What to Watch After Money Heist Season 1: 3 Shows Like La Casa de Papel
The heist was always an excuse. What Money Heist Season 1 really wanted was a story about people who fall apart and fall in love under impossible pressure. Three shows that keep that feeling going.
Money Heist Season 1 (La Casa de Papel, 2017, Antena 3 / Netflix, 9 episodes) earns its following not by outsmarting you with the heist logistics but by making you care about every person trapped inside the Royal Mint. The Professor has a plan. What he does not have is control over what happens to eight strangers sharing a building with 67 hostages, a crisis negotiator closing in, and roughly twelve hours before everything goes wrong in ways he did not model.
Tokyo falls for Rio inside that building. Berlin keeps the crew together through performance and menace. Nairobi keeps hope alive by simply refusing to let it die. By the time the finale arrives, the heist has become a backdrop. What you actually watched was an ensemble of damaged people choosing each other in conditions designed to break that impulse.
That is the specific feeling these three shows are trying to match.
1. Mr. Robot — USA Network, 2015–2019, 4 seasons, 45 episodes
The genius-outsider vs. the state, written with the same anti-institutional fury as the Professor’s manifesto.
Elliot Alderson is not running a heist against a mint. He is running one against the entire financial order, and he is doing it alone, or nearly alone, because most of the people around him do not know the full plan either. That is the first thing Money Heist S1 fans will recognize: a loner with an overwhelming idea and a habit of keeping the people closest to him in the dark for their own protection.
But the deeper match is emotional. Elliot does not want revolution because he is politically certain. He wants it because the world as currently arranged causes specific, daily, personal suffering, and he has decided that suffering is not tolerable. The Professor picks his crew from prisons and dead-end lives and names them after cities so they cannot become attached to each other’s real histories. Both of them are building something they cannot fully control, and both of them are, beneath the planning, terrified of what they need.
Mr. Robot earns its place on this list because it takes the anti-state romance seriously without softening it. The FBI is not incompetent. The corporation is not cartoonishly evil. The opposition is real, which means Elliot’s situation is genuinely precarious in the same way the Professor’s is. The show also carries the same ensemble habit: Darlene, Romero, Mobley, and Trenton are not background characters. They have their own reasons for being there, and those reasons keep complicating the plan.
One caveat: Mr. Robot is slower and more interior than Money Heist S1. Where La Casa de Papel keeps the pace tight and theatrical, Mr. Robot sits with Elliot’s dissociation and lets scenes breathe past the point of comfort. If you are coming in expecting the same propulsive energy, allow yourself two episodes to adjust. The payoff is there.
2. Lupin — Netflix, 2021–present, 3 parts, 17 episodes
Elegant solo-protagonist heist with the same playfulness about class, theft, and who deserves to lose.
Assàne Diop grows up watching his father destroyed by a wealthy family who decided a convenient accusation was easier than the truth. He grows up, he reads Arsène Lupin, and he decides that what he owes the world is not justice through institutions but justice through theft. That framing — the state and the rich as the real criminals, the heist as a form of moral correction — runs through Money Heist S1 with the same confidence.
Lupin is the obvious companion to Money Heist if what you loved was the Professor’s planning sequences: the watching, the preparation, the moment a carefully laid trap closes on someone who thought they were in control. Assàne has that same pleasure in his own competence, and the first part of the series builds its set pieces with the same theatrical satisfaction. The Louvre heist that opens Part 1 is a different register than the Mint heist — lighter, more playful — but it hits the same nerve.
The difference is that Lupin is a solo-protagonist story. There is no ensemble of misfits bonding under pressure; the emotional weight lands almost entirely on Assàne and what his quest costs him at home. If what you miss from Money Heist S1 is Tokyo and Rio falling for each other, or Nairobi’s loyalty to the group, Lupin will not scratch that itch directly. But if what you miss is a con artist with a genuine grievance running circles around institutions that deserve it, Lupin delivers that with a lot of warmth.
3. Vincenzo — Netflix / tvN, 2021, 20 episodes
A mafia consigliere returns to Korea and wages an absurdist war against a corrupt institution, with the same operatic emotional swings and ensemble loyalty as the Mint crew.
Vincenzo Cassano spent twenty years as the consigliere to an Italian mob family. He comes back to Korea for practical reasons and finds himself defending a run-down building full of eccentric tenants against a conglomerate that will do anything to take the land. He is not a good person. The people he ends up protecting are not waiting for a hero. What happens between them anyway is the heart of the show.
This is the pick for viewers who loved Money Heist S1’s ensemble texture most of all. The Cassano building residents — a con artist, a monk, a former gangster, a florist with a temper — have the same misfit-found-family energy as the Mint crew. They did not choose each other. They are thrown together by circumstance and kept together by something that starts as convenience and becomes something else entirely. When the stakes escalate and people start getting hurt, the grief lands because you have actually spent time with these people.
Vincenzo also shares Money Heist’s willingness to be operatically emotional without apologizing for it. It is funnier than La Casa de Papel, sometimes cartoonishly so, and it holds that comedy right next to moments of real loss without flinching. The villain is genuinely dangerous. The plan keeps nearly collapsing. The romance is earned slowly rather than rushed by adrenaline. For fans of Money Heist who also want an ensemble that feels like a family by the end, Vincenzo lands closest.
Which one to watch first
If you want the same anti-state fury and a protagonist who plans everything two steps ahead of everyone else, start with Mr. Robot. It is the most direct match to the Professor’s register.
If you want heist craft and the satisfaction of watching someone outsmart institutions that deserve it, pick Lupin. It is lighter and moves faster.
If what you miss is the ensemble — the misfits, the loyalty, the grief when the plan costs someone — Vincenzo keeps that alive the longest.
All three are on Netflix. All three reward the same instinct Money Heist S1 built in you: the feeling that the people running the game are not the ones who should win it.