Nowadays, a TV series – particularly a crime drama, which are ten a penny – has to have something special and out of the ordinary to attract an audience. Perhaps a Hollywood star has graced it with their presence, or an award-winning auteur has lent their directing or writing skills. Or maybe it’s the story itself that sets it apart – it could be set in the 1920s, or the Welsh countryside, or space!
But Dept Q, Netflix’s latest addition to the canon, has hardly any of that sparkle (though it is written by Scott Frank, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter behind The Queen’s Gambit). A cold case missing persons investigation, set in the dingy basement of an Edinburgh police station and lead by a miserable, troubled lead detective? Heard it all before… yet, it remains one of the best crime dramas the streamer has ever produced – not that its slew of cheesy Harlan Coben adaptations provides much competition.
The opening episode begins with body cam footage from a soon-to-be-deceased constable, with the aforementioned detective – DCI Carl Morck (Downton Abbey’s Matthew Goode, revelling in the chance to be standoffish) – and his partner DCI James Hardy (Jamie Sives) at a particularly brutal murder scene. But before they can figure out why the man in front of them has an axe in his skull, a masked intruder shoots at them, killing the copper, disabling Hardy and narrowly missing a major artery in Morck’s neck.
Chloe Pirrie as Merritt Lingard (Photo: Netflix)Months later, Morck is back at work, and in mandatory therapy, where he reluctantly works through the guilt he feels over escaping the shooting relatively unscathed.
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Worried that he might be unstable (and the fact he can’t investigate the crime he is a victim of), Morck’s boss gives him a brand-new cold case department to run, which he soon populates with a rag-tag bunch of misfits. They include detective Rose (Leah Byrne), who has been demoted to paperwork since she had a mental breakdown, Akram (Alexej Manvelov), a brilliant investigator who worked for the police in his native Syria, but is now in IT, and Hardy, who helps out from his hospital bed.
Dept Q is adapted from the series of crime novels by Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen, and that quintessential Scandi noir darkness comes through in Morck’s first case. Prosecutor Merritt Lingard (Chloe Pirrie) went missing four years previously, thought to have fallen off a ferry and drowned after arguing with her brother. We, however, know that this is false – she’s being held in a sort of pressurised tube called a “hyperbaric chamber” by two creepy unknown torturers.
Alexej Manvelov as Akram (Photo: Justin Downing/Netflix)Through flashbacks (indicated by characters’ variously wacky hairstyle changes), the series pieces Merritt’s pre-kidnap life together. Turns out she wasn’t the nicest or most liked person, and Pirrie relishes her characters’ cold-heartedness, which is starkly different to the quivering mess we see in the chamber. But it’s Goode who holds the whole thing together, making his suitably grumpy detective still likeable with just the right amount of dark humour and sarcastic grins.
As is usually the case with Netflix series, Dept Q runs for twice as long as the story can sustain, and over the nine episodes there are a handful of superfluous storylines introduced. I don’t really care about Morck’s unhappy relationship with his son, nor the suggestions of corruption in the police force (there are more than enough crime dramas concerned with that problem thanks to Line of Duty).
The beauty is that even with all the excess, Dept Q never feels complicated. It’s confident in its simplicity, assuredly propelling you towards a heart-thumping finale. Watching it is rarely hard work – something I can’t say about most police procedurals. They don’t make them like this anymore.
‘Dept Q’ is streaming on Netflix
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