THE ORB HAS SPOKEN: The Lab Coat Wins as the Forensic Detective Takes the TV Thriller Crown and the Streetwise Informant Slinks Back Into the Alley

Gather close, darlings, and keep your fingerprints off the orb. I turned the cards on the most argued-about question of the streaming age: which kind of lead detective really defines the modern TV thriller? Five camps sat around my velvet table. The serial case sleuth, the forensic lab detective, the courtroom strategist, the streetwise informant and the supernatural investigator. The smoke has cleared, the verdict is in, and it arrived wearing latex gloves.

First, the omens. Nobody owns this genre, and the research brief only covers a corner of it, but the corner is telling. Critics of Nordic noir say its leads are gloomy, worn-out figures rather than tidy heroes, and that their messy private lives mirror wider social problems. Over in Baltimore, David Simon argued that the police in The Wire are driven more by a sense of intellectual superiority over criminals than by any wish to protect the public, and plenty of them come across as incompetent or tangled in red tape. Procedurals are everywhere anyway: they have made up about a fifth of scripted shows on US broadcast networks over the past decade, according to the genre's Wikipedia entry, even as critics question how those shows portray officers.

The brooding detective is doing fine on screen, too. The fourth season of True Detective, developed by Issa López with Jodie Foster in the lead, became the most-watched season of the series, averaging more than twelve million cross-platform viewers. And the ABC's October preview introduces Dustfall, a gritty small-town mystery in which Anna Torv's detective Antigone Pollard pursues a brutal sexual assault case while confronting her own past. Weary souls carrying their wounds onto the job. The cards know the type.

Now the crowd, who put real money behind their gut feelings on Morfi's opinion markets. The Forensic Lab Detective sits on top at 30% consensus. The Streetwise Informant trails at 23%, still lurking in the doorway with its collar turned up. Further back, the rest of the ballot: 3 other sides. That's 77 traders and $411,008 staked, all in under a day of trading. Funny, though. Every trembling-handed antihero in the background reading above is a gut-feel, street-level creature, and the crowd went and crowned the one who trusts a centrifuge over a hunch.

This is only my opinion, but I think the crowd has fallen for certainty. In an age when nobody trusts anybody, a swab doesn't lie, a blood spatter pattern has no union rep, and a mass spectrometer has never been caught leaning on a witness. The informant, the lawyer and the ghost-whisperer all ask you to believe a person. The lab detective asks you to believe a machine, and these days that apparently feels more romantic. Me? A fortune teller is meant to root for the supernatural investigator, and I'm wounded on behalf of my people. Still, the cards don't care what I want, and today they smell of bleach.

What to watch: this market has barely opened its eyes, and one hard-boiled premiere could tip the balance. If Dustfall's haunted, past-dragging detective takes hold this October, the streetwise and serial-sleuth camps may come back from the grave. The orb is cloudy, the lead is real but young, and you can still change its fate. Join the market on Morfi and put your coin on the detective you believe in.