New York City just announced its murder count for 2025, and it’s a measly 305, down 86 percent from the 1990 peak, making last year one of the safest in recent Gotham’s history. If you turned on a TV, though, the Big Apple looked like Fallujah with better lighting. Square-jawed detectives were tripping over corpses at midtown construction sites, blind vigilantes were redecorating Hell’s Kitchen with body parts and even poor Lester the doorman ended up dead in an Upper West Side courtyard fountain.
In fact, for the first time in modern memory, there were more manslaughters in New York on TV — on such shows as Law & Order, Daredevil: Born Again and Only Murders in the Building — than there were in the actual brick-and-mortar city. At least that’s going by Rambling Reporter’s semi-scientific calculations. We combed through episode guides and scanned synopses and flagged any references to corpses and killers, and by our estimation there were 347 slayings on New York City soundstages in 2025, 42 more than on the real streets.
To be honest, some shows were so lethal, it was hard to keep track — we had to make an educated guess as to how many people were bitten to death by the hordes of zombies overrunning Manhattan in the season opener of The Walking Dead: Dead City (we conservatively counted 10). For other shows, like the quirky procedural Elsbeth, we added just one corpse — usually a ballet dancer or a college basketball star — per episode. On FBI, the tally depended on the week — sometimes zero, sometimes a small pile.
Of course, it’s possible our ballpark figures may be off by a slaying or two — but more likely we’re undercounting here. We restricted our survey to 40 shows, counted only new episodes — no reruns — and were limited in our research to free episode synopses and whatever else we could find online. With more resources — and another pot of coffee — Rambling suspects it could have uncovered a much bigger, bloodier number of TV murders.
New York, by the way, isn’t even the country’s most dangerous city. That would currently be Memphis, Tennessee — but it’s not nearly as telegenic.
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Also in Rambling Reporter:
Diane Warren reacts to being mistaken at the Globes for Ghislaine Maxwell; Rambling Reporter investigates the mystery of Jeff Bezos’ shaggy shrubberies, which flagrantly flout city ordinances.
This story appeared in the Feb. 11 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
