Netflix’s Dept. Q Is One Character Short of a Great Detective Show

Dept. Q, a Netflix crime drama from The Queen’s Gambit writer-director Scott Frank, presents itself as a show about difficult people. Its antihero, Edinburgh police detective Carl Morck, has just come back to work after being shot in the line of duty—while berating a young cop who was killed before Carl, distracted by anger, had a chance to finish his rant. Body cam footage of the shooting, along with an already-irascible reputation, ensures his return is anything but triumphant. The premiere also introduces Merritt Lingard, a prickly prosecutor whose hostile cross-examination of a man she’s sure murdered his wife infuriates her colleagues. “You go too far,” Merritt’s boss warns her. Carl’s superiors feel similarly about his aggressive approach.

There’s great potential in the entwining of these “good guys” with bad personalities whose obsessive pursuit of justice has left them isolated and embittered. If only the show’s many plot twists didn’t limit its parallel accounts of abrasive crusaders navigating a flawed criminal justice system by limiting viewers’ perspective on Merritt (Chloe Pirrie). Frank, adapting a series of novels by Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen, is ultimately more invested in Carl’s side of the story. What is, in one sense, a disappointing choice does have the benefit of setting up a detective series that has the potential to run for many seasons without getting old, thanks to characters and performances much richer than we normally see in this overcrowded genre.

As portrayed by the wonderful Matthew Goode—a charming period-drama stalwart who made impressions as The Crown’s Lord Snowdon, Downton Abbey’s Henry Talbot, and The Offer’s Robert Evans—Carl, an Englishman who complains incessantly about his adoptive home of Scotland, is as fascinating in his transparently self-protective arrogance as he is frustrating. “The phrase superiority complex seems to be the overall theme of your personnel file,” notes Dr. Irving (a wry Kelly Macdonald), the therapist he’s required to see as a condition of his return to work. He replies that he’s less impressed with himself than he is unimpressed by other people. It gradually becomes apparent that this attitude is his way of suppressing his guilt over not just his inferior’s death, but also the grave injury suffered by still-hospitalized partner, DCI James Hardy (Jamie Sives), in an incident for which everyone around Carl seems to blame him.

A more formulaic detective show would send him on a rogue mission to apprehend the mysterious assailant who shot all three cops, shortly after they arrived on the scene of a wellness check that yielded the discovery of a body. Yet Frank, who wrote or co-wrote all nine episodes and directed six, makes the intriguing decision to keep that case mostly in the background. The season focuses, instead, on Carl’s new assignment to establish Department Q—a cold-case division funded by law-enforcement leaders bent on generating positive press by creating fodder for true crime podcasts. This role is hardly an honor. Carl’s supervisor, Moira (Kate Dickie), a woman with a perma-grimace who despises him, resents being forced to reopen old cases when she urgently needs resources for active ones. So she gives Carl a box of yellowing files to choose from, banishes him to a murky sub-basement that used to be the building’s shower room, and uses his budget to buy everyone else new computers.

Though Moira is none too eager to give him the help he needs, Hardy has nothing better to do while convalescing than scrutinize evidence, and Dept. Q eventually cobbles together a small staff. Detective Constable Rose Dickson (Leah Byrne) has been confined to her desk since a car accident shattered her nerves. Unpleasant as it can be, working with Carl gives the young officer a chance to get back in the field, where her warmth and people skills win over essential allies he alienates. Recruited from IT, Syrian refugee Akram Salim (Alexej Manvelov), who claims to have relevant experience from his home country, has been bugging Moira to put him on the force. Like Carl, Akram crosses lines, though his transgressions are fueled by expediency rather than temper. “Back home, were you working for the good guys or the bad guys?” Carl asks him. “When you know which is which,” Akram replies, “please tell me.”

This sense of moral uncertainty—of how we should feel about detectives who do bad things in service of good outcomes, of whether the blame for their behavior lies with institutions that rarely work well without manipulation—pervades the series. No easy answers are provided, as the missing-person case Dept. Q takes on complexifies. This is, in large part, a refreshing break from the didactic tone of so many crime shows, although Frank does leave some compelling ideas insufficiently examined. He seems much more concerned with introducing relationships and storylines that could potentially fuel subsequent seasons by developing each character (Merritt aside) in tandem with the central mystery. (His coyness about major aspects of Carl’s personal life does feel a bit gratuitous.) Though they’re very different people, Carl, Rose, Akram, Hardy, and even Moira have all been scarred by jobs that force them to absorb endless trauma. “I’m two people,” Carl reflects, in a rare moment of vulnerability: one who is immersed in humanity’s most terrifying impulses and another who’s struggling to project normalcy. “I have to be that way.”

It’s an effective choice, on Frank’s part, to lean into its protagonist’s cognitive dissonance instead of trying too hard to maintain a uniform mood. If the unhinged nature of the criminals they’re closing in on clashes, tonally, with the groundedness of Carl and his colleagues’ interactions while working on the case, that only makes the show more effective on a psychological level. By inhabiting the interiority of detectives who live in our mundane world but have to keep their heads in a scarier one that’s equally real, Dept. Q expands beyond typical crime fare in much the same way The Queen’s Gambit transcended its ostensible subjects: chess, midcentury fashion, female empowerment. The first season does lack the latter show’s depth. But what it accomplishes should be enough to make it very popular. In that case, it stands a chance of becoming one of TV’s best long-running procedurals, with as many opportunities to go deeper as there are files on Carl’s desk.