What to Watch After Money Heist Season 3: 3 Shows Like La Casa de Papel Part 3
The Bank of Spain heist has started. Palermo is running the floor. Sierra is already one step ahead. If that energy is what you want next, here are three shows that earn the same thing La Casa de Papel Part 3 earns.
Season 3 does something harder than Season 1. It asks whether a sequel can justify itself.
Sergio (Álvaro Morte) and the others got out. They had the money, they had Lisbon, they had paradise in an undisclosed beach house. The first two parts earned that ending. Bringing them back two years later is a risk, and Part 3 knows it. That awareness is part of why it works: Palermo walks in with a plan that is bigger and more reckless than the Royal Mint job, Marseille and Bogotá come with it, and Inspector Sierra arrives as a different kind of problem than Alicia was. Sierra does not believe in the Professor’s mystique. She believes in pressure.
The taste tags that make Part 3 hit are specific: heist sequels that earn the return, ensembles rebalanced by new members, and antagonists who outclass whoever held the role before. The three picks below match on exactly those nodes.
1. Better Call Saul
The prequel-sequel that justified going back. 2015–2022, AMC / Netflix.
Pick Better Call Saul if what Part 3 gave you was the feeling of a world you already knew expanding into something you had not expected.
The premise is a return: Vince Gilligan going back to the Breaking Bad universe six years after Walter White's story ended. On paper that feels like it should be diminishing. What Better Call Saul does instead is demonstrate that the prequel can outperform the original on character depth without needing to match it on spectacle. Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) starts as a public defender scraping for clients in Albuquerque. The show has six seasons to trace exactly how he becomes Saul Goodman, and it does not rush a single year of it.
The match to Part 3 is not the crime. It is the dynamic between a plan and the person who holds it together. Sergio runs operations from the outside; he controls everything until he cannot. Jimmy does the same thing across a longer arc. Both of them build elaborate structures around themselves that protect other people while quietly costing them everything they actually want.
Better Call Saul also delivers the new antagonist problem. Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) enters the story with a different register entirely from what came before. He is organized, patient, and does not lose his composure. Sierra enters Part 3 with the same quality. She is not outmatched by the plan. She is already working around it.
If the Part 3 moment that stuck with you was Palermo and Sergio arguing about who controls the operation while Sierra closes in from outside, Better Call Saul is where you go next.
Take the Better Call Saul character quiz →
2. Andor
The Star Wars return that earned every minute. 2022, Disney+.
Pick Andor if the thing Part 3 gave you was the sensation of a universe you had written off proving there was more in it.
Andor is a Star Wars prequel to Rogue One, which was itself a prequel. That framing should be exhausting. It is not. Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) in the first two episodes is a low-level operator in a backwater trading post, hiding from his own past. The Rebellion is not a cause yet. It is barely a word. The show spends its first season asking what it actually costs to become the person who commits to something that will probably kill him.
The ensemble is where the match to Part 3 lives. Andor brings new characters into the story at each arc—Luthen Rael, Vel Sartha, the prisoners of Narkina 5—and each of them lands with the weight of someone who has a life outside the operation. That is the same texture Bogotá and Marseille bring into Part 3. They are not additions to pad the group. They come with history.
The antagonist parallel is also there. Dedra Meero (Denise Gough) at the ISB starts from a position that nobody takes seriously and becomes the most dangerous presence in the season. She does not have the most power in the room. She is just more willing to follow the logic all the way to the end than anyone else is. Sierra operates the same way. Both of them are more frightening for being right.
Andor also handles the question Part 3 keeps circling: what do you do when the plan you built to protect people starts to demand things you did not agree to? Luthen carries that weight across the whole season. Sergio starts to carry it the moment he agrees to go back.
Take the Andor character quiz →
3. The Wire Season 3
The season that expanded the system while keeping the crew intact. 2004, HBO / Max.
Pick The Wire Season 3 if what Part 3 gave you was a sequel that changed the scale of the operation without abandoning the people you already cared about.
A note first: The Wire is not easy to start in the middle. Season 3 rewards people who have seen Seasons 1 and 2. If you have not, start from the beginning—the payoff is worth it and Season 3 is where everything the earlier seasons built arrives at its fullest form. If you have already seen the first two seasons and want to know why Season 3 belongs here, the answer is in how it handles expansion.
Season 3 introduces Carcetti (Aidan Gillen), a city council member beginning a mayoral campaign against the incumbent, and Bunny Colvin (Robert Wisdom), a police major who decides on his own to solve the drug corner problem with a radical experiment. Both of them enter a world that already has its power structures—the Barksdale organization, the detail, the department—and neither of them asks permission to change the rules of engagement.
That is the Part 3 energy exactly. Palermo does not negotiate with Sergio about taking control of operations inside the bank. He presents a plan and assumes authority. It creates the same friction The Wire Season 3 lives in: the original ensemble, now with new power centers inside it, trying to hold the job together while competing visions of how to run it rub against each other.
Marlo Stanfield (Jamie Hector) arrives in Season 3 as well. He is younger than Avon Barksdale, less sentimental, and interested in territory in a way that Avon sometimes is not. He has more in common with Sierra than with any previous antagonist in the series: he does not care about the rules the other players use to contain their conflicts. He is already operating outside them.
If Part 3 worked for you because it let the ensemble breathe while the pressure multiplied, Season 3 of The Wire delivers that at a higher pitch than almost anything else on television.
A note on Money Heist: Korea
The Korean remake (Money Heist: Korea – Joint Economic Area, 2022, Netflix) is worth knowing about as a curiosity rather than a direct substitute. It relocates the premise to the Korean peninsula in a speculative near-future where North and South Korea are beginning economic unification, which gives the heist political weight the original does not have in the same way. The characters carry familiar names—Professor, Tokyo, Berlin—but they are different people with different histories.
It is not a replacement for La Casa de Papel Part 3 and it does not try to be. The pacing is slower in the first half and the emotional register is closer to melodrama than thriller. But if you want to see what a completely different creative team does with the same skeleton, it is a coherent and often surprising answer to that question. Think of it as a variant, not a continuation.
Which one to start with
If Part 3 worked because of the sequel dynamic—the feeling of a world you trusted being rebuilt with a harder job and a smarter opponent—start with Better Call Saul. It is the purest version of that feeling across six seasons.
If Part 3 worked because of the new crew members landing with real weight—Bogotá with his grief, Marseille with his loyalty, Palermo with his ego—start with Andor. It does that same thing with the Rebellion one episode at a time.
If Part 3 worked because it expanded the room and made the antagonist genuinely dangerous, start from the beginning of The Wire and reach Season 3 when you get there. You will not want to stop before it.