Netflix's new true-crime miniseries The Bombing of Pan Am 103 has quickly become one of the streamer's biggest hits, tapping into the platform's enormous appetite for the genre, which drew nearly half of US Netflix accounts in 2024. The six-part series revisits the investigation into the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, which killed all 259 people aboard the flight and 11 residents of the Scottish town below, and marks a departure from more sensationalist true-crime fare by focusing on the painstaking police work rather than the tragedy itself.

Rather than dwelling on the explosion, the series opens with passengers preparing to board before jumping to Detective Sergeant Ed McCusker (played by Connor Swindells) surveying the wreckage, reflecting its respectful tone towards victims. It charts the years-long, multi-agency investigation involving Scottish police, the FBI and the CIA, drawing comparisons to David Fincher's Zodiac in its procedural focus, though unlike that film and the related series Lockerbie: A Search for Truth (starring Colin Firth), it avoids favouring any particular theory or suspect, aiming instead to present the facts and let viewers draw their own conclusions.