TV Crime Dramas Trivia
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49 free TV Crime Dramas trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Crime drama is television's most durable genre. A rumpled lieutenant in a raincoat, a chemistry teacher with a lung-cancer diagnosis, a Belgian with a waxed moustache and a detective in a mac and hat have each held audiences for a decade or more, and the best shows are remembered for details: a catchphrase, a car, a theme tune, the city that became a character. These 49 questions cover every precinct: the American procedurals from Dragnet to Law & Order, CSI and NCIS; the prestige era of The Sopranos, The Wire and Breaking Bad; British favourites from Morse, Poirot and Midsomer Murders to Luther, Vera, Broadchurch and Happy Valley; and the European wave of The Bridge, Money Heist and Gomorrah. You will be asked who played whom, where the shows are set, and which famous lines were never actually said. Built for pub quiz hosts, trivia nights and anyone who has just finished a box set. Play it on your phone with instant answers and explanations, or print it for the table.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Breaking Bad is set in which New Mexico city, chosen over Riverside, California, for its tax breaks?
Albuquerque
Albuquerque was Sony's suggestion: Vince Gilligan's early scripts were set in Riverside until New Mexico's production incentives moved the show, and the city became a character in its own right.
Q 02Which actor, who lost his right eye to cancer at three, played the rumpled Lieutenant Columbo?
Peter Falk
Peter Falk's artificial eye gave Columbo his trademark squint, and the shabby raincoat was Falk's own coat. He won four Emmys in the role between 1972 and 1990.
Q 03Who played Holmes opposite Martin Freeman's Watson in the BBC's Sherlock?
Benedict Cumberbatch
Benedict Cumberbatch was the only actor the producers saw for Sherlock; the harder job, they said, was finding a Watson with the right chemistry.
Q 04Former police reporter David Simon set The Wire's drug corners, docks and schools in which US city?
Baltimore
Baltimore was Simon's beat at The Baltimore Sun, and each season of The Wire takes on a different institution of the city, from the port to the schools to the newspaper itself.
Q 05Which band's 1978 single is the theme of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation?
The Who
The Who's "Who Are You", written by Pete Townshend, is the CSI theme, and singer Roger Daltrey later guest-starred as mobster Mickey Dunn in the season-seven episode "Living Legend".
Q 06The Sopranos ended with a sudden cut to black in a diner while which Journey song played?
Don't Stop Believin'
Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" nearly stayed off air: Steve Perry refused to clear it until David Chase promised it would not soundtrack a death scene. The silence that follows made many viewers think their cable had cut out.
Q 07Showtime's vigilante killer Dexter Morgan works for Miami Metro police in which forensic speciality?
Blood spatter analysis
Blood spatter analysis is his cover: Dexter works crime scenes by day and kills by night, following a code from his adoptive father, a policeman, to target only murderers who escaped justice.
Q 08Money Heist's robbers, known by city names like Tokyo and Berlin, wear masks of which artist's face?
Salvador Dalí
Salvador Dalí's moustached face was picked as an instantly recognisable symbol of Spain; the designers first drew a Don Quixote mask and dropped it.
Q 09Which FBI agent, played by Kyle MacLachlan, comes to Twin Peaks to investigate Laura Palmer's murder?
Dale Cooper
Dale Cooper's first clue is a tiny typed letter "R" under Laura Palmer's fingernail, which matches a killing in south-west Washington the year before and turns one murder into a serial case.
Q 10Who played the tormented London detective John Luther in Luther?
Idris Elba
Idris Elba's Luther was written by Neil Cross, and its first series pairs him with Ruth Wilson's murderer Alice Morgan, with whom the detective forms a dangerously complicated bond.
Q 11Which actor, recommended by Agatha Christie's family, played Hercule Poirot on ITV from 1989 to 2013?
David Suchet
David Suchet had been in a Poirot film before, as Inspector Japp opposite Peter Ustinov in 1985; on ITV he went on to film every major Poirot story, 70 episodes in all.
Q 12Which daughter of 1950s star Jayne Mansfield has played Olivia Benson on Law & Order: SVU since 1999?
Mariska Hargitay
Mariska Hargitay received thousands of letters from viewers disclosing abuse after taking the role, and answered them in 2004 by founding the Joyful Heart Foundation for survivors.
Q 13Who played the nihilistic Louisiana detective Rust Cohle opposite Woody Harrelson in True Detective?
Matthew McConaughey
Q 21Which Jed Mercurio series follows AC-12, an anti-corruption unit led by Adrian Dunbar's Ted Hastings?
Line of Duty
Line of Duty was turned down by BBC One in 2011 and sent to BBC Two, where it became the channel's highest-rated series in a decade before being promoted to BBC One for series four.
Q 22What is Inspector Morse's first name, kept secret until the episode "Death Is Now My Neighbour"?
Endeavour
Endeavour came from Captain Cook's ship, chosen by a Cook-admiring father and a Quaker mother fond of virtue names; Morse's on-screen clue is "My whole life's effort has revolved around Eve, nine letters".
Q 23NCIS was launched as a two-episode backdoor pilot inside which Donald P. Bellisario legal drama?
JAG
Matthew McConaughey was first offered Marty Hart, the part closer to his past work, and asked to play Rust Cohle instead; Woody Harrelson then joined as Hart.
Q 14Narcos' first two seasons follow DEA agents Murphy and Peña as they hunt which Medellín cartel boss?
Pablo Escobar
Pablo Escobar is played by the Brazilian Wagner Moura, whose Portuguese-tinged accent was mocked in Colombia as all wrong for a Paisa from Medellín.
Q 15Peaky Blinders follows Tommy Shelby's gang in the months after the First World War in which English city?
Birmingham
Birmingham really had Peaky Blinders, street gangs first reported in 1890 whose name outlived them, though historian Carl Chinn says they had vanished before the First World War.
Q 16Jessica Fletcher of Murder, She Wrote lives in Cabot Cove, a fictional coastal town in which US state?
Maine
Maine's Cabot Cove was filmed a continent away: its exteriors are Mendocino, a town on the northern California coast.
Q 17Ozark's money-laundering adviser Marty Byrde moves his family from a Chicago suburb to which state?
Missouri
Missouri's Lake of the Ozarks is where the Byrdes land, in the resort town of Osage Beach, after Marty talks a Mexican cartel into a bigger laundering operation as amends for a scheme gone wrong.
Q 18Fargo's first TV season unfolds around Bemidji, a town in which US state?
Minnesota
Minnesota's Bemidji, not Fargo, is where Billy Bob Thornton's hitman Lorne Malvo crashes his car and meets Martin Freeman's henpecked insurance salesman Lester Nygaard.
Q 19Which actor won three Emmys as Adrian Monk, San Francisco's obsessive-compulsive "defective detective"?
Tony Shalhoub
Tony Shalhoub's three Emmys for Monk all came in the comedy category; ABC developed the show, handed it to USA Network, then ended up airing its repeats.
Q 20Brenda Blethyn's dishevelled DCI Vera Stanhope polices which north-east English county in Vera?
Northumberland
Northumberland's Vera reached television by chance: producer Elaine Collins found Ann Cleeves's novel The Crow Trap in a north London Oxfam shop while hunting for holiday reading.
JAG introduced Gibbs, DiNozzo and Abby in its 2003 episodes "Ice Queen" and "Meltdown", then ended two years later after ten seasons; its spin-off has run more than twice as long.
Q 24Criminal Minds' Behavioral Analysis Unit, under Aaron Hotchner, calls the killer it hunts by what shorthand?
Unsub
Unsub is short for unknown subject, and the Behavioral Analysis Unit builds a profile of the unsub's behaviour long before it has a name or a face.
Q 25Bones' heroine Temperance Brennan is based on the life and novels of which real forensic anthropologist?
Kathy Reichs
Kathy Reichs produced the show, and in the Bones universe Brennan writes bestselling novels whose heroine is in turn named Kathy Reichs.
Q 26Telly Savalas's bald, lollipop-sucking lieutenant asked "Who loves ya, baby?" in which 1970s series?
Kojak
Kojak's lollipop first appeared in a December 1973 episode as part of an effort to curb his smoking, one that never quite worked: he went on lighting cigarillos for the rest of the run.
Q 27"Let's be careful out there" closed roll call in which 1980s police drama from writer Steven Bochco?
Hill Street Blues
Hill Street Blues' Sergeant Phil Esterhaus delivered the line until actor Michael Conrad died during season four, when Sergeant Lucy Bates kept it going as a tribute.
Q 28Which catchphrase, spread by Stan Freberg's 1953 parody record, is forever linked to Dragnet's Sergeant Joe Friday?
Just the facts, ma'am
"Just the facts, ma'am" was not what Friday usually said: his regular Dragnet line was "All we want are the facts, ma'am", and Stan Freberg's chart-topping 1953 spoof reworded it.
Q 29Sofia Helin's The Bridge opens with a body, cut in half, laid on the border between which two countries?
Denmark and Sweden
Denmark and Sweden both claim the case because the corpse lies at the midpoint of the Øresund Bridge, forcing Malmö's Saga Norén and Copenhagen's Martin Rohde to work together.
Q 30John Thaw's The Sweeney takes its title from Cockney rhyming slang for which Scotland Yard unit?
The Flying Squad
The Flying Squad is "Sweeney Todd" in Cockney rhyming slang, and the show's timing was pointed: in 1977, midway through its run, the real squad's commander was jailed for corruption.