Television series

Endeavour

Name: Endeavour
Genre: Drama, Crime, Mystery
Released: 2012
Cast: Shaun Evans, Roger Allam, James Bradshaw, Anton Lesser, Sean Rigby

A prequel nobody asked for that turned out to be essential: young Endeavour Morse cutting his teeth as a detective constable in 1960s Oxford, years before the cardigan and the crossword-brain of the original. It's slower and sadder than most cop shows, in love with period detail, and built on the ache between Morse and his mentor Thursday. For anyone who likes their murders literate and their melancholy well-tailored.

TVMaze rating

8.4

If you liked this

Inspector Morse1987

The original, and the whole point of the exercise — watch where the young man you've just spent hours with ends up, opera, crosswords, loneliness and all.

But Slower pace, dated visual style, and it inevitably spoils who Morse becomes.

Lewis2006

Morse's old sergeant gets his own show, still solving crimes in the same golden Oxford light, now mentoring someone else the way Thursday mentored him.

But Lighter and cosier than Endeavour — the grief and grit are dialled way down.

Foyle's War2002

Same feature-length, character-first mystery format, same quiet moral seriousness, different war — a coastal detective solving crimes under the shadow of WWII.

But Even more genteel; the violence and cynicism of Endeavour's Sixties are largely absent.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Get Carter1971

Same late-Sixties Britain, same class fractures and crumbling industrial towns — but stripped of nostalgia to show the violence Endeavour keeps just off-screen.

A savage, unsentimental British gangster film from almost the exact moment Endeavour is set — Michael Caine as a hitman with none of Morse's poetry, all of his era's brutality.

But Genuinely nasty and cold where Endeavour is wistful; no puzzle, no mentor, no comfort at all.

Grantchester2014

A vicar-detective double act in 1950s Cambridgeshire, wrestling with faith, sin and the same kind of doomed friendship dynamic that anchors Endeavour and Thursday.

But Warmer and more romance-plot-driven; the mysteries are often the least interesting part.

Vera2011

A brilliant, difficult detective in a landscape that's practically a character itself — trade the dreaming spires for windswept Northumberland and keep the melancholy.

But Contemporary setting loses the period pleasures that make Endeavour so distinctive.

Broadchurch2013

If you want the emotional gut-punch dialled up — a small community torn apart by one death, told with the same patience and attention to grief as Endeavour's best episodes.

But Far bleaker and more contemporary; no period comfort, no nostalgia to soften it.

Line of Duty2012

Swap period nostalgia for institutional rot — corrupt police, moral compromise, and the same sense that the job eats the people who do it well.

But Much faster, twistier, and nastier; the tenderness of Endeavour is nowhere in sight.

Midsomer Murders1998

For evenings when you want the puzzle-box pleasures of English village murder without Endeavour's heavier emotional undertow.

But Broader, campier, more comfort food than character study — a very different kind of watch.

The Bletchley Circle2012no page yet

Postwar London, women using wartime codebreaking skills to solve murders the police won't take seriously — same era, same attention to a world rebuilding itself.

But Shorter run, smaller scale, and the mysteries are tidier than anything Endeavour attempts.

Zodiac2007

Shares Endeavour's forensic patience and interest in how investigation warps the investigator, but drops the fiction's safety net of a solved case.

An obsessive, meticulous procedural about a case that consumes everyone who touches it — the same devotion to method and period detail, with none of the guaranteed resolution.

But Nearly three hours, deliberately anticlimactic, and offers no tidy solution — a hard swap for weekly mystery satisfaction.

Brideshead Revisited1981

Same institution, same doomed romanticism about a vanishing England, but told from inside the privileged world Morse only ever polices from the outside.

A gorgeous, elegiac miniseries about Oxford's golden aristocracy in decline — the very world Endeavour serves and can never belong to, seen from the inside.

But No crime, no mystery — this is pure literary drama, slow and mournful in a completely different key.