Anime Like Shantaram
If you loved Shantaram's Crime and Drama storytelling, these anime deliver a similar experience — selected for art style, narrative depth, and emotional impact. Each includes where to stream it now.
★ Top Picks
Grace
Brighton based Detective Superintendent Roy Grace is a hard-working police officer who has given his life to the job, but his career is currently at rock bottom. He’s fixated by the disappearance of his beloved wife, Sandy, and running enquiries into long forgotten cold cases with little prospect of success. Following another reprimand for his unorthodox police methods, Grace is walking a career tightrope and risks being moved from the job he loves most.
Crime Story
The hard-boiled saga of hair-trigger cop Lieutenant Mike Torello and his obsessive pursuit of ruthless gangster Ray Luca.
American Crime Story
An anthology series centered around some of history's most famous criminal investigations.
Castle
After a serial killer imitates the plots of his novels, successful mystery novelist Richard "Rick" Castle receives permission from the Mayor of New York City to tag along with an NYPD homicide investigation team for research purposes.
We Own This City
The story of the rise and fall of the Baltimore Police Department's Gun Trace Task Force — and the corruption and moral collapse that befell an American city in which the policies of drug prohibition and mass arrest were championed at the expense of actual police work.
The Sinner
In a small New York town, a haunted detective hunts for answers about perplexing crimes while wrestling with his own demons.
Peaky Blinders
A gangster family epic set in 1919 Birmingham, England and centered on a gang who sew razor blades in the peaks of their caps, and their fierce boss Tommy Shelby, who means to move up in the world.
Godfather of Harlem
Loosely based on infamous crime boss Bumpy Johnson, who in the early 1960s returned from ten years in prison to find the neighborhood he once ruled in shambles. With the streets controlled by the Italian mob, Bumpy attempts to regain his piece of Harlem.
More Anime Like Shantaram
Full Circle
An investigation into a botched kidnapping uncovers long-held secrets connecting multiple characters and cultures in present day New York City.
Dalgliesh
A recent widower and acclaimed poet, enigmatic Inspector Adam Dalgliesh employs his exceptional empathy and insight to plumb the darker depths of the human psyche while investigating complex crimes in 1970s England.
Big Sky
Private detective Cassie Dewell partners with ex-cop Jenny Hoyt on a search for two sisters who have been kidnapped by a truck driver on a remote highway in Montana. When they discover that these are not the only girls who have disappeared in the area, they must race against the clock to stop the perpetrator before another woman is taken.
Better
After a family tragedy is narrowly averted, a corrupt police detective undergoes a painful moral awakening and decides to put right twenty years of wrongdoing but satisfying her newfound conscience won't be straightforward.
Seven Seconds
Tensions run high between African American citizens and Caucasian cops in Jersey City when a teenage African American boy is critically injured by a cop.
Power Book IV: Force
Tommy Egan leaves New York behind and plans to take on Chicago, using his outsider status to break all the local rules and rewrite them on his quest to become the biggest drug dealer in the city.
Murder in a Small Town
Karl Alberg moves to a quiet coastal town to soothe a psyche that has been battered by big-city police work but finds himself needing to call upon all his skills to solve the murders that continue to wash up on his shore.
CSI: Vegas
Facing an existential threat that could bring down the Crime Lab, a brilliant team of forensic investigators must welcome back old friends and deploy new techniques to preserve and serve justice in Sin City.
The Wire
Told from the points of view of both the Baltimore homicide and narcotics detectives and their targets, the series captures a universe in which the national war on drugs has become a permanent, self-sustaining bureaucracy, and distinctions between good and evil are routinely obliterated.
The Act
A seasonal anthology series that tells startling, stranger-than-fiction true crime stories with the first season following Gypsy Blanchard, a girl trying to escape the toxic relationship she has with her overprotective mother.
Why These Anime Are Similar
These recommendations share core qualities with Shantaram (2022): Crime and Drama themes, comparable animation style, and similar narrative pacing. NoBadPicks uses TMDB collaborative filtering, genre matching, and AI analysis to surface anime most likely to resonate with fans of Shantaram.
See full details for Shantaram (2022)