for

methodical cold-case, dual-timeline flashbacks and Drama

Story lane

Drama and Crime

Commitment

Season 2 · 3 episodes

Where

ITVX

Official Premise

When a historic murder case in St Andrews becomes the subject of a true crime podcast, fearless DS Karen Pirie is tasked with solving it.

Watch Next If This Is Your Lane

Start with the closest match, then check out two more shows with a similar feel, pace, mood, or theme.

Grace

ITVX • Mar 29, 2026

DramaCrime

Dead Simple, opens with Grace running inquiries into long forgotten cold cases with little or no prospect of success. He's fixated by the disappearance of his wife, Sandy, which haunts his thoughts. His unorthodox police methods have come under scrutiny once again, and Grace is walking a career tightrope and risks being moved from the job he loves most. With so much at stake, his colleague Detective Sergeant Glenn Branson knows he has more to give and asks him for help with a case. When a stag night prank appears to go wrong and the groom goes missing, Branson calls on Grace to unravel events that led to the mysterious disappearance of a successful property developer with everything to live for. Is this a case of stag night shenanigans gone wrong or something more sinister?

View show

Strongest Match

Grace keeps the cold-case, flashback-free methodical grind where small inconsistencies build pressure on the people around the investigation. Like Karen Pirie, it centers a determined detective whose personal obsession with a missing wife bleeds into the job, with institutional friction and slow reveals driving the tension.

Paradise

Hulu • Feb 23, 2026

CrimeDrama

A Secret Service agent investigates the murder of a former president in a seemingly peaceful community.

View show

Why this pick

Paradise delivers the same patient murder-mystery pacing, with flashbacks layering what happened against what the community is willing to admit. Karen Pirie’s St Andrews secrets and loyalty tests carry over into a tighter, more morally complicated investigation, where family pressure and buried community history sharpen the danger.

The Chestnut Man

Netflix • May 7, 2026

DramaCrime

The Chestnut Man is set in the quiet suburb of Copenhagen, where the police make a terrible discovery one blustery October morning. A young woman is found brutally murdered in a playground and one of her hands is missing. Above her hangs a small man made of chestnuts. The ambitious young detective Naia Thulin is assigned to the case, along with her new partner, Mark Hess. They soon discover a mysterious piece of evidence on the chestnut man evidence connecting it to a girl who went missing a year earlier and was presumed dead - the daughter of politician Rosa Hartung.

View show

Why this pick

The Chestnut Man matches Karen Pirie’s cold-case dread, where evidence tightens episode by episode and the emotional stakes keep resurfacing. The grieving-mother focus and restrained Nordic-noir procedural rigor create a colder, more solitary mystery than Karen Pirie, with dread built from physical clues rather than action.

Want the bigger picture?

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