Archived · ITVX
The Dark is a Scottish rural procedural built around staged crime scenes and a killer who lives among the people he targets. Each discovery tightens the atmosphere in the community, turning neighbors into suspects and ordinary local life into something quietly threatening. The investigation moves with procedural discipline, but the isolated setting keeps the dread grounded and specific rather than abstract.
Monica Kennedy's own history becomes a second source of pressure running alongside the case itself. Her judgment, the thing a detective relies on most, starts to slip, and that erosion is as unsettling as anything the killer does. The cat-and-mouse plot gains an extra layer because the person chasing the monster is also fighting to trust herself, which puts her family in a different kind of danger than the one she is trained to handle.
rural serial killer, cat and mouse and Crime
Crime and Thriller
Season 1 · 6 episodes
ITVX
When the body of a young man is found eerily staged in the idyllic Scottish wilderness, detective Monica Kennedy fears this is just the beginning of a terrifying campaign that will strike the heart of a rural community.As paranoia rises, suspicions and secrets are forced into the light, and the locals start to realise that there is a serial killer hidden amongst them. With her experience of dealing with the darkest of humanity Monica Kennedy quickly becomes entangled in a heightened game of cat and mouse with a cunning killer. Only she can stop this monster before he claims any more victims.But when her own history creeps up on her, she begins to lose trust in her own judgement. Will it be her own actions that are the biggest risk to herself and her family?
Start with the closest match, then check out two more shows with a similar feel, pace, mood, or theme.
A National Parks Service agent investigates a brutal death at Yosemite National Park.
Untamed brings the same rural-wilderness dread as The Dark, with a brutal death that turns everyday routines into tense, methodical pressure. In Untamed, the boss-employee hierarchy and local control shape how the case unfolds, so the paranoia feels communal and suffocating, not just personal, and the pace stays contained and procedural.
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.
The Chestnut Man fits The Dark’s taste for evidence-driven dread, where each episode tightens the net around a killer’s pattern. With a grieving mother at the center and a cold-case thread that keeps resurfacing, the tension builds through restrained scenes and tightening clues, darker and more emotionally raw than The Dark’s rural cat-and-mouse chase.
Mia, a Scottish doctor, in trouble at home, arrives in New Zealand to take refuge with her sister only to find her sister has died. Shock turns to mounting horror as she's drawn into a small town's web of lies and secrets.
The Ridge delivers the same slow-burn suspicion you get in The Dark, set in a close-knit Scottish community where grief makes people hide things. The mystery unfolds with quiet, watchful scenes and social concealment, so the danger creeps in through what neighbors refuse to say, slower and more intimate than The Dark’s sharper procedural momentum.
