News Every Day | 29 May 2025, 11:00

Netflix's prickly-cop drama Dept. Q shows promise

On paper, it’d be easy to call Dept. Q, the latest show from Scott Frank (The Queen’s Gambit, Monsieur Spade), Netflix’s stab at Slow Horses: Both series are anchored by unkempt pricks (in Q‘s case, detective Carl Morck, played by Downton Abbey‘s Matthew Goode) whose unpleasantness, smarts, and anti-authoritarian streaks precede them. Both follow an odd mishmash of an investigative team that operates from a dank, discarded office that feels miles away and decades removed from whatever’s going on at headquarters. Both are well-cast, with this new show boasting outside-the-core-crew turns by Scottish actors like Game Of Thrones‘ Kate Dickie (who’s very good here), Boardwalk Empire‘s Kelly Macdonald, and 24 Hour Party People‘s Shirley Henderson. Both, too, have a wealth of source material to base future seasons around (in this Netflix show’s instance, 10 Nordic-noir novels by Jussi Adler-Olsen, which have already been adapted into several Danish films). Hell, even both intros start with electric-guitar strums and silhouettes of its lead cranks.

But despite all of that and a similar ball-busting comic sensibility, the experience of watching Dept. Q feels quite different than watching that consistently great and taut British thriller. The stakes feel much lower here, with this season focusing on one cold case from four years back, not, say, a plane filled with explosives that is set to take out thousands of people in London. And while Q can get very bloody (there are graphic stabbings and one head is blown off late in the game), it doesn’t feel nearly as action-packed or like our investigators are racing against the clock to save a sizable chunk of a city. It also leans a bit into sentimentality, at least in its bloated, 71-minute season finale, that Jackson Lamb wouldn’t stomach for a second.

But there is plenty to like, comparisons be damned. Dept. Q‘s opening sequence, for one, is fantastic, kicking off with body-cam footage of Morck giving shit to a green cop at a crime scene—only for a gunman to pop out and off the rookie, partially paralyze the detective’s partner (Jamie Sives’ DS Hardy), and shoot a bullet through our main character’s throat. And a series like this, clicking and having legs really depends—more than the case it’s investigating and the conspiratorial twists and turns that it unfurls—on the chemistry between its investigators, on whether those contrasting personalities can sustain your interest or amusement over several hours. (Think of the chord Olivia Colman and David Tennant’s characters struck in Broadchurch‘s first season.)

On that front, Dept. Q delivers, with the team that sets up shop in a musty basement that looks like it hasn’t been in operation since the ’70s including the dick with PTSD (DCI Morck); a Syrian with a mysterious past (Alexej Manvelov’s Akram, the show’s MVP and the kind of guy whose soft eyes and calm demeanor belie the ability to bruise—but not crush—a man’s windpipe during questioning); a young and peppy paper pusher suffering from OCD and, as she puts it, any disorder in the alphabet (Leah Byrne’s Rose); and, eventually, Hardy, who checks in from a laptop on his hospital bed when he’s not reluctantly sipping beer with his partner and looking despondent. It’s a quartet that works and feels worthy of returning to, even when the show’s whodunit momentum runs out near the end of the season. The interactions between Morck and Akram are particular highlights, with the latter dropping insights (“Where I come from, when facts are being so clearly ignored, it’s never because of incompetence”) that throw off the know-it-all former.

As the investigation takes Morck & co. to graffiti-strewn squats, posh offices, and one horror-movie-like hyperbaric chamber, the show simultaneously unfolds the tale of a closed-off prosecutor (played by Under The Banner Of Heaven‘s Chloe Pirrie) who’s receiving threatening texts. And this brings up one of the other pleasures of this series: its production design, which has golden wallpaper that calls to mind Bemelmans Bar in New York City, striking sea-green overhead lights, electric-blue curtains, and—even in those shabby basement digs—retro floors that anyone would love to have in their place.

Admittedly, some of the dialogue feels too written, with lines like “You’re hypothetically asking me about a hypothetical?” and “This gentleman is guilty of something—probably a lot of somethings” coming off like they might have read better on the page. And compared to Frank’s last two TV projects, Gambit and Spade, this is more minor and less of a statement. (It doesn’t hook you in like that stylish 2020 miniseries, nor make you want to bask in its environment like that handsome, South-of-France-set neo-noir from last year.) But it does have the bones for a longer run than those shows—and a crew with strong enough buddy-cop dynamics to warrant another case.

Dept. Q premieres May 29 on Netflix