20 best shows like Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls (1995)

A comedic thriller that follows the bizarre adventures of eccentric “holistic” detective Dirk Gently and his reluctant assistant Todd. An adaptation of Douglas Adams’ wildly successful comic novels.

Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders is a drama about the specialized International Division of the FBI tasked with solving crimes and coming to the rescue of Americans who find themselves in danger while abroad.

Laura Holt, a licensed private detective, opens a detective agency but finds that potential clients refuse to hire a woman, however qualified. To solve the problem, Laura invents a fictitious male superior whom she names Remington Steele. Through a series of events that unfold in the first episode, "License to Steele," a former thief and con man, whose real name is never revealed, assumes the identity of Remington Steele. Behind the scenes, Laura remains firmly in charge.

The orphaned Baudelaire children face trials, tribulations and the evil Count Olaf, all in their quest to uncover the secret of their parents' death.

Each episode transports the audience to worlds of wonder through the lens of today’s most imaginative filmmakers, directors and writers. A reimagining of the original anthology series by Steven Spielberg.

Frank Hathaway, a hardboiled private investigator, and his rookie sidekick Lu Shakespeare form the unlikeliest of partnerships as they investigate the secrets of rural Warwickshire's residents.

A 15-year-old from LA spends the summer at her mom's childhood home on an island off the coast of England, where she bonds with a mysterious horse.

Following an emotional breakup, tough but tender FBI super-agent Will Chase (codename: “Whiskey Cavalier”) is assigned to work with badass CIA operative Frankie Trowbridge (codename: “Fiery Tribune”). Together, they lead an inter-agency team of flawed, funny and heroic spies who periodically save the world (and each other) while navigating the rocky roads of friendship, romance and office politics.

Ex-cop and recovering alcoholic Hank Dolworth partners with his best friend, former criminal Britt Pollack, in an unlicensed private investigation business. The series is set in Ocean Beach, San Diego, California, although it is portrayed as a distinct town, with Dolworth having once been a member of the fictional Ocean Beach Police Department.

A tight-knit group of teens unearths a long-buried secret, setting off a chain of illicit events that takes them on an adventure they'll never forget.

Inspired by the Internet’s “404” error code, Dimension 404 aims to evoke that 3 AM feeling of wandering onto the weird side of the web, stumbling upon stories that cannot be explained in the world that we know.

Four gifted orphans are recruited by an eccentric benefactor to go on a secret mission. Placed undercover at a boarding school known as The Institute, they must foil a nefarious plot with global ramifications, while creating a new sort of family along the way.

A shipping magnate hires four experts from various fields to investigate what happened to his ships that went missing in the Bermuda Triangle. The team discovers a threat that might unravel time itself and cause the world to end.

Neal Caffrey, a con man, forger and thief, is captured after a three-year game of cat and mouse with the FBI. With only months left serving a four-year sentence, he escapes to look for Kate, his girlfriend. Peter Burke, the FBI agent who initially captured Caffrey, finds and returns him to prison. This time, Caffrey proposes a deal with the FBI, as part of a work-release program. After some hesitation, Burke agrees, and thus begins this unconventional arrangement where Caffrey helps Burke apprehend white collar criminals.

Adrian Monk was once a rising star with the San Francisco Police Department, legendary for using unconventional means to solve the department's most baffling cases. But after the tragic (and still unsolved) murder of his wife Trudy, he developed an extreme case of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Now working as a private consultant, Monk continues to investigate cases in the most unconventional ways.

Set in a single room of an average American motel, each episode tells a different story of the assorted characters who pass through it.

Ichabod Crane is resurrected and pulled two and a half centuries through time to unravel a mystery that dates all the way back to the founding fathers.

Murphy is a flawed and irreverent woman who just happens to be blind and is the only “witness” to the murder of her drug-dealing friend, Tyson. When the police dismiss her story, she sets out with her dog, Pretzel, to find the killer while also managing her colorful dating life and the job she hates at Breaking Blind — the guide-dog school owned by her overprotective parents.

A skeptic is forced to work with a firm believer of the paranormal on unexplained occurrences in Los Angeles.

House of Anubis is a jointly Nickelodeon British, American, and Belgian mystery television series based on the Dutch-Belgian television series Het Huis Anubis aired in the Netherlands and Belgium. The series was created by Hans Bourlon and Gert Verhulst and premiered on Nickelodeon on New Year's Day 2011 in the United States and on 25 February 2011 in the United Kingdom. The series is the first Nickelodeon series to be filmed overseas, the first soap opera created by Nickelodeon and the channel's first soap opera aimed at children and teenagers. As of 25 February, the program will be broadcast on TeenNick. The show has since concluded its third season and as of 28 September 2013 Nickelodeon has not announced a fourth season.

The super-charged comedy-horror series is a modern take on the classic whodunit with a killer cast. 

Thomas Magnum, a decorated former Navy SEAL who, upon returning home from Afghanistan, repurposes his military skills to become a private investigator in Hawaii taking jobs no one else will with the help of fellow vets T.C. Calvin and Rick Wright, and the former MI:6 agent Higgins.

Everything changes when Alex Rider learns that his uncle Ian has actually been killed in the line of duty as a British spy. The normal teen is approached by the head of The Department and pressured to help investigate his uncle's death. Alex reluctantly assumes a new identity and goes undercover in a remote boarding school called Point Blanc.

Siberia is an American mockumentary series about a reality television show where 16 contestants must survive in the Siberian territory of Tunguska. The show was filmed in Birds Hill Provincial Park just north of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. It premiered on NBC on July 1, 2013. The first season was met with generally favorable reviews from critics and viewers, with average viewership per episode coming in around 2.03 million viewers. Metacritic scored the show with a 63 out of 100. The series concluded its first season on September 16, 2013.

Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre is an American anthology series, sponsored by Chrysler Corporation, which ran on NBC from 1963 through 1967. The show was hosted by Bob Hope, but it had a variety of formats, including musical, dramatic, and comedy.

While traveling across the country in a run-down RV, drag queen Ruby Red discovers an unlikely sidekick in AJ: a tough-talking 10-year-old stowaway.

Detective Lieutenant Everett Backstrom is a man with no filter. After a five-year exile to the traffic division for offensive behavior, he has returned from disgrace to lead Portland's newly minted S.C.U. Tasked with navigating the city's most sensitive and serious cases, he must solve each crime as he tries, and fails, to change his own self-destructive behavior. Based on renowned Swedish criminologist and novelist Leif G.W. Persson’s hit series of books of the same name.

Sleuthy foster siblings Max, Tess, Sal, Anika, and Daniel Hunter find new quests, more mysteries, and even new Hunter sibs!

A medical student who becomes a zombie joins a Coroner's Office in order to gain access to the brains she must reluctantly eat so that she can maintain her humanity. But every brain she eats, she also inherits their memories and must now solve their deaths with help from the Medical examiner and a police detective.

Flight attendant Cassandra Bowden wakes in her hotel room hungover from the night before in Dubai with a dead body lying next to her. Afraid to call the police, she continues her morning as if nothing happened. In New York, she is met by FBI agents who question her about her recent layover in Dubai. Still unable to piece the night together, she begins to wonder if she could be the killer.

Terra Nova follows an ordinary family on an incredible journey back in time to prehistoric Earth as a small part of a daring experiment to save the human race. In the year 2149, the world is dying. The planet is overdeveloped and overcrowded, with the majority of plant and animal life extinct. The future of mankind is in jeopardy, and its only hope for survival is in the distant past.

The space family Robinson is sent on a five-year mission to find a new planet to colonise. The voyage is sabotaged time and again by an inept stowaway, Dr. Zachary Smith. The family's spaceship, Jupiter II, also carries a friendly robot who endures an endless stream of abuse from Dr. Smith, but is a trusted companion of young Will Robinson

In a place where young witches, vampires, and werewolves are nurtured to be their best selves in spite of their worst impulses, Klaus Mikaelson’s daughter, 17-year-old Hope Mikaelson, Alaric Saltzman’s twins, Lizzie and Josie Saltzman, among others, come of age into heroes and villains at The Salvatore School for the Young and Gifted.

After crash-landing on an alien planet, the Robinson family fights against all odds to survive and escape. But they're surrounded by hidden dangers.

At the Castle of Gormenghast, the Groan family has ruled with dusty ceremony for more than seventy generations. A clever and ambitious new kitchen boy, Steerpike, begins to insinuate himself into the affections of Lady Fuchsia Groan and to murder his way to power.

In Victorian England, the young and beautiful Alice tells a tale of a strange new land that exists on the other side of a rabbit hole. Thinking Alice insane, her doctors aim to make her forget everything. While Alice is ready to put it all behind her, she knows this world is real. In the nick of time, the Knave of Hearts and the White Rabbit save her from a doomed fate. Together, the trio tumble down the rabbit hole to Wonderland, where nothing is impossible.

The 10th Kingdom is an American fairytale fantasy miniseries written by Simon Moore and produced by Britain's Carnival Films, Germany's Babelsberg Film und Fernsehen, and the USA's Hallmark Entertainment. It depicts the adventures of a young woman and her father after they are transported from Manhattan, New York, through a magical mirror into a parallel world of fairy tales, magical beings, evil stepmothers and self-discovery. The miniseries was initially broadcast over five nights in two-hour episodes on NBC, beginning February 27, 2000. It garnered good reviews but very poor ratings. It won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Main Title Design in 2000.

400 years after the extinction of the human race, a small group of humans are revived by an alien civilization. The colony of revived humans encounter struggles with the aliens who extinguished humankind centuries before, while trying to understand and get along with the mysterious aliens who revived them.

Crash-landed alien Harry takes on the identity of a small-town Colorado doctor. Arriving with a secret mission, he starts off living a simple life…but things get a bit rocky when he’s roped into solving a local murder and realizes he needs to assimilate into his new world. As he does, he begins to wrestle with the moral dilemma of his mission and asking the big life questions like: “Are human beings worth saving?” and “Why do they fold their pizza before eating it?”

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.

Leyla ile Mecnun is a Turkish television comedy series. The show is set in Istanbul, Turkey and premiered in 2011 on TRT. The series is a surreal and absurd comedy that revolves around the fictional love story between Leyla and Mecnun.

Relic Hunter is an anglophone Canadian television series, starring Tia Carrere and Christien Anholt. Actress Lindy Booth also starred for the first two seasons; Tanja Reichert replaced her for the third. It was inspired by the success of the video game Tomb Raider. It centers around Sydney Fox who is a professor but primarily a globe-trotting "relic hunter", looking for ancient artifacts to return to museums and/or the descendants of the original owner. She is aided by her linguistic assistant Nigel and occasionally by her somewhat air-headed secretary Claudia. She often ends up battling rival hunters seeking out artifacts for the money. The series includes fantasy and science fiction elements, with many of the relics featured having genuine supernatural powers or being pieces of unusually advanced technology. It ran for three seasons in the U.S. between 1999 and 2002 after fulfilling its initial three-season, 66-episode contract, from which it was not renewed. In both Ireland and the United Kingdom, it is aired on Sky1 and subsidiary channels, while in Canada, it is aired on CityTV and Space, CTV's sister network A-Channel and recently Showcase. The series was shot in the Toronto area, explaining Carrere's frequent attendance in courtside seats at Toronto Raptors games during the time.

A dysfunctional family of superheroes comes together to solve the mystery of their father's death, the threat of the apocalypse and more.

Desperate Housewives is an American television comedy-drama-mystery series created by Marc Cherry and produced by ABC Studios and Cherry Productions. It aired Sundays at 9 P.M. Eastern/8 P.M. Central, on ABC from October 3, 2004, until May 13, 2012. Executive producer Cherry served as showrunner. Other executive producers since the fourth season included Bob Daily, George W. Perkins, John Pardee, Joey Murphy, David Grossman, and Larry Shaw. The main setting of the show was Wisteria Lane, a street in the fictional American town of 'Fairview' in the fictional 'Eagle State'. The show followed the lives of a group of women as seen through the eyes of a dead neighbor who committed suicide in the very first episode. The storyline covers thirteen years of the women's lives over eight seasons, set between the years 2004–2008, and later 2013–2017. They worked through domestic struggles and family life, while facing the secrets, crimes and mysteries hidden behind the doors of their — at the surface — beautiful and seemingly perfect suburban neighborhood. The show featured an ensemble cast, headed by Teri Hatcher as Susan Mayer, Felicity Huffman as Lynette Scavo, Marcia Cross as Bree Van de Kamp, and Eva Longoria as Gabrielle Solis. Brenda Strong narrated the show as the deceased Mary Alice Young, appearing sporadically in flashbacks or dream sequences.

The anthology horror series follows 25-year-old Atticus Freeman, who joins up with his friend Letitia and his Uncle George to embark on a road trip across 1950s Jim Crow America to find his missing father. They must survive and overcome both the racist terrors of white America and the malevolent spirits that could be ripped from a Lovecraft paperback.

Los Simuladores is an Argentine television series about a small team of con artists for hire, who use their skills to solve common people's life problems. The show ran for two seasons, from 2002 to 2003. It was very popular and highly acclaimed, winning a Golden Martín Fierro Award. A number of remakes have been produced for various markets worldwide. There are also plans to release a film based on the series. The original series was produced and aired by the Argentine network Telefé, and ran for two 13-episode seasons in 2002 and 2003. The series is occasionally shown in reruns on Telefé. Remakes were soon produced in Chile and in Spain, using some of the same actors and production members. Another remake was made in Russia. Since 2008, Sony Pictures Television International has produced a remake for Mexican television network Televisa; as of late 2010, early production is starting on a third season, in which Salma Hayek is scheduled to appear.