That's precisely why EW decided to dedicate a week to it, culminating in our list of the 50 greatest TV and movie detectives. Now, before you get mad about someone we left off the list ...

Here are some of the smartest TV detectives to ever grace the small screen. One of the main things classic mystery shows like ...

There have been compelling TV detectives dating back to the beginning of television. The best ones include characters from ...

Audiences and critics alike were blown away by True Detective season 1, and its star, Rust Cohle actor Matthew McConaughey, ...

Sofie Gråbøl’s Sarah Lund is sometimes overlooked in lists of the greatest TV detectives but not here. The character is an obsessive who will stop at nothing to get to the bottom of a murder case.

Cop shows have been part of television since the medium's earliest days. From Dragnet in the 1950s all the way through into the first half of the 21st century police shows, and the detectives that ...

the very best of the best. Something to remember in our hunt is that this lot is the very finest, they’re the top of the TV detective iceberg, some names you may expect to see on this list are ...

It would be hard to argue that this TV detective is well-loved, seeing as it ran for 12 full seasons and 264 episodes. Columbo is one of the best TV detectives of all time (Image via NBCUniversal ...

Was he odd? Totally. Dumb? Not at all. Tony Shalhoub’s Adrian Monk could very well be one of the greatest TV detectives of all time, no matter how you cut it. Tasked with solving all kinds of ...